“I’m probably not the easiest partner to work with,” Isabella continued, and at that, he let go of a soft laugh.
“You’re a little bit of a puzzle,” he agreed. “But you’re not a bad person. And you’re definitely a good cop. I figure you’ve got your reasons for liking the outskirts.”
The thought of Marisol, of the one damned phone call that had kicked so many horrible, irreversible things into motion, punched through her gut. “Yeah.”
Hollister sat back in his desk chair, and even though she was certain he hadn’t missed a thing—her poker face wasn’t nearly as high-quality as his, and the guy was a fucking detective, for God’s sake—he also didn’t push. “If it makes you feel any better, we all have things we don’t advertise. You ever feel like talking about yours, I’m not a bad listener. I don’t just have your back on the job, you know?”
“Thanks. I…” Isabella paused for a breath. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Hollister cleared his throat, tapping the stack of case files on the desk in front of him. “So I take it the rest of your night was quiet after you left your apartment?”
Isabella nodded, taking a long sip of tea as she kicked back into work mode. “Yup.”
For as trashed as her apartment had been, Kellan’s had remained untouched. At this point, she’d take whatever silver linings she could get.
“Good,” Hollister said. “I took a trip out to North Point to check on Carmen after I left your place last night. I know she never worked for DuPree, but since she’s the one who gave up the intel on Danny Marcus, I figured a knock and talk couldn’t hurt.”
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.”