Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  “We found a good number of viable prints in the bedroom, but we’ll have to wait for the lab to prepare an analysis,” the officer said. He sat on the couch like he owned the place, still holding his notebook in his hands. Dandridge’s arrival must have interrupted his wife’s statement. “We have to make sure they don’t belong to either you or your wife first.”

  “Any other…samples?” Dandridge cringed when he said it. They all knew what he meant by samples. Blood, tissue, fibers…semen.

  “No, sir.”

  Without another word, Dandridge rushed down the hall and into Maggie’s bedroom. An officer knelt below the window, combing through the carpet with tweezers under the purple glow of a black light. He took in the room at a glance: rumpled bed linens on the floor; nothing broken; window open and intact; no blood or outward signs of a struggle.

  As he neared, he noticed the car parked on the curb outside the tape in front of his house. There was a silhouette inside, framed against the glare of the rising sun. He had been in such a hurry to get into the house that he hadn’t even noticed the Cherokee canted up on the sidewalk.

  “Who’s in the Jeep outside?”

  “Federal Agent,” the officer said without raising his eyes. “He was already here when we arrived.”

  “Why’s he just sitting out there in his car?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. He’s been like that for a while now. We figured we’d just leave him to it. Buy ourselves some time to do our jobs before this turns into a sideshow, you know?”

  Dandridge knew exactly what the officer meant. There was no time for a messy debate over jurisdiction or to bring anyone new up to speed. But what troubled him most was that a Federal Agent had been the first on the scene at a house not far from the middle of nowhere within a matter of minutes after Sharon called nine-one-one. The man would have to have been within miles of his house to beat the police here, and he couldn’t think of a single good reason for that. What did the agent know, and why in the name of God was he just sitting out there in his damn car when Maggie could be anywhere by now?

  “You let me know the second you find anything,” Dandridge said. He stormed out of the room and nearly barreled through his wife on the way out of the house. Focusing on the unmoving shape in the Cherokee, he strode right up to the driver’s side door and looked through the window.

  A man in his late thirties, wearing a disheveled suit, sat in the passenger seat with an open laptop on his thighs. He stared blankly through the front windshield, tears glistening on his cheeks. Dandridge could hear him crying even through the closed door. He craned his neck so he could see the monitor and did a double-take.

  He threw open the door and leaned across the driver’s seat.

  “Where did you get that?” There was no way any of that footage could have leaked from his crime scene so quickly. This agent had arrived at his house far too quickly, and now here he was watching a video there was no way he should have had.

  The man turned toward him with a startled expression.

  Dandridge grabbed him by the jacket, yanked him across the seat, and bared his teeth. “Where did you get that?”

  “On the ground outside the window,” the man whispered, holding out a weathered tatter of fabric. “It was wrapped in this.” Dandridge released the agent’s jacket, snatched the swatch from him, and read the inscription. “It’s a scrap of fabric from the dress my daughter was wearing when she was abducted six years ago.”

  “And you found this here?” Dandridge asked in a softer tone. He held the cloth out for the man, who nodded and tucked it carefully into his jacket pocket. “Along with that video.” Again the man nodded. Dandridge looked into the agent’s teary eyes and asked the question he had no choice but to ask. “And the child on the recording?”

  “Her name was Savannah. She would have been sixteen years old yesterday.” There was a rustling sound from the laptop. A bright glow bloomed from the little girl’s chest, almost like the reflection of the sun from glass, and then the footage went black. A puzzled expression crossed the man’s face. “You’ve seen a recording like this one before?”

  Dandridge studied the man, but betrayed nothing.

  “I want to know how it is that a Federal Agent with Colorado license plates was the first person to arrive at my house. You’d better tell me everything you know, and don’t even try to bullshit me. My daughter is missing, and if anything happens to her, I’ll skin you alive. You understand?”

  “Tell me where you saw a video like this and I’ll give you everything I have.”

  “I don’t have time for this! My daughter is out there somewhere with—”

  “The same man who killed my daughter!”

  Dandridge drew his Beretta and pointed it between the agent’s eyes.

  “If you know where he took her, you’d better tell me this very second or so help me I’ll put a bullet through your head right now!”

  “Tell me where you saw the video!”

  The look in the man’s eyes told Dandridge he had witnessed enough suffering that he didn’t fear the pistol. He had no other choice.

  “There were more of them. Buried in the mountains. By the bodies.”

  The agent closed his eyes for a long moment before opening them again. The tears stopped and his face hardened.

  “Take me there, and I’ll help you find your daughter.”

  “Sheriff Dandridge?” an officer interrupted from just outside the open driver’s side door.

  “What?” he snapped, pulling the gun away from the agent’s forehead.

  “A man named Lester Grant has been trying to get a hold of you. I just got word from dispatch. He says he knows where to find the killer.”

  “Get in,” the agent said, nearly shoving Dandridge out of the car as he hopped across the console into the driver’s seat. His laptop clattered to the floor as he cranked the key and revved the engine.

