Page 102 of The Devoted Game
“Agent McBride.”
Hearing the title attached to his name startled him. “Yeah, Schaffer. What’ve you got?”
“Agent Pierce wanted me to give you Worth’s collection of files on the Devoted Fan investigation.”
“Great.” He accepted the folders. “Thanks.”
He dropped the stack onto the table and went in search of Grace. How long did it take to get coffee? Even if she’d had to make it, it should be done by now. He didn’t want her out of his sight.
She wasn’t in the lounge. No coffee had been brewed. He checked the ladies’ room and the men’s room. Then every office on the floor.
The unthinkable possibility that something had already gone wrong started to leach into his bones. He fought it back, refused to even consider it. They were in the FBI field office, surrounded by an iron fence with an armed guard at the gate. It took a key card to get inside, and a dozen armed agents were milling about in here.
“Have you seen Grace?” he asked Aldridge when he passed him in the corridor.
“Not since I was in the conference room.”
Ryan started to run then. He barreled into Worth’s office, where Pierce had taken up residence. “Have you seen Grace?”
Pierce’s expression turned as anxious as his had to be. “No. She was with you in the conference room ... what, ten minutes ago?”
“Something’s wrong.” Ryan pulled out his cell phone and entered her number. A ragged breath whooshed out of him. “She’s not on the floor.”
“Maybe she went to her vehicle to get something she forgot,” Pierce offered.
Ryan hoped he was right. Five rings and her phone went to voicemail. His gaze locked with Pierce’s. “You’d better lock this place down.”
Pierce rocketed to his feet, reached for the phone on the desk. “We’ll find her.”
If she was even still there ... but she wasn’t. Ryan already knew ...
The next communication you receive from me will be your worst nightmare ...
Twenty-Nine
Wednesday, September 13, 12:30 a.m.
Ryan stood in the slot where Grace’s SUV had been parked. Pierce loitered nearby, pacing around as if he could somehow make Grace reappear by sheer power of will.
“Son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered. The lobby video cameras had captured Fincher escorting Grace from the building. The parking lot cameras had shown them getting into her SUV and going left out of the parking lot. He’d had a handgun. Possibly Worth’s. Since no guard was on duty in the lobby after 6:00 p.m., Fincher had needed only to get past the guard at the gate.
Lila Grimes was at the ER recovering from a knock on the head. Fincher had used her to lure Grace to the lobby with a phone call. Grimes had been forced to say she was on her way to the hospital where Worth’s wife had been admitted with chest pains—also a fabrication—and needed to drop off Worth’s files from home related to the Devoted Fan case. Grimes hadn’t wanted to take the time to come upstairs to the office.
If Grace had taken a moment to think, she would have recognized that something was wrong about the request.
But she hadn’t been thinking ... she was still reeling over Worth’s death ... his final words to her. It probably never entered her mindthat Fincher was in the building or that he would use kind, harmless Lila Grimes in such a way.
Ryan reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the pack of Marlboros, tapped one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He flicked his Zippo and inhaled long and deep.
“I don’t see how this happened,” Pierce argued with no one in particular. “We were all in the building. A goddamned guard is manning the gate, for Christ’s sake!” He gestured to the guard shack. “How the hell did Fincher get in here?”
Ryan hated to say out loud what he knew had to be the answer. “He had to have been at her house. Rode in here with us.” The idea that the son of a bitch had most likely been in the back of the SUV while they drove from Grace’s house to here made him want to howl with rage. “After we’d gone inside and the coast was clear, he came inside.”
“What about the guard?” Pierce flung his hand toward the guard shack again.
“His job is to watch the street, not the entrance to the building.”
Pierce marched a circle around Ryan as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with all the pent-up rage he no doubt felt. “He couldn’t have gotten inside without—”