Forever Deep: A Station Seventeen novella

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “I haven’t been able to go through all of it yet, but I did manage to catch Brittany walking by the mini-mart a half a block from the library at seventeen-oh-six. This is from their private security camera.” He hit play, slowing the footage enough to clearly show the fourteen-year-old passing in front of the store.

  Isabella metered the breath that had just threatened to spackle itself to her lungs. Junior varsity track jacket, bright blue backpack with reflective stripes on either side, dark blond braid, earbuds firmly in place…God, she was barely more than a kid.

  “That’s definitely her,” Garza said, pointing to the photo of Brittany he’d pulled from her Facebook page and posted on their digital crime scene board at the back of the office.

  Capelli nodded. “The mini-mart is well-lit and their security system is better than most, so I got lucky enough to grab a good visual. The second camera angle keeps eyes on her for another ten, maybe twelve feet. She pops up again on the city cam on the next block, but that image is a lot harder to make out.”

  “I don’t mean to ask a dumb question,” Kellan piped up from his seat beside Isabella and Hollister. “But what’s the point of having a city cam if you can’t see the surveillance video?”

  “Actually, that’s quite a logical question,” Capelli said. “Unfortunately for us, it’s got an equally logical answer. The equipment is placed in the most optimal spot for a good visual day or night, but that doesn’t make it foolproof. Usually, there’s a pretty decent view of the street and sidewalk from this one. Except…” A few clacks brought up a semi-distorted shot of Brittany from a lot farther away than the first. “The blinking holiday lights on all the brownstones here threw around a lot of weird shadows. This is the last image we have of Brittany. The security cam from the florist two blocks from here doesn’t show her at all, and she should’ve passed right by the shop on her way home.”

  “So she was kidnapped within these two blocks,” Maxwell said, ever to the point.

  Capelli hesitated, but only for a microsecond before he agreed, “Yes. That’s definitely the strongest hypothesis.”

  “Okay.” Sinclair lasered a stare in Capelli’s direction. “Then let’s see all we can see from this footage.”

  “You got it.”

  Isabella’s heart thundered, her pulse pressing against her eardrums in a wild thump-thump she was certain everyone in the room could hear. Capelli made the keystroke to start the video, slowing it down to half-time, and Isabella watched as Brittany moved, frame by frame, through the last normal moments of her life.

  “Wait.” Adrenaline shoved the word out of her mouth. “There. She stops to talk to someone.” Okay, so stops was a bit of a stretch. But Brittany definitely appeared to have said something to the shadowy figure passing by her on the street.

  “Looks like a passing hello. Friendly neighborhood like that, it could be nothing,” Hollister said. He wasn’t trying to be a jerk, or to discredit what Isabella had noticed, she knew. They had to try to rule something out before they could attempt to rule it in, and in a case like this, with so little evidence to go on, they needed checks and balances more than ever.

  “Could be,” Sinclair agreed, although he—along with everyone else in the unit—leaned in more closely to watch as Capelli went back a handful of frames to slow-mo the exchange. The footage showed Brittany, looking up at something the passing figure said to her and replying before continuing on her way out of the frame.

  Capelli backtracked again, then froze the video on the best angle of the guy. “Looks like a maintenance tech from the electric company.”

  Between the barely visible logo on the man’s baseball hat and the coveralls he was wearing, the logic leap seemed sound. A thought perked at the back of Isabella’s brain, drawing her brows downward.

  “There don’t appear to be any power outages on this block. Every brownstone in the shot has lights blazing, to the point that they’re messing with the footage. It doesn’t make any sense that the electric company would do routine maintenance after business hours. Which begs the question…”

  “What was this guy doing there?” Hale finished.

  “He might have been finishing up a call.” Garza gestured to the utility vehicle parked just inside the frame. “His truck is right there.”

  Sinclair’s expression suggested he was about as convinced as Isabella about the likelihood of that being the case. “Even if he is on the up and up, he looks like the last person to see our vic alive. Capelli, can you get a license plate or vehicle number off that truck?”

