Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(6)
“No, sir,” he said, dread cranking down on his gut as he looked at the pictures again.
“We need the police. I’m pretty sure they’re going to want to see what I just found.”
2
Isabella Moreno pushed back from her desk, trying with all her might to evil eye the paperwork at her elbow into submission. For every report she’d filed this morning, another three had popped up in its place, and after four hours, she was damn near ready to cry uncle.
Give her thieves, rapists, and gang-banging street thugs any day. But all the requisition-this and document-that required by the Remington Police Department? Now that could really kill a girl.
The sound of her boss’s throat clearing kicked her chin to attention and her pulse into third gear. “All right everybody, listen up,” Sergeant Sam Sinclair said in a clipped voice that reminded Isabella—and probably every other cop in the Thirty-Third, maybe even all of Remington—that he was as tough as he was dedicated to the job. “We just caught a double. Convenience store robbery over in South Hill and a report of something suspicious found at the scene of a house fire over on Glendale.”
“Something suspicious?” Isabella asked, her chest tightening by just a fraction. “Like a body?”
“Aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” Detective Shawn Maxwell threw her a wry smile from his desk across the squad room, and she worked up an identical twin to the expression in return.
“Yeah, that’s me.” She snorted, although not unkindly, because truth? Maxwell’s sarcasm wasn’t poorly placed. “All hugs and rainbows and unicorns.”
“And bodies, apparently. Overachiever,” he lobbed back. Of the four detectives in the Thirty-Third Precinct’s intelligence unit, she and Maxwell had the most seniority at the RPD, and shared a warped sense of cop humor as a result. Kind of funny that he was the oldest detective in the group while she was the youngest, but hey. Experience was experience, and they both had a buttload.
“The suspicious find is not a body,” Sinclair said, shooting a glance in her direction. “But first responders are calling it evidence of a possible crime.”
Despite the brashness she wore like Kevlar, her sergeant’s gruff affirmation allowed Isabella to breathe a little easier. As much as she loved her job and would stop at nothing to get it done, the grim parts were still…well, grim. Victims most of all.
Crimes, she could solve. But saving a victim after the fact was as impossible as hitching a wagon to the moon.
Not that Isabella hadn’t spent the last eleven years of her life trying.
Knock it off, she silently chided, pushing back from the stack of paperwork strewn over her blotter and the three half-to-mostly-empty cups of tea surrounding it. “Which call do you want me and Hollister to take?” Isabella asked, reaching for the car keys in the top drawer of her standard-issue metal desk. Grim or not, there were still bad guys out there who needed to be put to justice. It was time to shove up her sleeves and make that happen.
“Actually, neither.”
She froze, her eyes darting from her partner Liam Hollister’s don’t-look-at-me expression to Sinclair’s impenetrable blue-gray stare. “Sorry?”
“Hollister’s going to back up Maxwell and Hale at the robbery.” He jerked his crew cut at the three detectives sitting at their respective desks, all of whom started to move at the action. “You and I are headed to the fire over on Glendale.”
Oooookay. Although it was on the tip of her tongue to ask what she’d done to deserve special snowflake status, Isabella refrained. Despite the fact that she and Hollister were technically partners, the four of them worked interchangeably on cases. She worked apart from the group often enough—mostly when she requested extra assignments or volunteered to fly solo, but still. Anyway, the two years Isabella had worked for Sam told her in no uncertain terms that questioning his methods—in front of the team, no less—wouldn’t land her anywhere she wanted to be.
“Copy that,” she said. Double-checking the Glock and badge combo at her right hip, she grabbed the least cold cup of tea from her desk and followed her sergeant down the hallway of the intelligence office. She steadied her pulse to keep time with her footsteps, smoothing the thump-thump-thump into a steady rhythm until she and Sinclair reached his city-issued unmarked Chevy Tahoe.
“Everything okay?” Isabella lifted her brows just slightly, pulling her seatbelt across the front of her fitted black top. They didn’t stand on a whole lot of pretense in intelligence, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have to play this just right in order to figure out why her boss was acting nine kinds of cagey about this call.
Sinclair’s blond brows went up to mirror hers. “You mean other than the suspicious evidence found at this fire?”
Alllllrighty. If Sinclair wanted to get right to the case, she certainly had no problem jumping feet-first into work. It was, after all, her MO. “Suspicious evidence is a little vague, huh? We got anything else to go on?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.” Sinclair slid a pair of aviator sunglasses over his face and pulled the Tahoe out onto Franklin Street, headed toward Remington’s north side. Having lived in the city her whole life, Isabella knew the place as well as her own last name. Not an entirely small feat considering it was the second largest city in North Carolina.