by Debra Webb
“It may not be relevant,” Davis qualified, “but—”
“Agent Davis,” Pierce interrupted, “if you have an update, we’d all like to hear it.”
Davis looked from Ryan to Pierce. “Yes, sir.” He pivoted and addressed the room. “Agent Arnold and I have been narrowing down a fan mail list.” He gestured at Ryan. “Fan mail for Agent McBride.” Davis adjusted the tie he’d loosened sometime earlier in the night. “Anyway, we found a name, Martin Fincher. Fincher’s wife was a transplant patient a couple of years ago. Dr. Trenton was the surgeon of record.”
Ryan felt that old familiar tension ripple through him. “There has to be a connection to the others as well,” he urged. “One isn’t enough. Look harder.”
Davis nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Where’s Agent Arnold?” Pierce wanted to know.
Davis seemed a little less nervous with the second question. “He’s going door to door down the list of names. That was SAC’s order. I was supposed to catch up with him but then the news about Agent Worth came in and...”
Pierce nodded. “I understand. You should locate Arnold now.” Pierce surveyed the room. “I don’t want anyone going anywhere alone. We work in pairs.”
Ryan mulled over the idea of Devoted Fan as Martin Fincher with a wife in ill health. If it was about something Trenton did or didn’t do...
“Pratt,” Ryan said, “wake up someone on Trenton’s staff. Find out how the surgery on Fincher’s wife turned out.”
“Will do.”
Grace joined Ryan at the fax machine. “What did Schaffer find?”
Remembering what he’d come to the fax machine for, Ryan grabbed the stack of pages. Six in all. He read the note from Schaffer on the lead page. “Discovered one letter from this same guy in your fan mail file. Found five others, unopened, in the bottom of one of the boxes shipped to you. Whoever packed the boxes just tossed the letters in and then shoved your files on top of them. You just can’t get good help anymore.”
Ryan appreciated her cutting sense of humor. The part of his brain that wasn’t in shock at the idea of having only six hours wondered what color boots Schaffer had on. Purple? Green? Pushing aside the distraction, he shuffled to the first letter, read it, then read the next and the next after that. The adrenaline searing through him turned to ice.
“Son of a bitch.” He passed the letters to Grace, his gaze colliding with hers. “It’s Fincher.” That one letter he’d read from the man years ago was why the e-mails had felt familiar to him. The formal prose, the wide margins and excessive spacing. And damn, the man had even signed the last two “Martin Fincher, your devoted fan.” Two of the letters had been sent after Fincher’s son had been murdered. In both he had lamented that he was certain Ryan could have saved his son...but the special agent-in-charge refused Fincher’s request for Ryan. Randall Worth had been the special agent-in-charge.
“Fincher probably blames Worth for the loss of his son,” Grace said as she read the final letter Ryan passed to her. “Oh, my God...this guy has been obsessed with you for years.” Her gaze collided with Ryan’s. “And you were right...he does have a story to tell.”
Davis rushed back into the room. “Got a call from Arnold as I was heading out. He says McBride needs to see what he’s found.”
“At Martin Fincher’s residence.” Ryan guessed. “You got it,” Davis confirmed. “He’s already ordered a forensics unit.”
“Pratt, you keep working on this e-mail and any connections you can come up with,” Pierce said. “Grace, McBride, we’ll follow Davis.”
Ryan tossed the letters onto the conference table. If they were damned lucky, there would be some kind of clues at Fincher’s house about where this latest challenge was going down.
Otherwise, Agent Worth was screwed.
And Ryan would fail...again.
3:30 a.m.
Seven Oaks Drive, Vestavia Hills
Four hours, thirty minutes remaining...
The forensics van waited at the curb. Ryan, Grace, and Pierce arrived, pulling in behind it.
Agent Arnold stood at the door of Martin Fincher’s small cottage. “You gotta see this, man,” he said to Ryan. “I didn’t want to let anyone else in until you’d taken a look.”
