Chapter 10
Ten
Six hours, ten acres. And nothing. Dammit.
Worth had been right.
McBride had sent her here to head the search while he focused on identifying and tracking down anything he could find on the victim. And she had gotten nowhere. She had wasted time and resources.
A reporter, Nadine Goodman, and a cameraman from WKRT had shown up and attempted to question Vivian. Park security had sent them on their way. Fortunately, that one news crew was all that had bothered. Leave it to Nadine Goodman to sniff out the scent of a story ahead of the pack.
The hoopla at the cemetery had been about Alyssa Byrne, the daughter of one of the city’s prominent families.
If the media had gotten wind of McBride’s participation, there was no indication.
Vivian hoped their luck held out. Still, it seemed odd that a high-profile reporter like Goodman would show up for a missing person search without a socially elite name attached.
Goodman was the one to worry about. She was ruthless.
If she got wind of McBride’s participation, this case would ignite in the media.
Worth ordered Vivian back to Eighteenth Street. That lone command proved more devastating than if he had raked her over the coals.
She shoved her phone back into its holster and considered the official vehicles scattered around the parking area. All of it a major waste of time.
McBride, Pratt, and Davis were still working on identifying the latest victim and narrowing down the list of fans that had followed McBride’s career.
Finding the victim was like looking for that single four-leafed mutation in a field of clover.
There were hundreds of Joneses in the Birmingham area; hundreds had first name initials that began with the letter A—if the letter was even intended as an initial.
Basically, they had nothing.
How did you look for a missing person when you didn’t even know who you were looking for? Coming to Vulcan Park had been a shot in the dark at best.
What Vivian needed was a Pepsi. She had barked so many orders and walked so many miles over the park grounds, she was exhausted.
The high sugar content would do her good.
Lunch had come and gone with no time to care.
After giving Birmingham PD’s team leader the final word to head home, she made a stop in the gift shop.
“Two-fifty-nine,” the clerk said after ringing up her purchase.
Vivian handed her three one-dollar bills and reached for her soft drink.
A long line of brochures advertising local attractions filled display racks on the counter next to the register.
The first couple snagged her attention. Shelby Iron Works and Sloss Furnaces.
Both historic landmarks, the latter was now a huge open-air museum.
Vivian had visited the Sloss Furnaces on a sixth-grade field trip.
She reached for the brochure, some distant memory vying for her attention.
She definitely needed that sugar; her brain was going to sludge.
She and McBride had considered Sloss Furnaces and Tannehill Ironworks, as well as Shelby Iron Works, as secondary search locations, but none of those were located atop Red Mountain like Vulcan Park. That one factor had advanced the park to the top of the priority list.
But they had been wrong . . . She had been wrong.
“Now there’s a neat place to visit,” the clerk said with a knowing nod. “I take my kids there every year for the haunted house they put on. Scares ’em to death.”
Maybe it was the low blood sugar level or the gut-wrenching frustration, but Vivian opened up the brochure for a look. Anything to take her mind away even for a second. “It’s been a while since I was there,” she remarked, more to herself than to the woman behind the counter.
“Oh, you definitely need to go back,” she urged. “Why, that old place is something to see. Towering smokestacks and furnaces.” She cackled. “Old pipes snaking around in every direction like steel ghosts peeking around corners.”
Vivian smiled, allowing the woman’s enthusiasm to put a chink in her tension. “Sounds like fun.” She twisted the top off the drink bottle and downed a long, much-needed swallow.
“Good educational experience too,” the clerk went on as she passed Vivian her change.
“Been here over a hundred years. Those blast furnaces melted all that ore dug outta this very mountain and turned it into steel. That’s what made this city.
Birmingham wouldn’t be nothing but a fuel stop between Huntsville’s Rocket City and the capital in Montgomery if it hadn’t been for places like Sloss.
” She gave a resolute nod. “Don’t let those rusty old boilers and water tanks fool you, they’re an important part of our history. ”
Vivian almost asked her if she got a commission for her sales pitch, but then that final remark the lady had made cut through all the fatigue and frustration and kindled a spark of relevancy—rusty old boilers and water tanks.
Water tanks.
. . . 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.
15 hours 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.