Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  Dandridge acknowledged him with a slight nod. Preston walked over to where the sheriff stood and surveyed the scene at his side. He cradled his aching chest. His entire torso had been wrapped with tape under his shirt to ease the pressure on his fractured ribs.

  Together they watched a group of agents in navy and gold FBI windbreakers raise a body bag from the mouth of the tube where the central cairn had once stood.

  “His name was Walter Louis Cochran,” Dandridge said, inclining his head toward the black vinyl bag. “They had just ID’d him when I arrived. Seventy-two years old. Left his wife in 1976. Not a word from him since.” He paused. “Want to hear the kicker?”

  Preston nodded. Where had the old man been hiding for more than three decades, and why had he chosen to resurface like…this?

  “He was a homicide detective in Edmonton. Punched out one day. Never punched in the next. They found the body of his ten year-old stepson two days later.”

  “So how did he end up here?” Preston whispered.

  He walked between the short stone walls toward where the other agents were gathered around the earthen orifice, Dandridge at his heel. A familiar face caught his eye. The Bureau was pulling out all the stops on this one before it became a media circus. Marshall Dolan, the thirty-something Assistant Director of the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, the shared forensics arm of the FBI and the Denver Police Department, glanced in his direction. Marshall had been kind enough to allow him to search the missing persons databases pretty much at will following Savannah’s abduction, and had not only donated hours of his personal time, but had been instrumental in helping Preston formulate the theory that had led him to the pattern he had found in the kidnappings.

  Marshall offered a sympathetic nod and removed his non-latex gloves to shake hands.

  “You can’t imagine how sorry I am that it played out like this,” he said. “I was really hoping it would be different, you know?”

  Preston thanked him, and pulled him off to the side, out of earshot from the other agents. Dandridge hovered nearby, listening attentively, feigning distraction.

  “What did you guys find down there?” Preston asked.

  Marshall looked him squarely in the eyes.

  “You’ve already been through a lot today, and the coming days won’t be much kinder. Are you sure you really want to know?”

  “I have to know, Marshall.”

  “This stays between us.” Marshall glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the other agents. “You got that?”

  “Yeah.”

  Marshall nodded, and, with obvious reluctance, started in little more than a whisper.

  “First of all, there’s a tunnel that branches from the northeast corridor and leads to what passes for a road about a mile away in a shallow valley. We believe that’s how he brought in the victim and was able to sneak up on the officers whose bodies we found in the forest. There’s a rusted, unregistered El Camino parked under a screen of pines.”

  “What about the whole medicine wheel design?”

  “I hesitate to wager a guess just yet, but you know how it was built over those underground tunnels? Turns out that’s an old bomb shelter down there. Built by a bunch of Korean War vets back in the Sixties. We identified them by the dog tags we found on the corpses we pulled out of those barrels. It doesn’t appear as though anyone ever missed them, sadly enough. Anyway, the caves obviously predate the construction. These guys just reinforced them structurally in hopes of withstanding a nuclear assault. They also added the generator to supply the electricity, reinforced the chute with concrete, and installed the iron ladder. Here’s where it gets interesting. They ran the electrical cables through copper conduits in a complete circle around the central chamber, from which smaller cords branched off to supply all of the other rooms. They also ran the electricity up the tube to power the hydraulic seal and provide surface access. Remember what’s at the center? That iron ladder. What happens when you run an electrical current—especially thirty amps at two-hundred forty volts—around an iron core?” He waited for Preston to take the next logical step. Preston only shrugged. “You create an electromagnet. Granted, there weren’t enough coils around the ladder, nor were they in close enough proximity to make an especially powerful one, but that would probably explain what you said you felt. And the humming sound as well.”

  “The old man said something about the bodies of the children giving off electromagnetic radiation as they decomposed.”

  “Well, sure, but with a wavelength so long you’d basically have to be right on top of them to even detect it.”

  “Would the barbed wire conduct it?”

  “Theoretically, but we’re still talking about the corpses producing an infinitesimally small current that could barely generate a measurable magnetic field.” Marshall scoffed, but checked himself when he saw the expression of frustration on Preston’s face. “Look. Say the bodies produced a small electromagnetic field, and the generator below created a much larger one, the only reason two fields of varying strength would be significant is if you’re trying to create some sort of primitive, exceptionally low-energy particle accelerator. Even then, one of the magnetic fields would need to be flipped, or polarized, to accelerate electrons toward a target. And what would be the purpose of that? There’s no source of electrons, no target, and no reason to waste any more time or effort contemplating this. I know you’re trying to come up with some way to justify why this happened, trying to rationalize your daughter’s death. I hate to be so blunt, but I think you’re just going to have to chalk it up to the sick and twisted fantasies of a psychopath. You know as well as I do that there are deranged people out there that are simply monsters without consciences. They do terrible things, which, no matter how you look at them, never make sense.” He rested a hand on Preston’s shoulder and looked him directly in the eyes. “I won’t pretend to know how you must feel, but I’m telling you, as a friend, you’re going to have to deal with this in a way that allows you to move on.”

