She forced her feet into a steady gait, following the beam of the flashlight past the stairs to the opposite end of the corridor. Pushing the door inward, she paused in the entryway to examine the room where Walker had found the photos. The blackout curtain had been pulled back from the tiny rectangular window set high up by the ceiling on the far wall, and while the daylight struggling past the dust-smudged glass wasn’t much, Isabella would take it. Everything was just as it had been when she and Sinclair had been here four days ago, from the dinged and scratched up desk to the pizza boxes strewn over it, and her gut squeezed with determination as she exhaled.
“Okay. So the lock box was over here.” Isabella’s footsteps echoed over the floor, the beam of her flashlight sweeping the interior of the open closet. “Now let’s see what the rest of the room will give us.”
She’d taken the box and its contents as potential evidence the other day, carefully cataloguing the photographs and the jewelry as she’d struggled to find a lead. But there had to be something here, some small shred left behind that would springboard her out of this room and onto the right path. Moving to the center of the musty space, Isabella pulled a pair of nitrile gloves over her hands before bending down low to open the bottom drawer of the desk.
To her surprise, Walker knelt next to her. “So there weren’t any hits on these women online? No facial recognition or image matching that might be geotagged?”
Just like that, her surprise doubled down. “No.”
The word came out as more of a question than anything else, and he answered it with a quirk of his lips. “My buddy Devon works private security for that new firm over on Lincoln Avenue. I’ve got some experience with surveillance equipment, so sometimes he lets me freelance to learn new stuff. Dev’s company has got some pretty cutting edge tech.”
Ah, right, Devon. The guy who’d been traveling with Kylie when they’d gone to take her into custody in Chicago. Guess he’d relocated to Remington along with Walker’s sister. They’d definitely seemed like a couple, so the news wasn’t exactly earth-shaking.
“The angle of the photos made recognition software pretty useless, and the images don’t match any online databases the RPD can access,” Isabella said, closing the empty desk drawer and opening the one above it. Damn. More nada. “Whoever took them knows what the hell he’s doing.”
“Or she,” Walker pointed out, and okay, she’d give him this. He didn’t have two left feet when it came to the investigation dance.
Still. “While it’s possible our guy might not be a guy, sex crimes are overwhelmingly male on female. Especially when it comes to forced prostitution.”
He lifted his chin in a brief nod of concession. “Have you got anything to go on other than the stuff that was in the lock box?”
Isabella hesitated. Sharing case details on unsolved crimes was a strict don’t-even-think-about-it for anyone in the intelligence unit. But this wasn’t technically a case, and what’s more, she was pretty fucking desperate to make it one. She and Walker might not like each other, but he clearly wasn’t an idiot. How much damage could a little disclosure do?
She said, “No, and even the evidence I’ve got is running me into a wall. The rope is the most popular brand sold, available at any hardware store or mega-center. There weren’t any useable fingerprints on the lock box, the photos or the jewelry, which were all women’s earrings, none of them valuable or uniquely identifiable.”
Walker propped his forearms over his denim-covered thighs, his dark brows tucked in obvious thought. “How about the desk, or the closet doors? Could you get prints off that, maybe?”
If only. “I’d need a crime scene unit to process the place in order to find out, which I can’t do without an open investigation. Even then, any prints they’d find in the room would be circumstantial. Who knows how many squatters might’ve been in and out of here in the last five months. Getting from the furniture to the photos is a pretty giant leap.”
“So you’re stuck with whatever you can get to lead you out of this room.”
“Pretty much.” Isabella’s eyes narrowed on the pizza box splayed open over the top of the desk, a spark of hope kicking at her pulse. “Hold on a second.” She pressed to standing, flipping the box closed, and halle-freaking-lujah, finally the ball had bounced in her direction.
“What?” Kellan asked, dropping his gaze as he stood. “Three Brothers Pizza. Isn’t that the place down by the pier?”
“There are a couple of locations around Remington, but yeah, the one by the pier is the closest. This might be a little thin, but I know someone who works there.” She didn’t add that the ‘someone’ was a mouthy former junkie turned CI. The less Walker knew about Carmen, the better.
If his expression was anything to go by, he didn’t need to know more to think Isabella was nuts. “Tying prints from the desk to whoever took those pictures is thin, Moreno. Tying a pizza box to the guy? That’s anorexic.”