Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  His life had ended in that house. The world had collapsed in upon itself and left him with nothing but pain.

  And it had been all his fault.

  His child, the light of his life, had been stolen from him because of his involvement in a case, and he still didn’t know why. Over the last six years, he had begun to piece together a theory. Unfortunately, that’s all it was. A theory. Grasping at straws was what his superiors had called it. Over the past year, nearly eight hundred thousand children were reported missing. While most were runaways, more than a third of them were abducted by family members or close friends. Many of these children resurfaced over the coming weeks, while still others never did. It was the smallest segment, the children who vanished at the apparent hands of strangers, that was the focus of his attention. At least privately. Professionally, he performed his job better than he ever had. After Savannah’s abduction, he had thrown himself into it with reckless abandon, and at no small personal sacrifice. On a subconscious level, he supposed he hoped that by helping to return the missing children to their frightened parents that the universe might see fit to return his to him. But there was more to it than that. It was a personal quest, an obsession, and it had finally led him to a pattern.

  Factoring out all of the kidnappings for ransom, the abductions by estranged parents or family friends, and the crimes of opportunity, where the child was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, left Preston with a much smaller field to investigate. By narrowing his scope further to encompass only missing children from stable, two-parent, at least superficially loving homes, he winnowed the cases in his jurisdiction down to a handful each year. And of those, if he set the age range at Savannah’s at the time of her disappearance, plus-or-minus three years, he was left with four cases annually over the past six and a half years. Not an average of four. Not three one year and five the next. Exactly four. And they were spread out by season. One child each year in the spring, another in the summer, a third in the fall, and a fourth in the winter. And all within two weeks of the four most important dates on the celestial calendar—the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.

  The kidnappings were the work of a single individual: the man who had stolen his daughter from him. The same man who had sent the photographs of him at the Downey house, who had been within fifty yards of him at a point in time when if Preston had known, he could have prevented the abduction of his cherished daughter, and the twenty-three children who came after her, with a single bullet.

  Why could no one else see it? Why didn’t they believe him?

  Because he knew all too well that the parents of missing children would say or do anything if there was a chance of learning the fate of their son or daughter, even if it meant formulating a theory from a set of points that on paper appeared completely random, like forming constellations from the stars in the night sky.

  Preston focused again on the house, but still couldn’t bring himself to press the button on the garage door opener and pull the idling Cherokee inside. There was only solitude waiting for him within those walls, and the heartbreaking memories he was forced to endure with every breath he took. The house was a constant reminder of the greatest mistake of his life, but more than that, it was a beacon, the only location on the planet that Savannah had ever called her own. He still held out hope that wherever she was, one of these days she would simply appear from nowhere and return to her home. To him. It was the reason he would never allow himself to sell it. The one wish he allowed himself to pray would come true.

  It was all he had.

  He slid the gearshift into drive and headed south, pretending he didn’t know exactly where he was going. Ten minutes later he was on the other side of town, parked in front of a Tudor-style two-story, upon which the forest encroached to the point of threatening to swallow it whole. Light shined through the blinds covering the windows. With a deep breath, he climbed out of the car and approached the porch.

  The house positively radiated warmth, reminding him of what should have been. He pressed the doorbell and backed away from the door.

  Shuffling sounds from the other side of the door, then a muffled voice.

  “Just a second.”

  The door opened inward. A woman stood in the entryway, cradling a swaddled baby in the crook of her left arm. She brushed a strand of blonde bangs out of her eyes with the back of her right hand, which held a bottle still dripping from recently being heated in boiling water.

  “Hi, Jessie,” he said.

  She still had the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen.

  “Philip,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “He’s beautiful, Jess.” He nodded to the baby. “How old is he by now?”

  “Phil…”

  They stood in an awkward silence for several long moments.

  “You remember what today is?” Preston finally asked.

  “Of course,” she whispered. “Do you honestly think I could ever forget?”

  He shook his head and looked across the lawn toward the forest.

  “What happened to us, Jess?”

  “I’m not getting into this with you again.”

  “Does he at least treat you well?”

  “Who? Richard?” Anger flashed in her eyes. “He’s emotionally stable, physically available, and isn’t hell-bent on his own systematic destruction. And I don’t cringe when he touches me. What more could a girl want?”

  “But does he make you happy?”

  She sighed. “Of course, Phil. I wouldn’t have married him if he didn’t.” The baby started to cry, and quickly received the bottle. Jessie shuffled softly from one foot to the other in a practiced motion Preston remembered well. Only it had been with a different child, in a different lifetime entirely. “Why are you really here?”

  “I needed to know that you were okay.” He glanced back at her and offered a weak smile before looking away again. It was still impossible to think of her as anything other than the woman he had loved for the better part of his life, since the first time he had laid eyes on her. It hurt deep down to think of her as anything other than his wife. “That’s all.”