“Good work, Arnold,” Ryan confirmed. Any change in the unsub’s environment could alter an investigator’s or profiler’s overall assessment of what he was dealing with.
Once outfitted with gloves and shoe covers, they followed Arnold inside. The house was clean and neat; the decorating and furnishings older, but in immaculate condition. A picture of Fincher, his wife, and son sat on a table. Fincher wore dark, horn-rimmed glasses just like Horace Jackson said.
“First,” Agent Arnold said, “you need to see his office.” Arnold led the way through the living room and down the narrow hall to the first door on the left. The office couldn’t have been more than ten by twelve feet, but every inch of wall space, floor to ceiling, was covered in newspaper clippings. Most were about Ryan and the man’s son.
“Here’s something on Trenton.” Arnold indicated one of the articles. “Katherine Jones.” He pointed to another, then looked at Ryan. “Here’s a full-page spread on Byrne and the article mentions Worth.”
Grace moved closer and started reading.
“Give me the condensed version,” Ryan said to Arnold. “I’m on a tight schedule here.” The tension was expanding with each passing minute, making it harder and harder to stay calm and focused.
“Six years ago,” Arnold began, “Martin Fincher’s twelve-year-old son went missing. Agent Worth was in charge of the case. Four days later, the boy’s body was found, along with another teenage boy who had gone missing in Jefferson County the week prior. The boys were found at a construction site.”
“A Byrne construction site,” Ryan offered.
Arnold nodded. “That’s right.”
“How does Katherine Jones fit into this?” Grace asked, pausing from her reading.
“She was the clerk on duty in the electronics department at Walmart the evening the Fincher boy went missing.”
Grace’s gaze met Ryan’s. “She didn’t notice the abduction...making her guilty in Fincher’s eyes. Oblivious.”
Ryan figured the same. “What about Trenton?” There were several headlines about him plastered on the wall.
“Oh yeah,” Arnold said, “Pratt called while you were en route. Couldn’t get through on your cell,” he said to Grace. “He spoke with Trenton’s office manager who checked the schedule. She didn’t like it, said she had to pull up a whole different program to do it. Anyway, Trenton turned Mrs. Fincher’s surgery over to one of his colleagues because Tipper Winfrey’s name came up on the list for a heart that same day. The office manager reminded Pratt that the surgery had taken place two years ago, and that if there was a problem, the doctor’s office never heard about it.”
“State Senator Tipper Winfrey?” Grace asked for clarification.
Arnold gave her an affirming look. “The one and only.”
“Where’s Fincher’s wife?” Ryan understood where this was going.
“Now that,” Arnold said, his big frame looking even larger with the cockiness that went hand in hand with knowing something no one else did, “is the really creepy part. Come this way.”
He led the way to a bedroom farther down the hall and to the right. A woman wearing a flannel nightgown lay in bed. If she had slept through all this, then she was on heavy drugs.
Ryan approached the bed cautiously.
“Don’t worry,” Arnold called after him, “she’s dead.”
Ryan studied the body. Damned good condition if she’d been dead two years. A dozen bottles of prescription medicine sat on the table next to her. Transplant patients required lots of drugs, immune depressors, blood thinners. He didn’t know all the names, but he didn’t have to. The picture was crystal clear.
“Mummified?” Grace asked as she moved to his side. “Looks like she’s been
coated in plastic or some kind of clear varnish.” Ryan touched one smooth cheek. “At least now we know why Dr. Trenton’s office didn’t get a call back when things didn’t go well. Fincher wanted to keep her at home.”
Pierce joined the party. “Fincher’s not going to be too happy when he finds out we’ve taken her away.” His gaze locked with Ryan’s. “We’ve got to finish this fast. He’s already a couple of steps ahead of us. If he comes back here before we find Agent Worth you know how this will end.”
Like I need anyone to remind me. Ryan turned to Grace. “Search the rest of the house with Arnold. Pierce and I are going back to that office to see if we can find anything that will help locate Worth.” Ryan shifted his attention back to Pierce. “Fincher will stay hidden somewhere near the scene where he’s holding Worth until Grace and I come to rescue him. He likes to watch us do it. We can’t do anything until we know where to go.”
