Page 31 of The Devoted Game
... you must find her before she drowns in her regret ...
“May I take this?” Vivian quickly refolded the brochure.
“Take a handful. We got loads of ’em.”
“Thanks.” Vivian hurried out the door, her renewed enthusiasm morphing into heart-pounding anticipation as she punched McBride’s name in her contact list. She had added him at some point last night. She had almost deleted him after his smart-ass comment in the elevator this morning. They would be talking about boundaries again very soon.
As soon as McBride answered his cell, she blurted, “I think we started with the wrong place. Can you meet me at”—she paused at the driver’s side door of her SUV and glanced at the front of the brochure—“Sloss Furnaces on Thirty-Second Street?”
McBride had news of his own. He had ID’d the victim. He would provide details when they rendezvoused at Thirty-Second Street. She opened the vehicle door, tossed her phone onto the seat, and jumped behind the wheel. Maybe things were starting to come together. ’Bout time.
En route she put in a call to the leader of the search team provided by Birmingham PD and requested support at the Sloss Furnaces location. The team leader didn’t sound too thrilled, it was Friday and his team was ready to call it a day, but he agreed to meet her there. This could be another dead end, but waiting was out of the question. They had to try.
Calling Worth would be a last step, right before they launched the search on-site. If she was lucky, McBride would brief him and save her the angst. The SAC wouldn’t appreciate her sidestepping him, but she couldn’t afford to waste the time and McBride was supposed to be calling the shots anyway.
At every traffic light that caught her, she glanced over the history of the old steel mill to refresh her memory.
Sloss Furnaces and the production of steel from the iron ore of Red Mountain had been pivotal to the rapid growth of Birmingham.
. . . forged the path from atop Red Mountain . . .
Hundreds of men had died there, most burned to death, but the work never ceased.
. . . built on blood, sweat, and determination . . .
Jesus, they should have been looking at that email from a much broader scope. She had wasted all those hours.
Get a grip.This sudden charge of inspiration could turn out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. But with nothing else to go on, this was the next logical step. All she could do was make decisions based on the facts she had available.
The same way McBride had three years ago.
For the first time since she started her career in the Bureau, she understood how easy it would be to fail. The realization made her respect McBride’s incredible record all the more. The dedication and determination required to even begin to set that kind of precedent boggled the mind. Maybe that was the reason he had done a one-eighty after leaving the Bureau. Just maybe he didn’t know how to be anything else, so he didn’t even try.
She pushed the troubling thoughts aside. Now wasn’t the time to be distracted. And his personal problems were not her concern. Going down that path would only lead to places she did not need to go.
Considering they only had about two hours of daylight left, she put in another call to the search team leader and suggested he send two smaller teams to Shelby Iron Works and Tannehill Ironworks. Neither of those locations was as high profile in Birmingham’s history as Sloss Furnaces, but why ignore any possibility? The hours were ticking down. She was banking on the idea that the unsub would go with the higher profile location, just as he had when selecting a cemetery ... But then there had been extenuating circumstances at Oak Hill with the resealing of the tombs.
Damn, every time she believed she had a valid point, something else bobbed to the surface of her tumultuous thoughts to negate it.
She had made the decision to go with Sloss ... Now she had to face the possibility of having made the wrong one.
15hours remaining. . .
Sloss Furnaces
20 Thirty-Second Street, 7:00 p.m.
McBride and Pratt were waiting when she arrived at the parking area under the First Avenue viaduct. Aldridge was briefing Birmingham PD’s search team. The Pepsi had prompted Vivian’s second wind. She was ready to solve this puzzle.
The steady thump-thump of cars passing on the viaduct overhead resonated in the air like a heartbeat. A train’s lonesome croon somewhere in the distance underscored that repetitive thud.
When she reached the gate where McBride waited, he showed her a four-by-six photo of a blond woman.
“A Jones?” she asked.
He shot her a look that said, if only it had been that easy. “A Jones turned out to be Katherine Jones. Forty-nine. Widowed. No children. She’s employed by the Walmart on Hackworth Road. She got off work at eleven last night, and no one has seen her since. We might never have gotten to her name in time using the telephone directory if her sister hadn’t reported her missing.”
“How did her sister know she was missing?” Vivian frowned. Those who lived alone sometimes went for days before anyone noticed they were missing.