“So how’s your sister doing?” she heard herself ask. God, it was the last thing she’d meant to bring up, which must be a true testament to her pure idiocy right now. But if the mention had thrown Walker for a loop, he didn’t show it. In fact, his expression was pretty much carved out of granite, strong and cold and completely unmoving.
“Fine.” His arms re-knotted over his chest, the inky edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the dark blue sleeve of his T-shirt.
Isabella bit her tongue hard enough to feel the sting. She should just shut up and do the job she’d come here to do. But she’d lifted the lid on the topic. Trying to tap dance around it now seemed stupid. Or worse yet, cowardly. “Kylie moved to Remington, right? From Montana?”
“Yes.”
Jeez, he was the high lord of the monosyllable. She moved across the living room, the sunlight filtering in from the few unbroken windows showing her a whole lot of ash and empty space. “It must be nice that she’s close by now.”
“You think that just because everything turned out okay in Chicago by the grace of God and my buddy Devon’s quick thinking, you get to talk about my sister like she’s the weather?”
The musty scent of ashes and old smoke filled Isabella’s nose as she sucked in a breath of pure shock. “What?”
Walker pinned her with an icy stare from halfway across the burned and broken room. “You compromised Kylie’s safety by trusting Collins. She was nearly killed, and you’re treating her like casual conversation.”
“I’m not. I’m—” Isabella stopped short, the slam of her heartbeat warning that he wasn’t going to believe her no matter how genuine her remorse really was. But she hadn’t knowingly put Kylie’s life in danger. He had to know that. “We were racing against the clock to keep Kylie safe, Walker. Collins had worked with his team for three years. None of them had ever had so much as an overdue credit card bill. What was I supposed to do?”
“Better,” he said, the word hitting her ears like a shout even though he’d barely breathed it. “You were supposed to do better. You have no idea what I had on the line.”
“You have no idea what I know.”
For a breath, then another, Isabella stood on the ruined floorboards with her throat in a knot and her chest full of thorns. But she wasn’t here to argue with him. She was here to help the women in those pictures. Period.
No matter what Walker thought about her abilities as a cop.
Isabella took in the rest of the first floor in silence. Not that there was much to see, but the few pieces of ruined furniture in the living room coupled with the remnants of trash in the kitchen told her someone had been squatting here after the rental agency had cleaned the place out five months ago.
“Okay,” she said, pulling a small Maglite from the pocket of her leather jacket as she turned toward the basement door. “So can you walk me through what happened once you and McCullough headed down to the basement?”
“Yeah, sure.” Thankfully, Walker seemed to want to get to business just as much as she did. He swung the door open, waiting until Isabella had taken a few steps down before following her into the basement.
“The fire wasn’t as bad down here. It must’ve started on the second floor and traveled down through the walls. Still, we knew time was tight, so Shae and I split the basement,” Kellan said, the words sparking fresh curiosity in Isabella’s brain.
“Did she find anything at all?”
Walker waited until they’d both reached the bottom of the steps before shaking his head in answer. “A couple of small rooms that were empty, but that was all.”
Isabella took a minute to check out the two rooms in question, both of which were barely bigger than a shoebox and about as well-appointed. Both doors bore locks, though, and while the mechanisms were a lot less heavy-duty than the one upstairs, they were still deadbolts installed from the hallway side, and neither room had a window.
The only way out was if whoever had the key opened up.
“Alright,” she said, pivoting on her boot heel to shine her flashlight down the basement hallway. Her only hope of finding something—anything she could take to Sinclair—stood twenty paces away, in a nearly-empty room that had come dangerously close to burning down.
The police have no leads, Isabella. They say there’s nothing to go on. No way to know who did this to Mari…
No. Not today. If there was any shred of evidence in this basement, Isabella was going to find it.