  Preston nodded and averted his eyes. He understood what Marshall was saying, and appreciated the sentiment, however he knew there was no way he would ever be able to let it go. Not without swallowing a bullet.

  Marshall clapped him on the shoulder and turned to rejoin his team.

  “One more quick question,” Preston called after him.

  Marshall favored him with an impatient smile.

  “The lights I saw, when I was hanging from the trees. They looked like reflections, only they were several feet in the air.”

  “That one I can answer definitively. You ever heard of a glory?”

  Preston shook his head.

  “It’s an optical illusion. A trick of light. The ground here has a high concentration of calcite sand, not to mention the dense crystalline formation directly above the underground structure. You see, calcite has unique optical properties. Basically, a light wave enters a calcite crystal from one side, becomes polarized, and breaks into two different waves. Kind of like a reflection from the windshield of a car. And, voilá…You have yourself a spectral apparition.”

  “You said something earlier about polarization in regard to the magnetic field…”

  “You’re grasping at straws, Preston.” Marshall gave a half-hearted wave and struck off toward the others. “And if there’s one day in the year when you might expect some strange tricks of light, today would be that day.”

  Preston’s brow furrowed.

  “The Summer Solstice,” he whispered and turned to Dandridge, whose expression matched his own.

  II

  June 23rd

  Laramie, Wyoming

  Dandridge stood on the porch of the bungalow two blocks from the main campus. He had driven east to Laramie on a hunch, and he knew better than to ignore his hunches. From where he stood, he could see the University of Wyoming, a sprawling collection of salmon-colored brick buildings connected by underground passages that allowed the students t
o keep from freezing to death in the winter at the hands of the wicked winds. Dandridge pressed the doorbell and waited. The only car in front of the house was his Blazer, and the neighborhood itself seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the students to return for the fall semester. He rang again and listened. No sound of footsteps or the creak of floorboards. He glanced again toward the street, opened the screen door, and tested the front door knob. It turned easily in his hand.

  He wished he could pin down what was bothering him well enough to vocalize it. Maybe tying off a loose end was an oversimplification. Perhaps that was all he would end up doing, but his gut told him otherwise.

  Yesterday, the day following the ordeal at the medicine wheel, had been spent in one interrogation after another. Each of the interviewers had asked the same questions on behalf of a different agency, and he had given the exact same answers each and every time. He had barely been able to return home in time to arrange for his daughter’s burial, which would unfortunately have to wait until after the autopsy by the medical examiner and the official release of her remains from the FBI. The delay worked out well. He didn’t want to hold Maggie’s funeral while his wife was still hospitalized and under psychiatric care. The doctors were confident of her prognosis and expected to release her within the next couple of days, once they figured out the proper dosages of the dozens of pills she would have to take. One of the shrinks had offered to refer him to a colleague so he could talk about how he felt, but Dandridge had politely declined. He knew exactly how he felt. Even though he had shot the old man in the face, something deep down insisted that the case was far from closed.

  After visiting his wife this morning—sitting in a chair at her bedside and watching her lapse in and out of drug-fueled catatonia—he had sprung for a box of overpriced chocolates at the gift shop and wandered down the hall to check on the professor. He had found Grant’s room empty, the linens bunched at the foot of the bed, the wardrobe bare, save for a crumpled hospital gown. The charge nurse had been genuinely surprised when he asked where the professor had gone. Grant hadn’t even been cleared to leave his bed to use the bathroom with assistance, let alone attempt to bear weight. The sutures in his legs were too fresh, the bones nowhere near healed. A quick search of the wing had proven a waste of time. It wasn’t until they widened their search to include the entire facility that a cafeteria worker reported that she had seen a man in a wheelchair rolling himself out the front doors toward a waiting taxi.

  There had been no previous discussion of discharge against medical advice, nor had Grant been anything other than the model patient. He had simply changed into the clothes they had cut off of him in the emergency room, gathered his few belongings, and slipped out without a word.

  Dandridge hadn’t known the man long, but this impetuousness didn’t fit with his established behavior patterns. Thus, when a call placed to the taxi service had revealed a destination of Laramie, Dandridge had volunteered to follow up himself. He was still the sheriff after all.

  A call to the university had confirmed what he suspected. Grant hadn’t been in contact and his office was locked up tight. That meant he had to have gone home, but as Dandridge opened the door and stepped into the sparsely-furnished living room, he knew Grant had already come and gone.

  “Dr. Grant?” he called.

  The empty house swallowed his words.

  A wheelchair lay overturned on the floor beside a pile of clothing, including the pair of jeans that had been cut to mid-thigh to gain access to the compound fractures. He turned right down the main hallway. Droplets of blood spotted the carpet. He passed a bathroom on his left, a study on his right, and entered the master bedroom at the end. Several garments were strewn across the bed. Drawers stood open, their contents hanging over the lips. The closet door was ajar, hangers scattered on the floor, shirts and pants crumpled beneath the rails where they had once hung. There was a floor safe in the corner, door wide open, empty inside. A scrap of paper with the combination was on the floor beside it, folded and worn as though it had been inside a wallet for a long time.

