“It’s a little early for you to be punching the clock, isn’t it?” he asked. Most people weren’t even halfway to the door just shy of oh-seven-hundred on a weekday morning.
Moreno? Not most people, apparently. “What can I say? I’m feeling ambitious.”
Kellan resisted the urge to launch a less-than-polite comment about her work ethic, albeit barely. “I already told you and Sinclair everything I know.”
“Okay.” Her shoulders rose and fell beneath her dark gray leather jacket, easy and smooth. “So humor me and walk me through it again anyway.”
His sixth sense took a jab at his gut, prompting him to give the question in his head a voice. “Is this part of the investigation?”
“Why do you ask?” she said, and yeah, that was a no.
“Because you called it a favor, and you just answered my question with a question.”
Moreno paused. “I’m a cop. We do that.”
Nope. No way was he buying this. Not even on her best day. “And I’m a firefighter who’s not interested in putting his ass in a sling just to humor you with an unsanctioned walk-through.”
The RFD might offer a little latitude on firefighters revisiting scenes—a fact Kellan would bet his left nut Moreno damn well knew—but just because he’d worked the job didn’t mean he had carte blanche to prance through the place like a fucking show pony now that the fire was out.
Not that a little thing like protocol seemed to bother Isabella in the least. “Your ass will be fine. I’ll take full responsibility.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that one from you before.”
The words catapulted out before Kellan could stop them. Moreno flinched, just slightly, but it was enough. “Look, I need to get back onto that scene,” she said. “Are you going to help me or not?”
His brain formed the word “no”, but all of a sudden, he registered the weary lines bracketing her eyes and the shadows that went with them like a matched set of good and tired, and his mouth tapped into something entirely different. “Did you even sleep last night?”
An image of her in bed, honey-bronze skin against pristine white sheets, barreled through his mind’s eye, and Jesus. Maybe he was the one who needed some shuteye if his subconscious was going to go off the deep end like that.
“Not really, no,” Isabella said, shifting her weight from one heavily soled boot to the other in order to stand at flawless attention on the sidewalk. “I was a little busy worrying about those girls in the pictures you found.”
The answer hit him like the sucker punch it was. Fuck. Fuck. “Your boss doesn’t seem to find them quite as concerning,” Kellan managed, and at her look of surprise, he continued. “If he did, he’d have opened an official investigation and you wouldn’t have needed to haul yourself all the way down here at o’dark-thirty to ask me to get you into that house, right?”
For a long minute, she just studied him with those chocolate-brown eyes. But rather than copping to anything, Moreno said, “And what’s your gut on those pictures, hmm?”
Damn. For a detective who had botched the hell out of keeping Kylie safe, she sure was asking all the right questions to get him to cave.
Unease tightened his muscles, speeding his heartbeat by just a notch. “I have a sister. What do you think?”
“I think those photos are evidence of a crime being committed against the women in them, and I think you wouldn’t have had your captain call them in unless you do, too.”
She’s kind of got you there, dude. Kellan exhaled, mashing down on his inner voice. “So how come your sergeant doesn’t agree?”
“I never said he didn’t,” Moreno pointed out. Her expression matched the utterly noncommittal tone of her words, but come on. He hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck, for Chrissake. She wouldn’t ask him to bring her back to the scene of this fire unless it was her last resort.
Kellan hit her with a high-level frown. “If you want me to consider helping you out here, the least you can do is not bullshit me before I’m caffeinated.”
“Fine.” She pressed her lips together, a swath of light brown hair serving as cover for her eyes as she lasered her gaze toward the sidewalk beneath her feet. “Hypothetically, on occasion we catch cases that don’t have quite enough evidence to pursue in an official capacity.”
Seriously? “You have pictures,” he said. What better evidence was there?
“Yeah, and that’s all I have. Pictures of women I can’t identify, who might be of legal age and participating in consensual acts.”
Kellan’s stomach knotted. He was hardly vanilla when it came to sex, but the girls in those photos had looked terrified, not to mention dangerously young. Role play was in a whole different universe than rape. “You don’t really think what’s going on in those photos is consensual, do you?”