That was the hell of it...the clues sucked this time. The manic ramblings of a devoted fan.
4:45 a.m.
Three hours, fifteen minutes remaining...
In Fincher’s office, Ryan found the cemetery map, the information regarding the sealing of tombs, the newspaper article related to the controversy with the Wellborne family. There was a schematic for Sloss Furnaces, created for the preservation board. A complete blueprint for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church related to last year’s restoration efforts. But nothing on where Worth might be now.
Grace and Arnold had come up empty-handed in their search of the rest of the house. The third room, at the end of the hall, was a kid’s room. From the look of things, it was just as it had been the last time the Fincher boy had slept there.
Pierce had Agent Pratt on speakerphone.
“Any historic buildings recently abandoned, maybe scheduled to be demolished to make way for new construction?” Ryan inquired. Time was running out fast and they had nothing.
“We found three,” Pratt reported. “An old military plane hangar that was deemed unsafe and beyond restoration. A piece of residential property that was supposedly used in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. And the old Birmingham News building. But that last one is still up in the air. The Preservation Committee is lobbying hard to save the old News building.”
“Which ones are brick and mortar?” Ryan was reasonably sure he could count on that part of the e-mail as literal.
“The residence that might be part of the Underground Railroad and the Birmingham News.”
In the end, it is only the truth that really matters, not the story at all Not even a century of stories.
“Wait.” Ryan mentally chewed on that a moment. “Is the Birmingham News still in operation?”
“Definitely,” Pratt said. “They built a new building and want to demo the old one for a parking lot.”
“But you say that’s not scheduled,” Pierce reiterated.
“No, the Preservation Committee is trying to save it.”
Amid a cloud of controversy the old sometimes falls...
“How many floors is the old building?” Ryan was itching to get moving. The tension churned inside him. This had to be it.
“Five plus a mezzanine.”
Definitely a lethal fall.
“They misspelled his son’s name.”
Ryan’s attention swiveled to Grace, who was reading another of the articles plastered on the wall. “Show me.” He moved to her side, looked at the line in the Birmingham News article about the bodies found at the construction site. “Daniel Fitcher,” he muttered as he shook his head. “Looks as if they focused more ink to showing how Byrne employed hundreds of Birmingham citizens in his construction companies than on covering the murder of two young boys.” Ryan touched the misspelled name. “That’s the place. He’ll be waiting somewhere close by, watching for our arrival.”
Grace nodded her agreement. “Just the two of us this time.”
Pierce put his hands up in a hold-it gesture. “No way am I letting the two of you go into this without backup.”
“Then we might as well all go back home,” Ryan warned, “because if we don’t follow the rules, Worth is a dead man.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
5:50 a.m.
Twenty-second Street, Fourth Avenue
Two hours, ten minutes remaining...
“It’s damned quiet.” Vivian shivered as she stared out the window of her SUV. They had parked across the street, near the new Birmingham News building.
She could only imagine how Worth felt. Fear for his life had banished her worries over having her past revealed. She would just have to live with it.
Worth could die...they had no idea what kind of challenge waited for them inside that five-story building. Whatever it was, it could very well be capable of bringing down the century-old brick-and-limestone structure. So far Devoted Fan hadn’t made a single claim he hadn’t backed up.
“Birmingham PD, Pierce, and the team are only three blocks away if we need them,” McBride reminded her.
Yeah, and emergency personnel were close by as well. In case of a fire or explosion or whatever the hell this sicko had in mind. The memory of his dead wife made her shudder again. The chief tech from the forensics unit had called McBride five minutes ago to pass along preliminary details. They had found Mrs. Fincher’s organs preserved in spice-filled jars in the crawl space beneath the house.