  His frown was answer enough. “I can try, but it’s pretty far from the city cam. Factoring in the angle and the lighting, the odds are less than one percent I’ll be able to grab anything we can use. Same goes for facial recognition.”

  “Try anyway for both.” Sinclair swung a look across the office. “Maxwell, call the power company and see if there were any outages reported or routine maintenance calls scheduled on that block within four hours of Brittany Martin’s disappearance, along with who responded. Hale, you and Garza go over the rest of the footage to see if anything unusual pops within an hour on either side of this clip. Moreno, I want you and Hollister with boots on the ground. Canvass that entire area, especially the brownstones on that block. If any of those residents or business owners saw something even the slightest bit hinky, I want to know about it.”

  “I might be able to help with that.”

  Isabella’s heart stuttered at the unfamiliar male voice sounding off from the door of the intelligence office, then sped even faster as she paired the words with their speaker.

  “Detective Weiss?”

  “Moreno,” he said, giving up a clipped nod before shifting his gaze. “Sinclair. Thought you might need these.”

  Isabella blinked, belatedly realizing that Weiss held a manila file folder between his fingers. “And those are?”

  “My case notes on the canvass Barton and I did the day Brittany Martin’s body was found.”

  The beat of silence that followed might as well have been a mortar blast. “You want to help us?”

  “I want the bastard who raped and murdered that kid to rot in jail,” Weiss corrected. “Make no mistake, I don’t like being yanked from a case any more than you do.” He gave his frown a second to sink in before adding, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want justice for what was done to that girl, though. These notes haven’t been put into the system yet, and there’s something in there you’re going to want to see.”

  “You going to keep us in suspense, here?” Kellan asked, making the detective’s brows lift.

  “I’ll let you have that one, since my partner was an ass to Moreno. But that’s your only shot.” He waited until Kellan nodded in concession before continuing. “The day Brittany Martin’s body was found, we spoke to a woman who lives in one of the brownstones, a Pamela Markowski. Head of the neighborhood watch.” Weiss flipped the file folder open and passed it to Hollister, who happened to be closest.

  “Whoa. Fifty-four calls to the cops this year?”

  “Mmm hmm. She takes her position very seriously. She didn’t see Brittany the night she disappeared,” Weiss said, snapping the thread of hope that had just unwound in Isabella’s belly. “But she was pretty vocal about a guy from the power company who parked in front of her building and loitered for nearly forty minutes without doing, and I quote, ‘anything other than wasting air’.”

  “Sounds like our guy,” Garza said.

  “Also sounds like he’s got some explaining to do.” Sinclair looked at Weiss. “Ms. Markowski wouldn’t happen to have caught a license plate or ID number on this truck, would she?”

  Detective Weiss smiled, rekindling Isabella’s hope in full force as he lifted his cell phone and said, “I can do you one better. Not only did she write down both the plate and the truck’s ID number, but she snapped a photo of the guy.”

  Chapter 6

  Kellan mopped the linoleum in the hallway outside Station Sevent
een’s common room for the second time in ten hours. Not that the floor had gotten particularly dirty since he’d clocked in for his shift at oh-seven-hundred that morning, or that he’d done a less-than-stellar job the first time around—if the Army had taught him anything, it was how to keep his shit spic ‘n span. But engine had been surprisingly light on calls today, and if Kellan was left idle, he’d have far too much time to focus on the fact that the woman he was marrying in four days had spent the last twenty-four hours tirelessly trying to catch the criminal who had raped and murdered her cousin.

  Crap. Maybe the floors in the bunk room needed to be mopped, too. Just for giggles.

  “Hey, there you are!” January called out, her heels clicking over the mostly dry floor at the far end of the hallway. “I’ve got someone who’s been looking for you.”

  Kellan managed a laugh past his confusion. “Don’t get me wrong, J. I like Finn as much as the next person, but he’s your boyfriend. I’m pretty sure that means he’s here to see you.”

