Chapter Twenty-Three #2
This is the final test, Agent McBride. I trust you will not fail.
Agent Worth is counting on you. He is hanging by a thread.
This time I do have one minor condition: No one but you and Agent Grace are to enter the scene.
I will be watching; any failure to adhere to that condition will result in great calamity. You have six hours . . . starting now.
Sincerely,
Devoted Fan
“Does any of the phrasing reach out to anyone?” Pierce asked.
Six hours.
That phrase reached out and grabbed Ryan by the throat. Hell.
“I’ll run the phrasing against any historic landmarks in Birmingham,” Pratt volunteered. “Brick and mortar . . . stories.” He shrugged. “Controversy.”
“So far, historic landmarks appear to be his crime scene of choice,” Grace explained to Pierce. “If Worth is at risk of falling, as suggested by the email, then we’re looking for a location with more than one floor or an elevation of some sort.”
Lila Grimes appeared at the door, her eyes red and swollen.
“I thought you might need my help,” she offered.
She cleared her throat. “Agent Worth’s cell calls have been forwarded here.
I’ll take those calls until he . . . he returns.
” She hesitated, seemed to gather her composure.
“There was a call from Agent Schaffer. She’s faxing a number of letters she found in Agent McBride’s files. ”
Schaffer. The boot lady. “Thanks,” Ryan said to the distraught assistant as he pushed out of his chair. He strode over to the fax machine, which had already whirred to life.
Davis joined Ryan. “Sir, I may have found a connection between a name on the fan list and Dr. Trenton.”
Ryan shifted his attention to Davis. “What kind of connection?”
“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 emails 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 email 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.
4 hours remaining . . .
Seven Oaks Drive, Vestavia Hills, 4:00 a.m.
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 they were 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 his 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,” Arnold explained. “Jones had some sort of health event—she fainted, something like that—and while she was unconscious, the abduction happened.”
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.
3 hours, 15 minutes remaining . . .
4:45 a.m.
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 Magic City 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 email as literal.
“The residence that might be part of the Underground Railroad and the Magic City 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 Magic City 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 Magic City 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 on 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.”