Nameless (35 page)
McBride started to run then. He barreled into Worth’s office where Pierce had taken up residence. “Have you seen Grace?”
Pierce’s expression turned as anxious as McBride’s had to be. “No. She was with you in the conference room … what, ten minutes ago?”
“Something’s wrong.” McBride pulled out his cell phone and entered her number. A ragged breath whooshed out of him. “She’s not on the floor.”
“Maybe she went to her vehicle to get something she forgot,” Pierce offered.
McBride hoped he was right. Five rings and her phone went to voice mail. His gaze locked with Pierce’s. “You’d better lock this place down.”
Pierce rocketed to his feet, reached for the phone on the desk. “We’ll find her.”
If she was even still there …
“The next communication you receive from me will be your worst nightmare.”
Wednesday, September 13, 12:30 A.M.
McBride stood in the slot where Grace’s Explorer had been parked. Pierce loitered nearby, pacing around as if he could somehow make Grace reappear by sheer power of will.
“Motherfucker,” McBride muttered. The lobby video cameras had captured Fincher escorting Grace from the building. The parking lot cameras had shown them getting into her Explorer and going left out of the parking lot. He’d had a handgun. Possibly Worth’s. Since no guard was on duty in the lobby after 6 P.M., Fincher had only needed to get past the guard at the gate.
Lila Grimes, Worth’s secretary, was at the ER recovering from a knock on the head. Fincher had used her to lure Grace to the lobby with a phone call. Grimes had been forced to say she was on her way to the hospital where Worth’s wife had been admitted with chest pains—also a fabrication—and needed to drop off Worth’s files from home related to the Devoted Fan case. Grimes hadn’t wanted to take the time to come upstairs to the office.
If Grace had taken a moment to think she would have recognized that something was wrong about the request. But she hadn’t been thinking … she was still reeling over Worth’s death … his final words to her. It probably never entered her mind that Fincher was in the building or that he would use kind, harmless Lila Grimes in such a way.
McBride reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the pack of Marlboros, tapped one out and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. He flicked his Zippo and inhaled long and deep.
“I don’t see how this happened,” Pierce argued with no one in particular. “We were all in the building. A goddamned guard is manning the gate, for Christ’s sake!” He gestured to the guard shack. “How the hell did Fincher get in here?”
McBride hated to say out loud what he knew had to be the answer. “He had to have been at her house. Rode in here with us.” The idea that the son of a bitch had most likely been in the back of the Explorer while they drove from Grace’s house to here made him want to howl with rage. “After we’d gone inside and the coast was clear, he came inside.”
“What about the guard?” Pierce flung his hand toward the guard shack again.
“His job is to watch the street, not the entrance to the building.”
Pierce marched a circle around McBride as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with all the pent-up rage he no doubt felt. “He couldn’t have gotten inside without—”
“Worth’s ID card,” McBride finished for him. “One swipe and he was in.”
“shirt.” Pierce rubbed a hand over his face. “He’ll kill her.”
McBride threw the cigarette butt on the ground and pulverized it with his heel. “No. He’ll make me do it.”
Pierce’s gaze collided with his. “You’re right. He’ll make this another of those fucking challenges. Only this time there won’t be any way to win.”
“That’s the way I figure it’ll play out.”
Pierce went toe-to-toe with McBride. “This is your fault,” he snarled. “If something happens to her—”
“You’ll what?” McBride growled back. “Kick yourself for making sure she got assigned to this field office?”
Pierce blinked, backed off. “Yes.” The word was barely a hiss of breath … a regret of monumental magnitude uttered in three innocuous letters.
McBride left him standing there and headed for the door. He had to start narrowing down places where this bastard may have taken her. Without any parameters to go on, it would be pretty goddamned pointless. But he had to do something.
The front entrance flew open, Pratt stuck his head out. “You gotta get in here. Fincher’s sending us something. We think it’s a streaming video feed.”
