Page 70 of The Devoted Game

Four Birmingham PD cruisers had arrived and blocked off Sixteenth as well as Sixth Avenue, keeping curiosity seekers out of the blast radius.

“Dammit, Arnold, he’s been down there over five minutesalone. I’m going in.”

Arnold, his frame a mile wide, stepped in her path. “No way, Grace. You heard what McBride said, we stay out here. You’re not going in.”

There was movement at the entrance of the church. Her breath stalled in the vicinity of her lungs. McBride emerged with Trenton leaning heavily against him. The man’s naked body had been draped with some sort of dark cloth.

What the hell had happened? Had McBride defused the bomb?

Vivian ran for the steps.

The bomb unit roared to a stop on the street.

“Are you all right?” she demanded of McBride as she reached his position in front of the church. She did a quick visual sweep of Trenton, who looked like hell but was definitely still breathing.

“Didn’t hear a boom, did you?” McBride jerked his head toward Trenton. “I do owe the reverend a new pair of curtains.”

Fury descended on Vivian with biblical proportions. He had forced her to leave him in there alone with a damned bomb and a victim. And now he comes storming out talking about freaking drapes. “You are the absolute, biggest, goddamned—”

“Hold on, Grace,” McBride cut her off as he shifted Trenton’s weight. Then he inclined his head in her direction and said softly, “You’re practically in a church.”

Booted feet charged toward them. She snapped her mouth shut.

Trenton was alive.

McBride had done it again.

Vivian couldn’t decide if she wanted to hug him or kick his ass.

Nineteen

“Zoom in on her face,” Nadine Goodman ordered her cameraman.

Agent Vivian Grace, along with newly reinstated Special Agent Ryan McBride, stood aside as Dr. Kurt Trenton was hefted into a waiting ambulance. According to Nadine’s source from Birmingham PD, a bomb had been attached to the victim’s chest and the wordgodlesswas written across his forehead.

Nadine knew Dr. Trenton. His reputation in the medical world was unparalleled. His wife served on a dozen charitable committees. He had two brilliant children at the prestigious Altamont School.

Special Agent in Charge Randall Worth’s unannounced press conference last evening hadn’t mentioned anything about an ongoing case, only that Ryan McBride had been reinstated and temporarily assigned to the Birmingham field office. Obviously whatever case McBride had been brought here to solve had not been solved.

There was something going on that no one was talking about. In her eight years as an investigative reporter, Nadine had never encountered a case with a tighter lid. No one knew anything. She had spoken to Katherine Jones upon her release from the hospital and gotten nothing. The Byrnes refused to answer any questions regarding their daughter’s abduction.

And now an elite surgeon is tossed into the mix?

Was the same perpetrator committing these abductions? All three had taken place at historic landmarks. Dozens of police officerswere involved, and yet no one knew a damned thing. If they did, Nadine would have gotten something from someone, and her sources were bone-dry.

She supposed it didn’t help that charges related to the break-in at McBride’s bungalow were pending.

She was very good at what she did. Some called her ruthless. She, on the other hand, called her methods survival of the fittest.

There were two consistent details in this puzzling investigation: Ryan McBride, whom she had already exposed, and Agent Vivian Grace, a rookie and the newest agent at the Birmingham field office.

Why wasn’t Aldridge or one of the other more senior agents partnered with McBride?

Just another aspect of this strange investigation that made no sense.

“Let’s do the final segment with the departing ambulance in the background,” Nadine instructed her cameraman.

She would get this out of the way, then hang around the hospital to see if she could get an interview with someone ... anyone. Afterward, she was going on another digging expedition.