  Dandridge sprinted around the hood and jumped in through the passenger side door, already dialing the motel’s number on his cell phone.

  The Cherokee peeled away from the curb and rocketed to the north.

  “Now,” Dandridge said as the dial tone droned in his ear. “Talk.”

  V

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  All of the cars, minus the sheriff’s Blazer, were still parked exactly where they had been when Henson drove him to the motel, only all of the lights were now dark. Les had hoped to find at least one of the officers milling around the lot so he could simply relay his message and be done with it, but his luck held true. He dreaded the prospect of hiking back up to that site. The last thing he wanted was to see how many more corpses they’d uncovered during the night. Or worse still, if he was right and the killer was up there at this very moment, he feared the prospect of running into him in the middle of the isolated wilderness. Surely there were enough policemen up there that even if the killer was hiding where Les suspected, he wouldn’t dare take the chance of revealing his presence. Les just needed to reach the officers, tell them what his research produced, and then allow himself to be escorted back to town, where surely his car would be waiting for him and he could return to his normal life. Before the start of the evening news, he’d be lounging in his recliner with a well-deserved glass of wine, this whole mess already forgotten.

  Of course, that didn’t make his current task any less terrifying.

  The grumble of the old pickup faded behind him, leaving him to the company of the raucous starlings and the squeaking ground squirrels. He stared up the steep first leg of the path to where it disappeared into the pines. The sooner he started, the sooner he’d be back down here, he told himself. And while the shadows still clung to the forest, at least he wasn’t making this journey under the dead of night in complete darkness.

  He drew a measure of comfort from the sunlight. Monsters only hunted at night, didn’t they? But that was another thing that troubled him. He may have discovered the ancient schematics for the m
edicine wheel, but he still had no idea what its function might be. What was the construct’s relationship to today, the summer solstice, and how did it relate to the proximity of the sun? And there were still the trees to consider. What was buried under the ground that had caused such strange growth patterns?

  A shiver rippled up his spine. The branches above him swayed against the cool morning breeze.

  He was just going to have to wait and watch the news for resolution. Right now, his only concern was making sure the police were properly prepared to roust the killer from his warren so there wouldn’t be another body to complete the outer ring of the medicine wheel, and then he could formally wash his hands of it.

  As the golden sun rose slowly in the sky, Les mounted the trail, doing his best to focus on anything other than the image of twenty-eight small bodies bearing witness to the ascension of something dark from the pit.

  VI

  13 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  Preston pinned the gas pedal coming out of the curve and into a short, rutted straightaway. Gravel ricocheted from the undercarriage. The tires slewed from side to side, throwing up a roiling cloud of dust in their wake. The professor’s motel room had been empty when they arrived, however his belongings were still heaped in the corner. He hadn’t mentioned where he might have gone to the desk clerk who had opened the room for them, and they hadn’t had the time to canvass the town looking for him. With the sheriff’s daughter already in the clutches of the killer, their only option was to follow their instincts, and they both agreed that going to the site of the awful burial was the most logical course of action considering they had no other leads.

  Preston tried to steel himself against the horrible reality of coming face-to-face with his daughter’s posed remains, but he knew there was nothing he could do to mentally prepare himself. He had already witnessed the worst of it, but the camera lens tended to create a barrier of unreality between the atrocity and the viewer. The grim truth would set in when he finally saw what was left of Savannah with his own eyes, when he finally touched the decomposed skin of the cheek he had kissed so many times.

  An old Ford pickup barreled around the bend and nearly sideswiped them. Preston managed to hug the slanted shoulder and the edge of the forest at the last second.

  “Jesus,” Dandridge said from the seat beside him. The sheriff braced one hand on the dashboard and clung to the door handle with the other. All of the color had drained from his face, throwing the expression of anger and determination into stark contrast. Despite his obvious discomfort, he didn’t once ask Preston to slow down.

  Preston had already disclosed everything he knew to the sheriff, from the abductions leading up to Savannah’s disappearance to the pattern he discovered in the children who went missing after her. He described the photographs taken of him while he investigated the Downey kidnapping, the snapshot of his daughter in front of his house, and the picture that had led him to Dandridge’s house that very morning. In exchange, Dandridge detailed the horror of the clearing the professor and his students had discovered, the construction of the stone medicine wheel, the condition of the corpses committed to the cairns, and the computer disks exhumed from the ground. The sheriff confirmed Preston’s belief that the man who had orchestrated this whole thing had deliberately drawn them all into his web with the pictures he had sent to Preston and the university, but neither could divine the reason he would risk allowing them to close in on him when he had outmaneuvered them every step of the way. And the way Dandridge described the medicine wheel—a sadistic tableau of suffering—Preston was certain it had been meant to be found. But why? Was it possible they were dealing with a lunatic who simply craved infamy, his face on the cover of every newspaper across the country?

  “How much farther?” Preston asked. The uneven road made his teeth chatter.