“Pierce!” McBride looked back to make sure he was coming, then he followed Pratt.
The run up the stairs took two lifetimes. In the conference room the whole team was gathered around the computer screen. ASAC Talley manned the keyboard.
“It’s loading,” Davis told McBride as he moved in next to him. “Been doing that for about three minutes now.”
Pierce claimed a spot next to McBride. “This came in an e-mail?”
“Yeah,” Davis said. “When Talley opened it, something started downloading.”
A box appeared with an option to open the file.
“Open it,” Pierce ordered.
Talley selected the open file option. The screen flickered and went black. As if coming into focus, vague images faded in and out. Then the screen cleared.
McBride’s heart stumbled.
Grace
.
A thud in his chest sent fear and adrenaline roaring through his veins. He leaned forward, studied what he could see. The lighting was too dim—no, not dim, a low-light recording made in a room with no light. The room appeared to be small and square. Empty except for Grace. The white blouse she wore contrasted sharply with her surroundings. No audio. She kept moving, didn’t appear to be injured. When she looked long enough in the direction of the camera the word INNOCENT was visible on her forehead.
The need to do something detonated inside McBride.
“Where’s that coming from?” Pierce wanted to know. “Can you track that feed?”
“Systems is working on it,” Talley said. “If it’s encoded, they’ll have to break down the code.” Talley shrugged. “Could be jumping around from data center to data center to avoid being pinpointed. It’ll take time to locate the source.”
“Do whatever you have to,” Pierce ordered. “Get Atlanta in on it. I want to know where this is coming from.”
“Yes, sir,” Talley acknowledged.
The screen flickered, went black again.
“What the hell happened?” McBride demanded. “Did we lose the feed?”
The screen brightened, then focused into a split view. The same one with Grace now standing in the middle of that tiny room looking helpless. Then the second view went from static to clear. A man paced another small room. He was tall, thin, with a bald head.
“Who is that?” Pierce tapped the blurred image next to Grace.
A rhetorical question, obviously, since no one in the room had a fucking idea.
McBride squinted in an effort to make out the guy’s face as he came nearer the camera. The way he was looking around it was fairly clear that he didn’t have a clue the camera was there.
No eyebrows. Weird. Letters written across his forehead, in the same manner as with Grace and the other victims, snagged McBride’s attention, but the man moved too quickly for him to read the word.
“Can you switch to your recorded version and run that back?” Pierce asked before McBride could.
“Yeah.” Talley shifted screens and did a back search on the recording.
“Right there,” McBride said.
The image froze on the screen.
N …A …M …E …L …E …S …S
McBride’s gut plummeted to the floor. “Jesus Christ.”
“That can’t be right,” Pierce argued. “No way. Nameless is dead. Grace killed him.”
Fury coalesced with the fear. McBride pushed away from the screen, got in Pierce’s face. “She tried to tell you there were two of them.”
Pierce shook his head in denial. “Forensics said—”
“Fuck forensics.” McBride jabbed a finger at the screen. “The victim said there were two, goddammit! And nobody listened.”
“She was seventeen. She was traumatized—”
“And she was right,” McBride said grimly. “Goodman’s exposé must have brought him out from under whatever rock he’s been hiding under.”
The silence lasted until Schaffer cleared her throat and said, “Are we going to do something about this, fellas?”
Without breaking the stare-down, Pierce said, “Davis, Talley, find out where that’s coming from. Also, find out if Grace’s Explorer drove past any cameras in the city when it left this location. Check with every patrol unit cruising the streets. Maybe somebody saw something.”
Doubt surfaced in Pierce’s expression and he visibly swallowed hard, his pride probably. “Pratt, I still want you to go to Fincher’s house to see what you can find. Arnold, you dig into the Nameless investigation. Call Kyle Cummings at Quantico, tell him I want him to look at the forensics evidence in that case again. If there’s any chance this accomplice is for real, I want to know it.”
