Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(10)
Okay, so it was going to be an uphill climb. Still… “Age aside, if these girls are being forced to do anything against their will, that’s illegal no matter how old they are,” Isabella said.
Sinclair paused, his gaze going dark as it landed on the stack of photos, and finally—finally—he was ready to play the other side of the coin. “If someone’s moving girls, eighteen or not, that’ll fall under Peterson’s jurisdiction at the FBI.”
Isabella’s stomach clenched. Derek Peterson was in charge of their local FBI task force unit, and while he was a good agent and a decent enough guy, to say his team was overextended was a gift. “You think he’ll open an investigation?”
“Based on just the photos?” A frown bracketed Sinclair’s mouth. “Not likely.”
Oh, come on. “Sam—”
He stopped her words with a lift of one hand. “Listen, Moreno. If someone’s turning these women out, I want to grab whoever’s responsible just as badly as you do.”
Isabella knotted her arms over the front of her shirt, and although she was tempted as hell to refresh her argument, she knew Sinclair wasn’t the bad guy here.
At her silence, he continued. “RFD’s got this place on lockdown, so no one’s coming or going. Our best bet is to bag what we have, do our due diligence on making a case, and run all the facts up the chain of command to the FBI field office. If there’s something here, we’ll do our best to find it.”
Dammit, she didn’t like this plan. But she didn’t hate it yet, either. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one,” Isabella said, looking down at the stack of photos Sinclair had placed on the desk. The cop in her saw all the variables, heard everything her sergeant had said about the possibility for consensual encounters.
But the part of her beneath her armor saw something very, very different. Something Isabella knew by heart and would never forget.
Something she could not, under any circumstances, let her boss or her fellow detectives or anyone else ever see, so she scraped for a breath and took a step back, focusing on the job in front of her like always.
“Someone’s hurting these girls. Or worse. It’s our job to help them,” Isabella said.
Sinclair scrubbed a hand over the light blond stubble peppering his face. “If that’s the case, we’ll do all we can to make that happen. But everything Peterson comes at us with will need a solid argument if we want him to open an official investigation.”
Isabella straightened, tucking her shoulders in toward her spine. No way would she leave these girls without someone to stand up for them. Without someone to keep them safe.
Without someone to keep them alive.
“Okay,” she said. “Then let’s give him one.”
* * *
Isabella pushed away from her desk, her back creaking as badly as her ancient office chair. The convenience store robbery Hale, Maxwell, and Hollister had caught three days ago had turned out to be a slam dunk thanks to a smart store owner with a lot of security cameras and a stupid thief whose license plate they’d easily lifted from the footage, so she’d thrown the last seventy-two hours’ worth of her energy into working alone, making a case for her case.
Hell if she hadn’t had to throw down for what little she’d been able to scrape up, too. Facial recognition on the girls in the photos had been the bust she’d expected it to be, although of course she’d tried. The rental agency for the house confirmed that the place had been vacant for nearly half a year, and the former tenant was an eighty-year-old woman who’d had no known relatives and a squeaky clean record when she’d passed away five months ago.
Still.
Isabella might be lean on hard evidence from the scene of this fire, but her gut absolutely screamed of things not right. If Peterson sank his hooks into the case, maybe took a harder look at the crime scene, had CSU scour the room in the basement for something they could’ve missed, she was positive he’d uncover something illegal.
And whoever was responsible for hurting those girls needed to go down.
“Moreno.” Sinclair stood in the doorframe of his office, tipping his head to the room behind him. “You got a second?”
Her gaze spun over the open space of the intelligence office, briefly connecting with Hollister’s before she planted her boots onto the linoleum and scooped in a deep breath. “Sure.”
“Have a seat,” he said, closing the door when she’d crossed the threshold, and shit. Shit. Getting asked into Sinclair’s office was a fifty-fifty on bad things about to happen, and the odds increased to seventy-thirty when he shut the door. When he told you to sit down on top of it all?
One hundred percent chance you were about to get news you didn’t want to hear.
“I just heard back from the FBI on the photos RFD found at that fire call,” he said, sliding into the chair across from her. “They’ve decided not to pursue the photos found at the house fire.”
Isabella’s heartbeat slammed in her ears. “What?”
“You put together a compelling report, and Peterson gave everything a hard look,” Sinclair said, propping his elbows over his desk and steepling his fingers as he gave her a sympathetic look. “But with all this gray area and no clear-cut evidence of an actual crime, he doesn’t have a damn thing to go on.”