  Where had the professor run off to in such a hurry?

  Dandridge was confident he would find him soon enough.

  The real question was why?

  He glanced at the kitchen on his way back to the living room. The refrigerator door was open, the inner light splayed on the linoleum. Cupboard doors hung wide. A box of cereal rested on its side, raisins and flakes everywhere.

  A cordless phone had been cast aside onto the couch. He picked it up and hit the redial button.

  “’Lo?” a young man’s voice answered.

  “This is Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge. With whom am I speaking?”

  There was a long pause. Dandridge imagined the kid running through recent events to determine if he was in the clear of whatever he had done that he probably shouldn’t have.

  “Eric Wright, sir.”

  “Mr. Wright, can you tell me why someone would have called your house from this number?”

  “You’re calling from Dr. Grant’s house, right? I have it on Caller ID. My roommate’s in several of his classes. Lane Thomas. He left about half an hour ago. Said he needed to do a quick favor for Dr. Grant.”

  “Do you know what that favor was?”

  “Yeah. Sure. He said the professor needed a ride over to the health center on campus since his legs were all busted up or something.”

  “And that’s where your roommate is now?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m his mom or anything. He doesn’t need to run all his plans past me.”

  “Can you give me Mr. Thomas’s cell phone number?”

  Dandridge committed it to memory and hurried back out to his Blazer, already dialing as he peeled away from the curb. Lane answered on the third ring and corroborated what his roommate had told him. He had picked Grant up roughly half an hour prior and dropped him off at the Student Health Center with a duffel bag stuffed so full it looked like Grant anticipated staying for several weeks. Lane said Grant could barely walk and had to bite his lip against the pain with every step. By the time he hung up, Dandridge had pulled into the parking lot behind the clinic.

  He ran through the door and surprised the receptionist, who sat at a desk beside a triage nurse. The nurse was currently occupied with a kid who wore a hat that showcased his Greek letters low across his brow in an effort to hide his obviously broken nose.

  “Did a man named Lester Grant check in with you?” he nearly shouted.

  “Sir. I’m sure you understand that patient privacy is regulated by HIPAA—”

  “Yes or no? Or do I cuff you for obstruction?”

  It was a bluff, but with the way her eyes widened, she didn’t know it. She scanned through the list of registrants with a manicured fingernail, looked back up at him, and shook her head.

  “Damn it,” Dandridge said, rushing back out to his car.

  He leapt into the driver’s seat, grabbed his radio, and, even though he had yet to formulate solid justification as to why, prepared to put out an APB on Grant.

  Something caught his eye and his heart skipped a beat.

  The radio fell from his hand and clattered to the console.

  He slowly climbed out and walked across the parking lot.

  There was a bench with the beaming face of a real estate agent on the street beyond.

  A pole with a bright blue sign stood beside it. On the sign was the letter A. The bus route.

  Dandridge glanced down.

  Several dark droplets of blood dotted the sidewalk. He dabbed one with a fingertip.

  Still damp.

  If there had been cash in the safe in Grant’s closet, they were never going to find him. He could have gotten off at any stop, boarded any transfer, or simply gone straight to the Greyhound station. He could be on a bus to anywhere in the country at this very moment, or he could be holed up in a motel under an alias. All Dandridge could hope was that someone had noticed a ma
n who must have been walking with great difficulty, a pained expression on his face, leaving a trail of blood behind him. But by the time they tracked down someone who remembered seeing him, too much time would have elapsed.

  He returned to his Blazer to go through the motions, hoping to get lucky, all the while wondering what had gotten into the professor’s head to make him run.

  III

  June 27th

  Evergreen, Colorado

  Preston sat at his kitchen table, laptop open before him. He planned to make good use of the time off the Bureau had forced upon him. Two paid weeks to get his life in order, grieve his loss, and return ready to work once more. He had initially resisted. After all, what did he have to do? The only pursuit that had kept him going was now gone.

  And then he had received the call from Sheriff Dandridge, and suddenly he knew there was still much work left to be done.

  Dandridge had just arrived. He paced the kitchen, rubbing his weary eyes. Like Preston, he hadn’t had more than a few uninterrupted hours of sleep in a single stretch during the last week. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or a shared delusion, but both of them were convinced that even though Cochran was dead, the evil was still out there somewhere, and Grant was the key to finding it.

  Preston had yet to take off the suit he had worn to Savannah’s funeral that morning. Despite everything leading up to it, the service had been beautiful. His baby girl had finally been laid to rest in a small white casket on top of a forested knoll overlooking a thin stream lined with aspens. A marble angel knelt above her grave, the pedestal that supported it engraved with the epitaph Let thy child rest in hope and rise in glory. He had purchased the adjacent plot, and smiled at the thought of being reunited with her sometime soon.