Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  “The professor?” Preston rose and stared down at the man, who searched the bank for the narrowest section and hopped across. “What’s he doing all the way out here?”

  “I don’t know, but I sure as hell intend to find out.”

  Together they picked their way down the steep, rocky trail, skidding on the loose gravel and bounding between rugged crags mountain goat-style. At the edge of the forest, they regained visual contact with the professor, who had begun to jog on a relatively level section of the path.

  “Grant!” Dandridge called, his voice echoing through the valley.

  The professor paused and turned in a slow circle, apparently unable to determine the direction from which Dandridge’s voice had originated.

  “Stay right there!” Dandridge ran through the slalom of pines and aspens, crossed the meadow at a sprint, and cleared the stream in a single leap. When he finally caught up with Grant, the relief on the professor’s face was evident.

  “Thank God,” Grant gasped. “I was hoping I would run into someone before I made it all the way to the site. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for hours now. Your dispatcher kept telling me she’d have someone call me back, but no one ever did and now I’m out of cell phone range—”

  “What are you doing out here? You were supposed to stay at the motel until we were through with you.”

  “I had to tell someone, and since no one would return my calls, I figured that you were all still up here, so I decided to come out here in person and make you listen.”

  “Listen to what?” Dandridge asked. He tugged on the professor’s arm to start him walking again.

  “I think I know where the killer is.”

  VIII

  The sheriff stopped in his tracks and roughly turned him around. Les couldn’t read the expression on the man’s face: eyes wild, cheeks red, breathing ragged.

  “Tell me!” Dandridge snapped, grabbing him by his shirt and nearly lifting him off the ground.

  The other man, who looked out of place in a dirty suit, crooked tie, and sweat-stained shirt, pulled the sheriff away from him and shoved them both ahead on the trail. No introduction had been made, nor did Les really care for one. All he wanted right now was to get out of this awful forest.

  Les drew a deep breath as they scrabbled up the slope and told the men everything he had learned. He described the petroglyph, the smaller human renderings, the alignment of the celestial bodies, and the man rising from the pit. Until he actually heard the words coming out of his mouth, he didn’t realize how insane he sounded. He half-expected them to openly mock him, or, based on their sour dispositions, toss him off the nearest cliff. Neither man reacted at first. They merely locked eyes and shared a silent conversation to which he wasn’t privy. After a long moment, the sheriff finally spoke.

  “I want you to run, and I mean run, back to where the cars are parked. Get as far away from here as you possibly can.”

  “So you believe me?” Les asked.

  The men made no reply. They drew their side arms and dashed away from him up the path.

  Les didn’t need to be told twice. He had delivered the warning as he had promised himself he would, and now, whatever happened, he could look at himself in the mirror with a clear conscience.

  The men rounded the bend uphill and vanished into the forest, leaving only the sound of their scuffing footsteps in their wake.

  For the first time in hours, Les breathed a sigh of relief. Granted, there was a part of him that wanted to further examine the medicine wheel, to be there when they found the man who had built it so he could learn its function, but the very last thing he wanted was to have to look into the eyes of a monster in the center of a ring composed of the bodies of murdered children.

  He allowed himself a moment to revel in the sensation of the rising sun’s caress on his face, and then started to run as he’d been instructed. Skidding down the steep path, he shouldered the tree trunks for leverage and eased around boulders until he reached the meadow, where he picked up his pace again. The golden grass wavered at the urging of the wind as he sprinted toward the stream, which was visible only as a dark line through the field. His right foot clipped something hidden by the weeds and he hit the ground shoulder-first. He rolled over and grabbed his ankle, from which pain radiated all the way up his shin, and shoved aside the tall grass to see what had tripped him.

  A metallic flash of the reflected sun against tan fabric. Les recognized the badge on the deputy’s chest before the man’s face, which was smeared with blood. Lifeless blue eyes stared through him and into the heavens from bruised sockets. The nose was broken at the bridge, the lips split over broken teeth. The man’s throat had been slit across the common carotids and trachea with such force that Les could see the hint of the cervical spine through the gaping laceration.

  He gasped and scrambled in reverse, barely able to see over the feathered tips of the grass.

  It was Deputy Henson, the same man who had driven him to the motel only hours earlier. The deputy must have returned here sometime afterward and been intercepted on his way back to the site.

  Les surveyed the meadow around him. There was no sign of movement, save the rolling waves of the amber grass and the shivering branches on the trees.

  He was in the middle of nowhere and it was a long journey back to the cars, for which he didn’t have a single key. The deputy—the armed deputy—hadn’t even had enough warning to draw his pistol. And the body had been invisible in the weeds. He must have walked within inches of it just minutes ago. For all he knew, the man who had killed Henson could by lying in wait mere feet away. Or he could be anywhere for that matter.

  Les eyed the trail that ascended the slope to the south and made a decision. He reached for Henson’s utility belt and removed the gun with trembling hands.

  If there was safety to be found, it would be in numbers. Especially well-armed numbers.

  It was a long way back to the road, and he would be alone, separated from the others the entire way. At least in the opposite direction, there was a swarm of law enforcement officers who were undoubtedly much better trained with their weapons than he was.

