Page 33 of The Devoted Game

A woman’s life depended on it.

Dusk had settled, and Vivian desperately wished that the dogs would lock on to a scent.If it was even possible.That reality hit like a ton of bricks. If Katherine Jones was in water, the dogs might not be able to pick up her scent.

There was always a slim chance that moving her to her destination would have left a scent trail the dogs could latch on to, but no guarantee.

Vivian checked the time on her cell phone. They still had twelve hours, but most of those would be night hours and not nearly as productive.

One by one, they checked the ten gigantic boilers, every cubbyhole in the walls or in the ground, under and aboveground rooms, any pipes large enough to accommodate a body, furnaces, stoves—they examined every damned thing they encountered that would hold water and/or a body. And burned up more time—that precious commodity—without yielding the desired results.

“Where the hell is she?” McBride muttered.

Vivian understood his frustration. Neither the dogs nor the team had spotted a single piece of evidence that might give hope. About every ten or fifteen minutes the “clear” signal echoed across the deathly quiet industrial yard, and each time her hope sank a little lower.

“Maybe she isn’t here.” Vivian hated to say the words out loud, but someone had to. As sure as she had wanted to be about this location, she had to face the looming reality that she was, apparently, wrong.

“She’s here,” McBride argued.

When had he decided that with such certainty? What gave him that kind of confidence? Ten years in the field doing exactly this? Or had he been born with an innate sense of finding the lost? His former reputation would certainly seem to indicate so.

As he stood in the spotlight of one of the few lights around the property, McBride’s gaze met hers, and she knew instantly that he was on to something.

“We’ve spent all this time looking in every imaginable hiding place,” he said with a final survey around him. “She has to be someplace easy to accessandin plain sight.”

Vivian had considered the whole “public” complex as being inplain sight. Time to reduce that focus. “You mean, like someplace more specific or ... obvious?”

“Exactly.” He took another look at the map. “To pull this off”—he hesitated as if considering a theory—“he would need running water, not standing water like we’ve seen in a lot of these old boilers and containers.”

His renewed optimism was contagious, as was his theory. “He would need to control the flow of water into wherever he’s holding her—to facilitate the timing?”

“Yeah.” McBride nodded. “And it’s someplace right under our noses.Plain sight.”

He was right. Adrenaline bumped up her pulse rate. “Let’s find that site manager.” Vivian put through a call to Pratt.

The entire search team rendezvoused in front of the massive flywheel in the main blowing engine room.

McBride made eye contact with every member of the group. “We need quiet. Wherever she’s hidden, the water will be running. If she’s able, she’ll be attempting to make some sort of sound.” He turned to the site manager. “Can you narrow down the locations where there’s running water access?”

He nodded and quickly pinpointed the spots on his map. McBride deferred to the search team leader for directing his people to the targeted areas. Then he and Vivian methodically scanned each location, looking for anything the others might miss. Still they found nothing. Heard nothing but each other scrambling around in the dirt and gravel.

The odds for success looked bleak at best, but McBride refused to give up. Vivian had to admire that because she damned sure felt her optimism waning.

If Katherine Jones was here ... somewhere ... she would be terrified, and she, too, would be losing hope.

7hours remaining. . .

3:00 a.m.

Vivian looked at the digital display on her cell phone. They were no closer than they had been two or four or even five hours ago.

McBride had ordered everyone back to his or her vehicle except her. They stood in the darkness on the ladle car tracks listening. She was pretty sure that she was the only one who still held out any hope for finding the woman at this location. On the other hand, with each minute that passed, McBride grew more certain that she was here.

For some totally irrational reason, Vivian couldn’t give up onhim.

Slowly, painstakingly, he began a meticulous repeat search of a fifty-by-fifty perimeter around each accessible water source on the property. Vivian stopped when he stopped, and started when he started, mimicking his movements with a second look.

They had gone over their current location two or three times, and still she noticed something new she had missed before. The darkness ... the fatigue ... both were playing tricks on her eyes.

This go around, that something new was a narrow strip of disturbed earth. It was a miracle she had noticed it at all. Whoever had done the digging had smoothed it back over especially well. She crouched down and touched it. Loose dirt. Rock. Just beneath a shallow layer of those elements, something cool and smooth brushed against her fingertips. Aiming the flashlight for a closer inspection, she studied it, followed the path of the furrow for several inches ... a water hose?