Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(73)
“E-excuse me?” Isabella sputtered, her pulse tripping through her veins. “Why would I go home if we’re opening an investigation?”
“You’re going home because that’s where I’m sending you. As of this moment, you’re off this case.”
“Sam.” The single syllable was all she could push past the dread keeping her pinned into place. But he couldn’t kick her off this investigation. Not when Angel had been killed for agreeing to meet her. Isabella had to make this right.
Sinclair shook his head. “You’re a great cop, Moreno. But even great cops can’t freelance in this unit. And they sure as shit don’t get to buck the chain of command that starts with me.”
“You bend the rules all the time,” she said, clamping down on her lip as soon as the words were out. Okay, so pointing out his rules-are-mostly-just-guidelines mentality might’ve been a teensy bit brash. But Sinclair didn’t exactly go by the book all the time, or hell, even half the time.
Just when she was certain she’d surpassed her daily quota for total fucking shock, Sinclair said, “You’re right. Sometimes I do. But there’s a huge difference between massaging the rules to get the job done and going completely rogue. You repeatedly put yourself in danger for evidence the State’s Attorney can’t touch because you had no search warrant when you obtained it, you showed a blatant disregard for a direct order given to you by your commanding officer, and don’t even get me started on the fact that you brought a civilian on not one, but all of these field trips of yours.”
“Believe me, that part wasn’t by choice,” she argued, but Sinclair wasn’t having a single word of it.
“Everything you did was by choice. Your decision to pursue DuPree off the books—”
Despair drove her to interrupt. “You wouldn’t let me pursue him on the books!”
He interrupted right back. “Your decision to keep me and the rest of this unit at arm’s length rather than trusting us to back you up once you’d talked to your CI—”
No. Way. “Is that what this is about? You’re booting me from this case just because I don’t want to share my feelings while we all have s’mores around the campfire?” Un-be-fucking-lievable!
“No,” Sinclair bit out. “I’m booting you from this case because you need to learn that being a cop isn’t just about you. It’s about solving cases as part of a team. And if you can’t work with me and Hollister and Maxwell and Hale and Capelli—if you can’t trust us when you need us, either out there or in here—then you’re not working this case.”
Isabella blinked through the afternoon sunlight slanting in past the shades. Sinclair knew her. He’d read her personnel file cover to cover a thousand times—shit, he’d put the full court press on her recruitment to the intelligence unit the second she’d been promoted to detective. He knew why she’d become a cop, why she’d made it her mission to become a detective so she could stop men just like Julian DuPree. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t do this to her.
“Sam,” she whispered, her throat rasping over her words. “You can’t take me off this case. Please.”
But Sinclair simply shook his head. “I’m sorry, Moreno, but I just did. You’re on restricted desk duty, updating your unrelated paperwork until further notice. And if you so much as look at this case again without my permission, I’ll see to it personally that you walk the beat at the shopping mall for the rest of your career. Are we understood?”
19
Kellan pulled himself from the driver’s seat of his Camaro, every one of his muscles feeling as if it had been strung up and stretched thin. Captain Bridges had given him a lot of latitude during yesterday’s shift, sparing him from his duties on engine in order to take Isabella and Sinclair through the scene of the fire, inch by inch. But Seventeen had rolled out on four back-to-back calls after that, and while two of them had been relatively minor, the three-car smash-up on the highway and the utility worker they’d rescued from a drainage pipe had sucked away energy he’d had to manufacture out of sheer will. Add to it the fact that DuPree had somehow managed to ID Isabella as a cop and kill both Angel and Danny Marcus, then cover it up while still flaunting the crime in their faces?
Yeah. Stick a fork in him. He was freaking cooked.
Kellan sent a few extra covert gazes around the parking lot in front of his apartment complex, his awareness on full-alert as he walked the path from the asphalt to the building’s double-wide glass front doors. If DuPree knew who Isabella was, chances were high that the bastard had ID’d Kellan, too. He’d called Kylie and Devon as a precaution, his sister kicking into what-the-hell mode and Devon kicking equally hard into oh-hell-no mode. Kellan had assured Kylie he’d be fine (and Devon had assured Kellan she’d be fine—thank fuck), passing along the same assurances to Bridges and everyone else at Seventeen when Sinclair had told them all to be extra vigilant for the time being, just in case. Gamble had even gone so far as to get all Special Forces on his ass, making him swear to check in at regular intervals between now and their next shift. And Kellan thought he was paranoid. He didn’t even want to know what had happened to make Gamble so sharp around the edges.
Speak of the devil. Kellan liberated his ringing cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans and tapped the icon to take the call. “I left the fire house ten minutes ago, you know.”