  Damn what the sheriff said, he thought, and struck off cautiously to the north with a pistol he wasn’t even certain he would be able to fire, held out in his shaking grasp.

  IX

  Preston focused on the silence. They should have heard something by now. Voices. The clatter of stones. Anything. Dandridge had said they were nearly upon the clearing. So where was everybody? Suddenly, even the crunch of his own tread was too loud, his heavy breathing amplified. There was definitely something wrong.

  An odd pine appeared at the side of the path, twisted, grotesque. Several paces ahead, an aspen had grown in the same corkscrew pattern.

  “We’re here,” Dandridge whispered beside him. He too must have sensed that something was amiss.

  Preston eased to the edge of the forest in a shooter’s stance and surveyed the stone creation through the branches. More of those bizarre trees grew at random intervals. There was no one in the clearing. Nothing stirred, as though even the wind feared to enter the horrible scene spread out before him.

  And then he saw the bodies. Skeletal remains wired in place as though to mock the innocence of the pose. Festering flesh. Bare bones. All in various stages of decomposition. The air was rank, the smell of death all around him, and beneath it, a faint, malodorous, yet almost sweet, scent. Preston recognized it immediately. Something had died here, and recently.

  “Where are your men?” Preston whispered, leaning forward into a clump of scrub oak in hopes of gaining a better vantage.

  Dandridge shook his head, apparently every bit as perplexed.

  “How many officers should be here?”

  “Seven,” Dandridge whispered.

  Preston nodded and pressed deeper into the branches. A wall of cold air struck him. It had to be several degrees cooler, even with the swatches of sunlight that lent the g
round a checkered appearance. He tried not to look at what was left of the children, for he knew one of them was his little girl. His precious Savannah, the light of his life, who had been left at the mercy of the elements as though she had been worth nothing. He seethed, the pain and rage boiling in his bloodstream. It took all of his strength to hold back the scream of futility that welled in his chest. All of these children, all of these lives prematurely extinguished. The horrors their families had been forced to endure, and the sorrow that would be thrust upon them when they learned the fates of the sons and daughters for whom they had prayed and held out hope for so long.

  Even as she was now, he wanted nothing more than to hold his daughter in his arms one last time. Let her know that she had mattered and that he’d never stopped looking for her. That she had been his world and he would have gladly taken her place. That he was sorry he hadn’t been there when she had needed him most.

  But first, he was going to find the monster who had done this, and he was going to inflict a measure of pain beyond the capacity of any human being to bear. Let them lock him away. With nothing left to live for, he no longer cared. He could deal with the consequences as long as he knew the killer would never hurt anyone again.

  He turned to Dandridge and motioned for the sheriff to circle around the east side while he rounded the clearing to the west. Dandridge gave a single nod, and, with the rustle of branches, vanished back into the woods.

  Preston crept through the foliage, one eye on the dense forestation, the other on the medicine wheel to his right. It was just as the sheriff had described it, only seeing it in person was much worse than he had imagined. The black stains of dissolution and the rust-colored crust of dried blood on the bones made them look tainted, as though the killer’s evil had leeched into them even in death. He noted the stones were bereft of the lichen that would have grown on them over time. The dirt was a riot of footprints, and there were small patches between the uncovered remains and the central cairn where freshly-turned earth suggested that something had been recently buried. Was that where they had exhumed the disks, and, if so, had someone reburied them again? There were large sections of scuffed dirt toward the north and central portions of the clearing, possible signs of a struggle, and the telltale shallow trenches of something heavy being dragged away into the woods. He saw splotches and arcs of ebon mud, and there hadn’t been any recent precipitation. There was no longer any question about what had happened to the sheriff’s men, but could one man have overcome seven trained law enforcement professionals or were they dealing with more than one killer?

  He thought about what the professor had said, about the pit in the petroglyph. Was it possible the killer had simply risen from the ground in their midst and caught the officers by surprise? And was he preparing to do so again at this very moment? He pondered the idea that the children had been gathered posthumously to bear witness to some event beyond his comprehension, that twenty-eight—

  Dandridge had said there were only twenty-seven corpses, and that there had been an obvious gap for the twenty-eighth, but he didn’t see a break in the ring. Granted, the far side was hidden by the cluster of trees surrounding the central mound of stones…

  He paused and counted the outer cairns, those both still intact and disassembled. There were definitely twenty-eight, which could mean only one thing.

  They were too late.

  Preston suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He glanced across the medicine wheel to where Dandridge darted through the trees like a specter, and was overcome by pity for what the man was about to experience.

  A gentle breeze renewed the scent of fresh kill, guiding Preston farther to the north, toward where the dragging impressions in the dirt vanished into the forest. He passed the last of the partially-uncovered remains and reached the point where he had to lean closer in order to see the body inside through the gaps between the stones, hints of exposed bone, snarls of desiccated hair and skin.

  His grip on his pistol grew slick, forcing him to readjust it, his finger firmly pressed on the trigger, eager for the opportunity to squeeze.

