“All I need is a yes or no. Do you believe DuPree is behind this, and that he either killed these two people or was directly involved in their deaths?”
Isabella’s heart pounded, but she stabbed her boots into the unkempt grass and stood tall, sparing only the briefest of glances toward the scorched clapboard and the smashed-out windows on the house before saying, “Yes. I’m absolutely certain.”
“Okay.” Sinclair’s face showed no emotion even though his single word had just filled her with too many of them to count. “Let’s go talk to your Captain, Walker. I’m going to need a very detailed walk-through of everything your people saw today. As of right now, this is no longer a fire scene. It’s a potential crime scene. And I’m in charge of the investigation.”
* * *
Isabella sat in the chair across from Sinclair’s desk, her temples throbbing and her heart full of holes. Sam had been painfully quiet during the course of the three hours they’d spent at the house on Oakmont. Not that he was an overly chatty guy otherwise—in fact, Isabella would swear he’d emerged from the womb with his poker face fully intact and nailed into place. But he’d been one hundred percent business as they’d worked the scene, then dead silent after they’d reached the Thirty-Third. The fifteen minutes they’d been sitting across from each other as he wordlessly read and re-read the notes she’d kept on everything she’d discovered over the last week and a half had quickly become torture, and she’d had to bite her lip to bleeding to keep herself quiet.
Isabella might have plenty to say, but Sinclair still hadn’t made the call to officially open this case. Hell, he hadn’t even called in the rest of their team to help with gathering and examining the facts so he could run them up the chain of command. And she could not, under any circumstances, risk even the tiniest chance that he wouldn’t do either.
They had to catch DuPree. She had to work. Because if she didn’t work, she’d think about Angel. Angel, whose body was at the morgue at Remington Hospital. Angel, who was supposed to have met Isabella for breakfast, but instead she’d been trapped inside a burning building, terrified and alone. Angel, who she’d sworn to protect.
On second thought, screw biting her tongue. Julian DuPree needed to go down for this. Hard and fast and right goddamn now.
“How quickly can we get Peterson to okay an investigation and order search warrants for the penthouse at the Metropolitan?” Isabella asked. The surveillance equipment alone had to hold a gold mine of guilty-as-charged.
Sinclair fixed her with an unreadable blue-gray stare. “We need to rewind a little here, Moreno. I’m not calling anybody just yet.”
All the emotion from the morning—fuck, from the whole week and a half since Kellan had found those photographs—surged past the tipping point, and something hot and without a name exploded in her chest.
“You cannot be serious,” Isabella cut out, her spine going ramrod straight against the office chair behind her. “Julian DuPree is a psychopath who has forced God knows how many women into prostitution by keeping them locked up and stringing them out on heroin. He gets off on watching from behind the scenes as these women are violated five and six times a night, and he murdered two people—that we know of—in cold blood!”
Sinclair matched Isabella’s fire with a whole lot of ice. “Actually, I’m very serious. And so are the actions you took to pursue this guy off the books when I told you in no uncertain terms to back the hell off.”
And there’s the rub. “Look, I know I took some liberties with regard to this case—”
“Liberties?” He let go of the word as if it tasted rotten. “You ignored my orders. The chain of command doesn’t exist for you to piss on it, Moreno.”
A ripple of warning traveled the length of Isabella’s spine. Yeah, she’d known Sinclair was going to be shit-slinging mad that she’d taken matters into her own hands. She just hadn’t thought he’d be completely unreasonable on top of it.
DuPree was insidious. He had to be stopped. Period.
“There’s no way these deaths were an accident,” Isabella said, diving right in to round two. “Somehow DuPree found out I’m a cop, and he connected the dots from the video footage from the penthouse to put me with both Marcus and Angel. Then he killed them to keep them quiet.”
“Or they were cooking meth and accidentally sparked a fire, then died from smoke inhalation before they could be rescued by the RFD. There’s evidence that points in both directions here.”
Sinclair’s words were quiet and far from an argument, but Isabella’s nerves were beyond frayed, her composure completely shattered.