Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(88)
Oh. God. Isabella’s mouth went as dry as sand despite the tea she’d just thrown back. “She’s okay, right? She’s safe?”
Hollister made a rude noise and a face to match. “She’s a righteous pain in the ass, is what she is. But yeah. Carmen’s fine.”
Relief skated through her, followed by a hard shot of curiosity. One day, she’d have to ask what the deal was between the two of them, but since Carmen was safe and the girls at DuPree’s parties weren’t, today wasn’t going to be that day.
“Okay, good.” Isabella dropped her eyes to the pile of gray folders on her desk, each one stamped with the RPD crest, then shot a glance at the matching stack of paperwork in front of her partner. “So you want to catch me up, here? I’d like to be useful by the time Sinclair gets in.”
Hollister grinned. “Sure. Let’s get to work.”
They spent the next forty minutes going over what the intelligence unit had turned up in her absence. It was still too soon to have much of anything from last night yet, and the rest of what they did have was disappointingly thin. But the fact that the FBI had given them jurisdiction to investigate meant Isabella could dive into this case even harder than she’d hoped. There might be a lot of maybes, and even more what-ifs. But even if she couldn’t prove it yet, she knew the truth.
Julian DuPree was hurting women in the worst ways imaginable, and she wasn’t going to stop until he’d been stopped. All she had to do now was get him to make one wrong move.
“Well look who’s back in action.” Maxwell’s voice sounded off from the front of the office, snagging Isabella’s attention. “You okay, Hardball?”
She laughed at the unexpected nickname. “Yeah. I wish I could say the same for my furniture, but I’m good.”
“Glad to hear it. And good to see you back.” Although Maxwell was about as far from clean-cut as possible, with his shaved head and multiple piercings and dark eyes that seemed to have seen far too much for a guy who had way more of his life ahead of him than behind, his smile still curved around the welcome enough to tell her she’d been missed.
“Yeah, looks like you guys are stuck with me after all,” Isabella said, sending her grin from Maxwell to Hale and Capelli, who had walked into the intelligence office alongside him.
“Oh thank God,” Hale said in her usual all-in manner. “I know it was only a couple of days, but I missed the crap out of you.” She twirled her finger in an imaginary circle to encompass the rest of their unit. “These three chuckleheads tried to gang up on me in a guys versus girls pool tournament down at the Crooked Angel on Saturday night. Thankfully Shae McCullough from Seventeen was cool enough to help me out.”
Capelli frowned, moving past Hale to park himself at an L-shaped desk with three state-of-the-art computer monitors on each branch. “McCullough’s scores shouldn’t count. That woman is an anomaly.”
“You’re just mad because she managed to defy all those probability statistics you used to try and calculate whether or not she’d be any good at shooting pool,” Hale said, and Hollister added a laugh.
“Welcome to my world, Capelli. I’ve never been able to figure out women, either.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t figure out women,” Capelli grumbled. “Only that this particular woman is an anomaly.”
Hale snorted. “Whatever. You still can’t figure her out. And even though you didn’t put any money on the game, as usual, that’s got to be driving your boy-genius brain bat-shit crazy.”
Isabella opened her mouth to agree with Hale—Capelli was very rarely wrong, even less so when fact-based predictions were concerned, and it probably was making him nuts on toast. But instead she was interrupted by the very familiar, very serious sound of a throat being cleared.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Sinclair walked across the linoleum, pausing to hit each one of them with a stare that meant business, and damn, she loved this job. “Now that Moreno’s clearly gotten the welcome back she deserves, where are we on this DuPree case? Peterson might’ve kicked this investigation over to us, but he’s going to want leads to go with the bright, shiny indictment we promised, and I’m not inclined to tell him we don’t have any.”
It took less than thirty seconds for all five of them to find both their desks and their work ethics, although not necessarily in that order, and Maxwell was the first to chime in with a reply.
“Right. Well, starting with last night’s break-in, we got a whole lot of nothing from canvassing Moreno’s building. No one heard or saw a damned thing, which means this guy knew exactly what he was doing. Low profile all the way.”
Ugh. Isabella had figured as much. DuPree hadn’t gotten this far by throwing down bad-guy calling cards everywhere he went. But if they could put him in the building some other way, that would be a huge step forward in the concrete evidence department. “What about the surveillance video?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Capelli said, leaning in to examine one of his six monitors. “Looks like our guy was actually three guys. The only people on yesterday’s feed who didn’t check out as residents, guests, or delivery people are three males who entered the building at ten forty-six yesterday morning. A closer look at the entry log shows their key card as a fake.”