  He had to turn away so she wouldn’t see the shimmer of tears in his eyes, and used the momentum to spur his feet back toward his car.

  “Phil.”

  He paused, blinked back the tears, and turned to face her again. Even with the recent addition of the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, she was still the most stunning woman he had ever seen. And the baby seemed to make her glow. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her his name.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He shook his head, releasing streams of tears down his cheeks. No, he would never be all right ever again.

  “Do you still blame me, Jessie?”

  “You invited the danger into our home, whether intentionally or not,” she whispered. “I will always blame you.”

  “So will I,” he said, and struck off toward his car again. “I hope you have a good life, Jess. You deserve to be happy.”

  He heard her start to softly cry as she closed the door.

  “Don’t ever let him out of your sight,” Preston said. “Ever.”

  His heart broke once more as he walked away from the love of his life.

  III

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  Les stood beside one of the cairns in the outer ring and watched his students perform their tasks as they had been taught. Jeremy guided the magnetometer in straight lines between the short walls that formed the spokes of the wagon wheel design. He wore the sensing device’s harness over his shoulders and held the receptor, which looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, a foot above the detritus. It interpreted the composition of the ground based on its magnetic content, and forwarded its readings into a program on Les’s laptop that created a three-dimensional map of the earth to roughly ten meters in depth. Every type of rock had varying content of ferrous material and l
eft a different magnetic signature, as did extinguished campfires, the foundations of prehistoric ruins, and various artifacts lost through the ages. Often, one ancient site was built upon another when a more modern culture eclipsed its forebear, like the Acropolis in Athens rose from the rubble of a Mycenaean megaron. If there was an older structure beneath this one, they would be able to find and map it without so much as brushing away the topsoil, but of greater importance were the relics left behind by the Native Americans who had meticulously crafted this ornate design. Hopefully, these buried clues would provide some indication of the function of the medicine wheel, the identity of its creators, and the reason it had been erected in the first place.

  The magnetometer would also serve a secondary function he had chosen not to vocalize. Primitive societies often built cairns to mark the burial mounds of individuals of significance. If there were indeed corpses interred under their feet, then the magnetometer would reconstruct their unmistakable signals as well in hazy shades of gray. Fortunately, they had yet to isolate any remains. Based on the condition of the stones and the level of preservation, he feared any bodies they discovered would not be as ancient as he might prefer.

  So far, the only signals had come from rocks under the soil, in no apparent pattern and of varying mineral content, save one square object roughly a foot down, midway between where he stood now and the central ring of stones. Breck and Lane had cordoned off the square-yard above it with string and long metal tent pegs, and had begun to excavate in centimeter levels. They were only six inches down, and had yet to sift through anything more exciting than the coarse dirt.

  “I still don’t think this thing is working right,” Jeremy said. “I can’t seem to get rid of that strange, streaky feedback a couple yards down.”

  “I told you that you were putting it together wrong,” Breck said.

  “You could always switch with me and lug this thing around, princess.”

  Les rolled his eyes and tuned them out. Their bickering was grating on his nerves. Besides, he needed to try to sort out his thoughts, to figure out exactly what was so wrong with this site.

  “There’s another one over here!” Jeremy called. “Same size, same shape, and same location within this section.”

  “Mark it and try the next section over,” Les said. Two could be a coincidence. Three was a pattern. “Let me know immediately if it’s there.”

  What was roughly five inches square, half an inch thick, and crafted from metal? He would know soon enough, he supposed, but the objects made him nervous. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel predated the development of Native American metallurgical skills. If what they uncovered was manmade, then this site wasn’t nearly as old as it had been designed to appear.

  The wind shifted, bringing with it a scent that crinkled his nose. It smelled like something had crawled off into the forest to die. He stepped around the cairn and walked into the wind, but the smell dissipated. A cursory inspection of the forest’s edge didn’t reveal the carcass he had expected to find. Perhaps the detritus had already accumulated over it. The breeze waned, and he returned to his post, where he resumed his supervisory duties.

  “Right here,” Jeremy said. “Just like the other two. What do you want me to do?”

  “For now, just mark it and keep going with the magnetometer. I want to map as much of the site as we can before sundown.”

  “I could just dig it up really quickly.”

  “That’s not how it works and you know it.”

  Les sighed. The impatience of youth.

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” Jeremy said with a shrug, and went back to work.

  Another gust of wind brought the stench back to Les. The breeze made a whistling sound as it passed through the stacked stones of the cairn.

  He crept closer and the smell intensified. The source of the vile reek was definitely somewhere under the cairn. He leaned right up against it and tried to peer through the tiny gaps between the stones. At first, he saw only shadows, so he crouched and inspected the lower portion, nearer the ground. He gagged and covered his mouth and nose with his dirty hand.

