Read Online Skin Deep by Kimberly Kincaid - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    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