If, as the tech suspected, a quasi-Egyptian mummification method had been used, the body would have been cleansed, rubbed in salt, and then filled with spices. Instead of wrapping her with cloth, it appeared he had varnished her. Original, but truly sick.
The guy definitely had done his research. That went hand in hand with what they had learned about his occupation, an aerospace engineer retired from NASA. If the certificates and plaques hanging in his house were any indication, a brilliant engineer.
An APB had been put out on Martin Fincher and his blue Volvo wagon, the same vehicle he’d had since his son was born. He had probably researched just the kind of car to buy to keep his child safe. The Finchers had been in their early forties before having their first and only child. Losing him certainly would have pushed them toward the edge Martin had eventually fallen over, perhaps with the death of his wife.
“Grace.”
She snapped out of the disturbing thoughts. “Sorry. What did you say?”
“Let’s get in there and find out what the hell we’re up against.”
They had two hours, but there was no way to know what obstacles might stand between them and rescuing Worth. Scanning the building’s dark windows, she emerged from her SUV and then pushed the door shut. She reached into the back seat for her backpack. She had brought along flashlights, a box-cutter-style knife, screwdrivers, pry bar, scissors, and a hammer, just in case. The trip to Sloss Furnace had taught her a lesson about being prepared.
“We’ll start with the top floor.” McBride met her at the front of the vehicle and took the bag. “Work our way down.”
“You’re the boss.”
His gaze met hers in the moonlight. “I’m not so sure trusting me that much is a good thing, Grace.”
Maybe not, but it was too late. She already did. She just hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
“Don’t give yourself so much credit, McBride,” she argued, lied actually. “Worth told us all to follow your orders. I’m just doing my job.”
That one corner of McBride’s mouth kicked up, telling her that she wasn’t fooling him one bit.
“Let’s get this done.”
He crossed the street, his attention on the front entrance. She stayed a couple of steps behind, monitoring left and right to ensure nothing unexpected got the jump on them. Birmingham PD’s SWAT unit had scouts prowling the alleys and side streets. They all knew that Fincher would be here somewhere.
She took a last look around. Lots of places to hide.
A slow walk around the building revealed that Worth wasn’t hanging from the rooftop or any
of the windows. Since there was no roof access, they could assume he wasn’t up there.
Pierce had suggested the use of wireless communications since they were going inside without any backup, but McBride had declined. What was the point? If anyone else entered the premises the game was over. So far no one had died, but they couldn’t take the risk. Martin Fincher was not playing with a full deck, which provided the ammo Pierce needed to push for a compromise. Vivian was to check in every half hour or Pierce would send in a tactical team. McBride didn’t like it, but he had left it at that.
The Birmingham News CEO had been rousted from bed for the necessary keys. The man had insisted on staying close to the scene with Birmingham PD. Vivian couldn’t blame him, he was responsible for the building. Considering the ongoing war with the Preservation Committee, he was probably hoping it would blow so he wouldn’t have to fight them anymore.
“I guess we won’t be needing the keys,” McBride commented as he opened the door.
Anticipation sent goosebumps scattering across Grace’s skin. Time to face the last challenge. After this it would be over. All they had to do was make it happen one more time.
Her attention settled on McBride. He could do it.
Whatever the challenge, he could handle it.
She didn’t know all the details about his career, but the one thing she knew for certain was that the Bureau had been wrong to allow such a talented agent to get away.
Inside Vivian paused while he took care of the lights. For security and insurance purposes the building’s utilities remained active. She checked her weapon, then they climbed the few steps to the lobby. The building’s two elevators were at the top of those steps.
“You want the stairs or the elevator?” She was fine with either one.
McBride hefted the backpack onto his shoulder. “I’ll take the stairs.”
Vivian hit the elevator’s call button as he walked away. When he was out of sight, she turned back to the elevator but the call button hadn’t lit up as it should have. She pressed it again and waited just in case the problem was only a faulty light. The stairwell door closing behind McBride echoed in the deserted lobby. She rested her right hand on the butt of her weapon as she waited another minute for the elevator to respond.