  January grinned at the tall, dark-haired guy who had been making his way down the hall next to her, and okay, yeah. Kellan might be a little pot/kettle when it came to being decidedly un-single, but January was a total goner for the hockey player who had moved back to Remington to join the hometown team after taking home the Cup last spring.

  “You’re right about that,” Finn said, moving to the side to reveal a serious but still smiling Isabella, who’d been walking quietly behind him. “But your visitor is prettier than I am, and I think you’ll be happier to see her than me.”

  Kellan ditched his mop and bucket in favor of a grin of his own as he met the trio just shy of the common room. “No offense, dude, but you’re not wrong,” he said to Finn before turning toward Isabella. “Hey. I didn’t know you were coming out.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call to give you a heads up,” Isabella said, letting Kellan fold her into a quick embrace. “This case has kept me running all day. Oh hell,” she added, scrunching up her nose and brows at the sound of an alert chiming from her cell phone. “I totally forgot I was supposed to stop by the florist and confirm the order and delivery details for the wedding. Ugh, and they’re only open for another half an hour.”

  January hooked a thumb over the shoulder of her bright red sweater. “Finn and I are on our way out. Do you want us to do it?”

  Isabella looked as relieved as Kellan felt. They might have been slow today, but he couldn’t risk leaving his engine-mates down a man, even for a pre-wedding errand as big as this one. No matter how much he wanted to make her life easier while she worked this case.

  “Oh my God, could you?” Isabella asked. “The deposit is already paid, so all you’d have to do is make sure they’ve got the order right and that it will arrive on time.”

  “Sure. Just email me all the details.” January held up her cell phone a minute after Isabella tapped out the particulars, a victorious smile on her face. “Annnd, got it.”

  “Thanks, you guys,” Kellan said, but Finn just waved him off with a laugh.

  “I seem to recall a certain fundraiser you helped us coordinate not that long ago. Seriously, don’t even worry about it. We’ve got this. See you two crazy kids at the wedding.”

  Kellan waited until the couple had made their way through the double doors leading out of the front of the fire house before returning his attention to Isabella. “So, how’s the case going?”

  “Slow,” she said, following Kellan a handful of steps farther down the hall and dropping her voice, presumably to keep their conversation as private as possible. “Capelli had to do a lot of work to clean up the photo from the neighborhood watch lady, and it took longer than we expected.”

  Well, shit. “I thought it was better than the ones from the city cam.”

  “It is,” Isabella agreed. “Just not by a whole lot, and the facial recognition programs take time even when the pictures are perfect, so it’s still running. The good news is, he feels pretty confident that now the photo is clear enough to get a hit if there’s a match in the DB.”

  “Pretty confident?” Kellan asked, and it earned him a smile—a small one, but he’d take it.

  “I believe the statistic he used was ninety-seven-point-nine percent.”

  Now Kellan smiled, too. “That sounds like Capelli. How about the electric company? Any luck there?”

  “Good news and bad.” She tugged a hand through her hair, and damn, he wished he could do something to erase some of the weariness from her eyes. “The bad is that the man in the photo doesn’t work for them. The manager said he’d never seen the guy in his life, and there was no maintenance scheduled for that neighborhood—emergency or otherwise—on the evening Brittany was kidnapped.”

  “Yeah, that isn’t great news.” It would’ve been a huge break if this guy had been easy to track down, and Kellan had known it—which meant Isabella and the rest of her team must’ve really known it. Still, no matter how careful this guy was, he also wasn’t invisible. “Do you think you’ll find anything in the truck, maybe?”

  Her tiny smile went for round two. “There’s the good news. That truck was used on a call the morning of Brittany’s disappearance, but it was marked as being returned to the lot at three PM that afternoon. Our guy obviously stole it on the down-low, but that’s a lot of trouble to go to just to blend in to a neighborhood where he didn’t belong.”