  The smell intensified and the tracks in the dirt became more defined. Different treads and sizes, but whoever had dragged the bodies had been smart enough to use them to erase his tracks. The faint buzz of flies signaled that he was close.

  Another dozen paces and he saw a heap of corpses in the alcove beneath a broad pine. Bloated flies spun lazily over a tangle of flesh. He quickly counted five faces, all covered with blood from matching cuts across their throats. Clean incisions. One swift stroke and the deed was done, surgical in its precision, deadly in its speed. It wouldn’t have taken more than a matter of seconds for the men to bleed out, and none of them would have had a chance to call for help. These were methodical kills. The officers hadn’t stumbled upon the killer, nor had they interrupted his work. These men had been hunted, their deaths precisely planned and executed. Almost as though they had been exactly where the killer had wanted them to be. Preston shuddered at the thought. Pictures had been sent to the right people to guarantee their presence at this site at exactly the right time, and whoever had orchestrated it had been ready, as though he had done this before.

  There was no time to spare for the dead officers. Two were still unaccounted for, and if there was a chance they were still alive, however unlikely, they needed to be found. Or was it possible that one or both of them were in on the killings? That would explain how the other men had been so easily dispatched.

  Too many questions. Too few answers.

  He heard a strangled moan from the east and knew exactly what it meant.

  Dandridge burst from the forest and ran toward one of the cairns. The ground surrounding it had been disturbed and then wiped clean by a pine branch, which left tiny needle scratches on the topsoil. Preston hurried after him, covering Dandridge along the barrel of his pistol. The sheriff had holstered his weapon to free both hands so he could toss the rocks aside. He sobbed and moaned. Preston’s heart ached for the man, but now was not the time to fall apart. The killer had enacted his plan with such meticulousness thus far that he was undoubtedly counting on the sheriff’s incapacitation.

  “There’s nothing you can do now,” Preston said, jerking on Dandridge’s collar.

  “I need to know.” He elbowed Preston, who absorbed the blow and pulled even harder. “I need to know if Maggie’s in there.”

  “If she is, she’s beyond our help.”

  “What if she’s in there? What if she’s still alive? Buried in there. Alone. Suffocating.”

  Preston knew there was no way anyone would have been able to prevent him from doing what Dandridge did now. He would have turned his weapon on whoever tried to stand in his way, with every intention of using it.

  “Sheriff…” he whispered, and finally released the man’s collar.

  Rocks clattered behind him as he stood sentry, watching for the first hint of motion, hoping to put a round in the murderer’s knee or his shoulder to buy them some quality time alone.

  Dandridge bellowed into the sky. Preston turned around to find the sheriff collapsed on his knees, not in front of the corpse he had expected to find, but before something else entirely. A dirty, stuffed bear lay on the dirt, covered with a mess of long blonde hair. Maggie’s hair. That meant there was still a chance she might be alive if they could find her quickly enough.

  Her abductor had known they would be here and had left these things so there would be no mistaking to whom they belonged. And, it was now apparent, the man who had taken her meant for the chase to continue.

  Preston grabbed Dandridge around the chest and hauled him away from his daughter’s belongings, his tortured cries echoing off into the forest.

  X

  Dandridge barely maintained some semblance of functionality. The moment he had seen Maggie’s bear and all of that hair, the reality of the situation had set in and something ripped inside of him. The anger and indignation he had felt turned to fear, a sen
sation of helplessness so primal his body threatened to simply shut down. Whatever control he had thought he held was illusory. All of his training, his power, and his experience meant nothing. His daughter’s life was in the hands of a twisted, sadistic demon for whom none of the normal rules seemed to apply, and there was nothing Dandridge could do to stop him.

  At least Preston had had the presence of mind to draw his pistol for him and thrust it into his hand, where it now hung limply in his grasp. The agent shoved him toward the center of the clearing, all the while sweeping his sidearm in circles.

  “Snap out of it!” Preston said. “I need you right now! Your daughter needs you!”

  She’s already dead, a voice said from the darkness in his mind. There’s nothing left for you now. You failed the one job that really mattered.

  “No,” Dandridge whispered. No, he hadn’t failed. Not yet. Until he saw Maggie’s body with his own eyes, there was still hope, and he wasn’t about to give up as long as there was even the slightest chance. His grip tightened on his pistol and the fugue began to clear. Rage pumped through his veins. If the man who had taken his child had meant to break him, then he had woefully underestimated his resolve.

  His grinding teeth nipped the inside of his lip and he tasted blood, which only served to fuel his desire to see the monster’s spilled as well.

  He raised his weapon and scoured the tree line for any sign of movement, nerves flat-lined, arms steady.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “We go down,” Preston said as they reached the center cairn. He leaned over the edge and peered down into its depths. “Into the pit.”

  Dandridge scanned the forest one last time, then risked a quick glimpse into the cairn. The dirt on the bottom was sloppy with mud, a deep black stain with a spattered pattern around the edges. The inner rock walls still dripped with blood. He prayed it wasn’t his daughter’s as he scaled the stones and perched on the top. Nearly obscured by the shadows was a circular depression in the dirt, through which a dark seam coursed. The ring was too perfect for it to be natural. There was obviously something underneath.