  “Maybe five miles. Can you go any faster?”

  “Not without killing us both.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance.”

  The Cherokee slid sideways through a turn before righting and accelerating through a trench formed by the encroaching wilderness.

  “It could be nothing, but I noticed something odd on both of the videos,” Dandridge said. “Did you see that strange reflection of light right at the end? Almost like a glare or a sunspot, coming from—”

  “Savannah’s chest,” Preston finished for the sheriff. “You saw the same thing on the other one?”

  “Yeah, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is. I thought it was just a trick of the light in the first one. But two can’t be a coincidence.”

  “It could have been a reflection of the overhead bulb or of a light mounted to the camera from the…blood. The shifting of the camera as the killer shut it off. I don’t know.” The trunks of the trees raced past to either side, packed together like cornstalks. “What I want to know is, what’s the significance of the medicine wheel? Are we dealing with a crazy Indian making some sort of political statement or reenacting some ancient ritual?”

  “I don’t care who he is or why he did it. I just want my daughter back. And then I’d like nothing more than to tear him apart like he did to those children.”

  Preston didn’t tell the sheriff he would never get that opportunity. The man’s life belonged to him, and he would be the one to end it in the manner of his choosing and over however long he decided to make the pain last. It was his right as a father, and the last thing he would ever be able to do for his baby girl.

  Ten minutes passed in silence as they wended higher into the mountains and crossed through meadows where the road became little more than twin ruts in the tall grass. When they finally reached the terminus, Preston parked his car next to one of the police cruisers, a pine branch resting on his windshield. He stared across the impromptu parking lot toward where the trail led up the hillside. Over the crown of evergreens, sharp blue peaks cut the sky.

  He killed the engine and hopped down to the dirt. Dandridge met him around the front of the car, and together they struck off toward the path.

  Something wasn’t right. He could feel it, an uncomfortable sensation of foreboding that caused the hackles on his shoulders and the base of his neck to stand painfully erect. The current in the air was almost electric, alive with potential.

  “If we guess wrong and your daughter isn’t here, we might as well be killing her ourselves,” Preston said. He glanced at the sheriff, whose hand already hovered anxiously over the grip of his pistol in its holster.

  “She’s up there somewhere,” Dandridge said, breaking into a jog once they rounded the ERT van. “I can feel it.”

  But that didn’t mean she was still alive. Preston sensed that his daughter was up there as well. He only hoped they hadn’t met the same fate. In his mind, he saw a small dark room with cinder block walls and a bloodstained worktable. Was it possible that it was up here too, in some remote survivalist’s cabin? The mental snapshot shifted, and the girl in the picture he had driven all the way from Colorado to save appeared on the table, bound in the same fashion as Savannah had been. A hideous shadow leaned over her from beside a tray of wicked implements and softly shushed her. Preston’s jog became a sprint, and together he and the sheriff hurtled through the forest toward the clearing where he would finally be reunited with what remained of his little girl.

  VII

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  Dandridge didn’t know what he would do if anything happened to Maggie. Too much time had already elapsed. Even if they guessed right and the killer had brought her here, the window of opportunity had been more than long enough for the man to do whatever in the world he wanted to do to her. What kind of father did that make him? Unable to protect his daughter in his own home where she should have been safe and sound? Emotions warred inside of him—anger, fear, helplessness, panic. He could barely focus on the ground as the path rose and fell over the alternately rocky and eroded terrain. Every second that passed brought him closer to
the clearing, but they were seconds he simply didn’t have. He tripped and fell repeatedly, only to rise and stumble into a sprint again. His palms and knees bled, his chest ached from the exertion, and the physical reality had begun to set in. He was going to have to slow his pace to catch his breath or he was going to collapse.

  Special Agent Preston lagged behind, but Dandridge could hear him huffing, struggling to stay close enough to maintain visual contact. Dandridge wasn’t sure if he trusted the man. His appearance had been too well-timed, too convenient. However, he did feel a certain kinship to the man, who had lived through what he now endured. Assuming he was telling the truth. He believed everything the agent had told him so far—either that or he was one hell of an actor—but blind trust was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  He fell again, only this time his trembling arms could barely push him up to all fours. Gasping for air, Preston caught up to him and helped haul him up. They both doubled over and sucked at the air as they walked.

  “How much farther?” Preston panted.

  “There’s a valley just beyond that rise ahead. We’re going to the top of the ridge on the other side. Maybe twenty minutes if we hurry.”

  “Then we’re wasting time,” the agent said, breaking into a jog.

  When they reached the crest of the knoll, the agent suddenly ducked off the path and threw himself to the ground on his belly. Dandridge was just about to ask why when he saw movement at the bottom of the slope below them, the silhouette of a man moving through the trees toward the thin stream. The needled branches allowed fleeting glimpses of the man, only enough to determine that he was alone, until he emerged from the tree line into a meadow of thigh-high weeds at the edge of the stream.

  “Grant,” Dandridge said.