Chapter 10 #2
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.
“They were supposed to meet for lunch today. The sister’s been worried about Katherine’s depression, so she went to her house when several hours passed with no word.
The back door had been opened by force, and there were signs of a struggle.
” He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag. “Looked staged. But, however he got her out of the house, she was gone. Forensics is there now.”
“Neighbors?” Vivian asked as they entered the Sloss property.
“No one saw a thing.” He gestured to the K-9s and their handlers.
“Aldridge has the blue vest Jones wore to work last night. Hopefully that will put the dogs on her scent. Worth and Talley are questioning her family. The vic’s husband was killed in an automobile accident two years ago.
According to her sister, she hasn’t been herself since. ”
. . . her regret . . .
Mrs. Jones had lost her husband. Had to still be grieving.
Fury roared through Vivian. What was this scumbag doing?
First a child, then a woman who had already lost her husband.
What harm could either of these victims ever have done to the unsub?
That was the one thing Vivian looked forward to in all this, putting him behind bars.
“Where do you want to start?” She refolded the brochure so that the map faced out, then surveyed the sprawling industrial complex that had the look of being trapped in time.
The goliath restored furnace she remembered vividly from that elementary school field trip.
The towering blast stoves and enormous smokestacks too.
She had felt like a tiny speck surrounded by the massive metal giants that had somehow dragged her back a full century. Felt that way now.
“I take it you’ve been here before.”
She glanced up at McBride, some foolish part of her mind noting the five-o’clock shadow that darkened his jaw. “Sixth-grade field trip.”
He considered her a moment, for once not staring at her lips. “You know, maybe this is about you as much as it is about me.”
The statement gave her pause, made her frown for a second or two. That wasn’t possible. No one knew about her past . . . She had no career reputation yet to encourage that kind of attention.
“That was a joke, Grace.”
Her frown turned into a glower. “It wasn’t funny.” She turned back to the rusting graveyard and repeated her question. “Where do you want to start?”
McBride took a moment to evaluate the situation. “I’ve already instructed the team to conduct the usual grid search.” He glanced at her. “You and I will start with anything that holds water.”
. . . before she drowns . . .
If Katherine Jones was here and the danger to her was paralleled by the clues in the email, as had been the case with Alyssa Byrne, then she would be at risk for drowning. Someplace in plain sight.
In other words—Vivian looked around once more—just about anywhere.
As they passed through the shadow of the cold, quiet blast furnace and threaded their way between the sky-high smokestacks, she had to wonder what around here wouldn’t hold water.
Valves, pressure gauges, and pipes that ran in every direction with vines climbing along and around the rusty metal surfaces.
Steam vents and shaft openings gave the impression of a landlocked submarine.
Night was coming way too fast. Even with flashlights, the iron grate paths along the main walkways were damned gloomy.
Somehow in the last century trees had pushed their way up through the sandy earth and stood like alien beings in this metal wasteland.
The wind rustled through their leaves, adding another layer to the creep factor.
The search team would scour the dilapidated brick buildings, including the supposedly haunted blowing-engine rooms. A site manager had arrived to assist the search team through the maze of metal.
The gates of hell. That was what one of her classmates had called this place.
He had heard his daddy talk about the hundreds of workers who had died here during the factory’s century of operation.
The sound of footsteps on the catwalk high overhead jerked her attention there even as she knew a dozen or more team members and two dogs had fanned out in every direction.
Shake it off, Grace. You aren’t twelve anymore.
And you don’t believe in ghosts. Between the numerous reported ghost sightings and the fact that Sloss Furnaces had been labeled as one of the most haunted places on earth, she wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next few hours.
Her freak-o-meter was set to hypersensitive.
Deep down she knew it wasn’t really this place . . . it was the coming darkness and the unknown that had her rattled.
Would they be able to find Katherine Jones in time?
Applying her undivided attention where it belonged, back on what she had come here to do, she pointed to a doorway up ahead.
“That leads down to the tunnel. It comes out on the other side of the mill. I don’t think there are any side tunnels or cubbyholes for hiding, just a straight path.
The team may have already swept through there. ”
“I’d like to check it out anyway,” McBride said, setting a course for that destination.
Vivian glanced toward a pair of uniforms up on the nearest section of catwalk, then took the plunge and descended those stairs into the tunnel.
She remembered this part all too well. Nothing had changed.
Long, pitch dark, spooky tunnel. No place to go but forward or backward, just like she had said.
The sounds of their breathing . . . of each trickle of water .
. . echoed in the tunnel as if time stood still and the sound stretched to compensate.
Ankle-deep water splashed with every step, soaked her shoes, and chilled her feet.
When they finally reached the other end, she was more than ready to leave it behind.
“Over there.” McBride indicated a row of large tanks in the distance.
Vivian glanced at her map. “Boilers,” she pointed out.
Decrepit and rusty, they seemed pretty much past holding water, but the need to be sure wouldn’t be abated by conjecture. Making certain was necessary.
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 access and in plain sight.”
Vivian had considered the whole “public” complex as being in plain 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?”