Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(8)
“After we put the fire out, firefighter Walker was doing a sweep of the scene to prevent flare-ups when he found something suspicious in a basement closet. Watch your step.” Bridges indicated the water and ash-covered porch boards as they crossed the threshold together, and the acrid smell of old smoke hit her like a punch in the nose. “I had some extra lights brought downstairs for better visibility, but no one’s been in here except my firefighters.”
Isabella took in the scene on the first floor, her heart picking up the pace. There wasn’t a whole lot here, and what little was left was pretty torched. What on earth could Kellan have possibly found in a place like this?
She followed Bridges to a staircase at the back of the house, her eyes taking a split second to adjust from the daylight that had spilled in through the main level windows to the shadow-casting glare thrown off by the spotlight lamp at the bottom of the basement steps. He led her and Sinclair down the right-hand side of the hallway and over the threshold to the only room Isabella could see. Her brain smoothly catalogued the scene. Smallish room, maybe twelve by twelve, one desk dead center. Unfinished drywall, cement subfloor.
And one firefighter whose stare had suddenly gone as dark as storm clouds over a raging sea.
Irritation flashed over Kellan’s face, along with a hint of surprise as he turned from Isabella to his captain. “You called intelligence?”
Sinclair’s brows popped at the same time as her pulse. Her boss knew all about Walker’s beef with her, and not only was he fiercely protective of his detectives, but he wasn’t exactly known for his stellar composure.
Thankfully, Captain Bridges was. “Of course I called them,” he said, just as calm as a lake at sunrise. “This falls under their jurisdiction, and it could be evidence of a potentially serious crime.”
The irritation on Walker’s soot-smudged face coalesced at the mention, and Sinclair didn’t waste time or words getting right to business.
“You want to tell us what you found?” he asked.
After an ever-so-slight pause, Walker nodded. “I covered this section of the basement for search and rescue during the fire. When I got to the closet over here, this lock box fell off the overhead shelf and broke open. Captain Bridges gave the order to fall out before I could see what had been inside—the fire had gotten pretty hairy on the second floor at that point. But when I came back for the prevention sweep after the fire was out, this is what I found.”
He gestured to an old, dented metal lock box, the kind someone would store cash in at a yard sale, and a pile of photographs, along with a bundle of thin nylon rope and a plastic baggie containing what looked like a few pairs of women’s earrings.
“I gathered the pictures before I saw the images on them,” Walker continued, pointing to the tidy pile next to the lock box. “But once I did, I put them down, and I didn’t touch any of the other stuff, just in case.”
It didn’t escape Isabella’s notice that he’d kept his eyes lasered in on Sinclair and only Sinclair as he’d recounted the story, even going so far as to turn his shoulder to give her half of his back while he spoke. But screw that. Despite what he thought, she was a damn good cop, and if something had gone down here, she was going to be part of catching whoever was responsible.
“Is this everything you found?” Isabella asked, pulling a pair of nitrile gloves from the pocket of her jeans and snapping them into place.
He looked over the broad ridge of his shoulder, his bright blue gaze covered in frost. “Yes.”
The unspoken “duh” riding shotgun with his answer tagged her right in the gut, and she heard the unintended implication in her question just a beat too late. As displeased as they were with each other, Isabella knew Kellan would never withhold potential evidence. He was pissed, not dirty.
She cleared her throat and tried for round two. “What I meant was, are these the only suspicious items your team found from the entire house,” she qualified, but still, Walker’s expression remained as unmoved as it was chilly.
“Still yes.”
Alrighty then. Although she had to bite her tongue to do it, she focused on the evidence in front of her. Kneeling down to the concrete, she picked up the photographs, dropping her stare over the first one in the pile.
And her breath came to a crashing halt in her lungs.
“Jesus.” The photograph showed a young woman in profile, her face turned just far enough away from the camera to be useless to any sort of recognition software. Bent halfway over a crushed velvet settee, she wore a lacy black tank top and matching thong underwear, both pulled provocatively low. Her hands were bound behind her with a thin length of nylon rope tied in an intricate knot reaching halfway up her forearms, her back arched at a sharp angle as if her hair was being yanked by someone just outside the camera’s range. The corner of her darkly lipsticked mouth was pulled into a tight grimace that further supported the guess, and Isabella’s heart took a potshot at her breastbone as the rest of the photo registered. The angry red marks covering the woman’s wrists beneath the bindings looked fresh.
The bruises on her throat didn’t.
“Yeah,” Kellan said, the word going soft at the edges. “That’s why we called.”
Isabella flipped through the rest of the photos—twenty-two in all, of what appeared to be five different women all in the same setting and same basic pose—before swallowing past the knot in her throat and handing them over to Sinclair. Don’t go back there. Don’t think about it. Don’t. “These items were inside the lock box with the pictures?”