Pierce continued to look at McBride as if he expected him to have something to add. But he didn’t. They would know where Grace was when Fincher was ready to tell them.
Unless McBride could bargain with him.
Inspiration fueling his stride, he rushed to another of the computers and opened a link to the Internet. He typed quickly, anticipation building with the possibility of making a deal with the bastard.
Fincher,
The fact is, if you hadn’t used a faulty pulley, then Worth wouldn’t be dead. So, let’s not pretend you’re innocent in all this.
“That could be a mistake, McBride.” Pierce stood next to him now. “The last thing we want to do is piss him off.”
McBride ignored him, kept typing.
Release Grace and I’ll deliver Deirdre back to you. I’ll sweeten the deal by making it a two for one, you can have me to boot.
If you don’t want the world to believe you’re a murderer, then release Grace. She hasn’t hurt you. It was me, and only me.
McBride
He hit send.
More of that choking silence hovered in the room.
By the time the signal that he had mail sounded, the others, one by one, had gathered around him and Pierce. McBride opened the e-mail and read the response.
McBride,
Your offer was touching. But I’m afraid nothing I could do to you would trump knowing how you will suffer as an innocent takes your punishment.
I am not a fool. I know that you cannot deliver Deirdre back to me. I will see that we are together soon. Our family will not remain torn apart.
And as for the other one, I found him lurking in Grace’s garage tonight. So you see, I’ve already gotten two for one. A pleasant surprise that will provide an opportunity for a truly exciting finale. I’ll have to thank Ms. Goodman for sending Grace’s old friend Nameless an invitation. You’ll get an invitation as well, McBride, and when you do, you’ll understand exactly what you must do.
You are right, though. This is entirely your fault. You let Deirdre and me down and you let Grace down … too bad she trusted you.
You have two hours, starting now.
Fincher
Two hours.
Defeat sucked at McBride.
“Nice try,” Pierce said before stepping back. “Let’s get the source of that feed triangulated,” he announced. “It’s coming from somewhere close by. There wasn’t enough of a time lapse between when Grace disappeared and now for Fincher to have gotten far. A twenty- or thirty-mile radius, tops. Pinpoint it so we can get this bastard. Time is short.”
McBride got up slowly. No clues, an impossible deadline. This wasn’t going to be about finding her … this was going to be about a fight to the death—live and uninterrupted. That video feed hadn’t been initiated for nothing. This sick son of a bitch had every intention of putting Grace in the room with that twisted fuck.
“Wait …” Talley shook his head. “We’ve got … the images are still now. No more live feed.”
McBride rushed to Talley’s station and took a look at the screen where the two images remained frozen. “He knows we’ll try to triangulate his position,” McBride said, hope funneling out of him. “He’s too smart to let that happen.”
Expecting any less was a strategic error. They wouldn’t have nailed this guy’s identity at all if he hadn’t written those fan letters back before he planned any of this. That he hadn’t considered the possibility that the letters would be found was testament to how far into the abyss of insanity he’d obviously gone.
McBride walked out of the room. He needed to think. He couldn’t do it in here.
“Where’re you going, McBride?” Pierce shouted after him.
When he didn’t answer, Pierce double-timed to catch up with him. “I asked you a question.”
McBride stopped, faced the persistent prick. “I’m going to the can. You want to join me?”
Pierce leveled a warning glare on him. “Don’t you leave this building. We’re going to need you. Grace is going to need you. You be back here in five.”
McBride raised his hand as if he intended to salute but he gave him the finger instead. “I know what I have to do.” He left Pierce standing there with his mouth gaping and headed for the stairwell.
Taking the stairs as fast as he could, McBride burst into the lobby and headed for the men’s room. Instead of lighting up as he went in the way he usually did, he stalked straight over to the counter and braced his hands there. He closed his eyes and took a moment to fend off the panic clawing at him.
When he could breathe normally again, he opened his eyes and stared at the man in the mirror.