  “You think he used it to kidnap Brittany.” Kellan’s gut twisted. The only thing worse than a sick son of a bitch was a smart, sick son of a bitch.

  “We do.” Isabella nodded. “Especially since he returned it to the lot before the morning shift started the next day. The thing was never even marked missing.”

  “Christ, he really does want to stay under the radar.”

  “Yeah, well, CSU is combing the truck right now. Unfortunately, it’s gone on a few calls this week, so we don’t want to get our hopes up too high. But anything we can get at this point would be a gift. The team went through all the footage and recanvassed the neighborhood today, too. But between waiting for the photo software to find a match and the crime scene unit to find something in the truck, we’re kind of at a standstill right now. Sinclair booted all of us for an hour so we could get something to eat and take a brain break.”

  Kellan couldn’t help it. He knew she was tough, but this had to be raking her over a giant bed of red-hot emotional coals. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’ve had way more Red Bull than is probably prudent,” she said, managing a soft laugh that faded far too quickly. “But I just want to catch this guy. If we can match his DNA to the profile in Marisol’s case…”

  “What if you can’t?”

  Fuck, he hated the question, let alone the look of hurt it sent over her face. But he’d promised to have her back, and that meant looking out for her emotionally as well as physically.

  “Look, I’m not saying it would be from lack of effort,” Kellan said. “Clearly, you’re busting your ass on the case. But you yourself said the evidence connecting this crime to Marisol’s murder is speculative at best. I just don’t want it to send you down a dark road if Brittany’s killer doesn’t turn out to be the same guy who murdered your cousin.”

  For a second, Isabella just looked at him, her eyes glinting with uncertainty and fear and about a thousand other things in the fluorescent light spilling down from overhead, and shit. Shit! He should’ve kept his frigging mouth shut.

  But then she let out an exhale and slipped between his arms. “I don’t want that to happen, either. I have personal ties to this case, and that’s not something I can avoid or ignore.”

  She let the silence settle in for a breath, then another before pulling back to pin him with a stare. “But even if Marisol’s killer is never found, Brittany deserves justice. I owe it to her to find the man who hurt her, and I owe it to the women in this city to keep them safer. I want to find the monster who murdered my cousin.” Her voice didn’t waver despite her whisper-so
ft tone, and God, she was the strongest person Kellan had ever known. “But if this guy isn’t him, I’ll be okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “You believe me?” Isabella asked, and Kellan laughed, because it was either that or give in to his raging worry, and right now, she needed him to trust her.

  “Should I not?”

  “No, I just…you’re a little protective of me, is all. I’m not saying I mind,” she added, lifting a hand for emphasis. “I’m protective of you right back. I just thought that after everything we went through last year, you might be harder to convince.”

  Kellan’s heart squeezed, rattling faster beneath his long-sleeved RFD T-shirt, but still, he forked over the truth. “It’s because of everything we went through last year that I believe you,” he said, pulling her close. “Yes, I worry about you, and hell yes, I want you to find Marisol’s killer, but above all, I trust you. If you say you need help, I’ll be here to help you. If you say you’re good, I believe you’re good.”

  “What did I do to deserve you?” Isabella asked, her lips parting in the first genuine smile he’d seen from her in days.

  Kellan kissed her before answering. “For starters, you kind of saved me from being tortured and stabbed to death by a complete sociopath.”

  “You kind of saved me right back by living through it, you know.”

  “Let’s call it square and get married. What do you say?”

  “Deal.”

  He held her close, letting her lean on him literally and maybe even figuratively until a soft buzz made them both jump.

  “Ah, that’s me,” Isabella said, sliding her hand into the back pocket of her jeans to retrieve her cell phone. Her eyes widened as she read the message on the screen, her body kicking into motion less than a heartbeat later. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”

  “Is everything okay?” Kellan asked, hoping like hell there had been a break in the case rather than another murder.

  Lucky for him, his Christmas wish came early as she answered with a determined nod.