  There was a dark recess behind the stacked rocks. He could barely discern a smooth section of something the color of rust. A rounded segment of bone through which thin sutures coursed. Just the barest glimpse and he knew exactly what was entombed within those stones.

  “We’ve reached the artifact,” Breck called. “What do you want us to do?”

  Les couldn’t find the voice to answer. He craned his neck to see through another gap below the last. An eye socket in profile, the sharp stub of the nasal bones, crusted with a coating of dirt and blood.

  A spider scurried over the cheekbone and disappeared into a small fissure in the ridged maxilla above a row of tiny teeth.

  There was no doubt it was human. And it definitely wasn’t thousands of years old.

  His legs gave out and deposited him on his rear end in the dirt. He scanned the forest, expecting to find whoever had done this watching him from the shadows.

  “Dr. Grant? What you want us to do with this?”

  He whirled in her direction. These kids were his responsibility. He needed to get them out of here this very second.

  Breck raised her eyebrows to reiterate the question. She and Lane knelt over the square hole in the earth, mounds of dirt to either side by the screens they had used to sift through them. They must have recognized something in his expression, for both of them backed slowly away from him.

  “Gather your belongings,” Les snapped.

  “What about the magnetometer?” Jeremy asked.

  “Leave it!”

  Les crawled away from the cairn and shoved to his feet. He grabbed his backpack and strode toward where Breck and Lane cringed. Fear shimmered in their eyes.

  “Get your backpacks. Hurry up!”

  “But Dr. Grant—” Lane started.

  “We don’t have time for this!”

  The graduate students scurried away from their excavation. Les heard a shuffling sound as they donned their gear. He knelt by the hole and stared into its depths.

  A tin with rounded edges peeked out of the ground. He brushed away the loose dirt to reveal three rows of numbers and letters that had been crudely scratched into the metal.

  19

  3-20

  V.E.

  He pulled one of the tent pegs from the cordon and pried at the corner of the object.

  The top portion of the tin popped open to reveal its contents.

  A DVD-R in an ordinary plastic jewel case. The same series of numbers and letters had been scrawled on the disk in black marker.

  The case was smeared with blood.

  IV

  Evergreen, Colorado

  Preston sat on the back porch in a folding lawn chair, watching night approach from the eastern horizon over the jagged crests of the distant foothills as he did whenever he had the opportunity. He prayed that one of these evenings, a young woman would simply emerge from the twilight and step through the overgrown juniper hedge and back into his life. Would she still recognize him? Six years was a long time to a child, but he would devote his remaining days to reminding her if she didn’t.

  He drew a swig from the bottle of Bud and set it back in his lap. It was all he could do to resist the urge to drink himself into a stupor, as if that wasn’t exactly how he had stumbled through the last six years.

  The odds were stacked against him. With each hour that passed following an abduction, the chances of the child returning home diminished exponentially. After so many years, there were really only two viable outcomes: Either Savannah was somewhere far from home and would never come back, or she was dead. Both meant he would never see his child again, never know what happened to her. But he couldn’t allow himself to abandon all hope or he’d be tasting the oil from the barrel of his pistol. And then what would happen if by some miracle his daughter finally did find her way back? Someone needed to man the lighthouse, and if he didn’t, wh
o would? Jessie had already moved on, but he knew he would never be able to. Not until Savannah appeared again…or they discovered her body.

  He sobbed at the thought, leapt to his feet, and hurled the bottle across the yard. It struck the tree house at the top of the slide and shattered. Foam slid down the weathered wood and glass shards fell into the sun-fried grass. The chains on the swings had rusted long ago, and the branches of the cottonwood had grown around the whole construct.

  The back door of his neighbor’s house opened and he heard tentative footsteps on the wooden deck beyond the fence. They all knew better by now than to ask him if he was okay. Besides, it wasn’t the first bottle he had broken in the yard, as evidenced by the fragments in the dead lawn that reflected the red of the setting sun behind him. After a long pause, the neighbor’s door closed softly and Preston was alone again.

  He watched the first star twinkle into being and made the same wish he always made, then righted the chair he had toppled in his hurry to vent his anger. He turned toward the open door to the kitchen, obviously in need of another beer.

  Movement caught his attention from the corner of his eye, a rustle of branches, a shift in the lengthening shadows.

  He spun to face the yard again.

  A dark face.

  The whites of eyes.

  Juniper branches shook and he heard the crunch of invisible tread.

  Drawing his Beretta from the holster under his left arm, Preston sprinted toward the shrubs, swatting branches away from his face as he barreled through. He exploded from the far side and leaped over the fence into the closely-cropped field. Rear porch lights turned the fences to silhouettes in the distance. The clusters of scrub oak cast long shadows.

  “Freeze!” Preston shouted. He swept his pistol from one side of the clearing to the other as his voice echoed away into oblivion.