Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  But first, there was something he needed to do. For her. For himself. For the children he felt, deep down, would one day need his help.

  “Any news about Grant?” Preston asked.

  “We lost his trail at the Greyhound station in Cheyenne. We found several eyewitnesses who remember seeing him, but none of them saw him board a bus or noted his destination. Since he paid in cash, we don’t even have a credit card trail to follow. There were a dozen different busses departing during the timeframe we pieced together, heading in any number of directions. I’d wager he hopped a bus to Denver since it was the closest destination. From there he could have transferred to another cross-country bus or skipped over to the airport. He could be anywhere in the world by now.”

  Preston nodded. The professor’s sudden flight didn’t sit well with him either. His most vivid memory of the man was the expression on his face as he fell away into the waiting mouth of the tunnel. There had been no fear in that expression. In fact, Preston was almost certain Grant had smiled. He had witnessed the same momentary expression when the professor had seen the old man’s corpse on the ground beside him. Had Grant not bolted without explanation, Preston probably never would have even remembered, but now that he did, those mental images haunted him.

  “And what did you find that was so important that you couldn’t just tell me over the phone? This wasn’t the best time to drive down here, you know. My wife’s been a wreck since Maggie’s funeral yesterday, and the docs have her so doped up that she hasn’t even gotten out of bed since.” He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down beside Preston, and sighed. “Sorry. I don’t think I’m dealing with all of this very well either. There’s a part of me that can’t let it go. Heck. Grant probably just wanted to get away from everything so he could recuperate in peace. The guy potentially saved both of our lives, and here I am, prepared to track him to the ends of the earth based on nothing more than a gut instinct. Maybe I’m having a breakdown like everyone seems to think.”

  “Then it must be contagious,” Preston said. He opened the manila folder beside his laptop, pulled out a stack of printouts, and slapped them down on the table in front of the sheriff.

  “What are these?”

  “Copies of the photographs that were pinned up on the walls in the southern chamber of the bomb shelter.”

  “They look like they were taken a hundred years ago.”

  “More like seventy, actually. The top six photographs were taken between 1939 and 1941.” He moused through a string of menus until he opened a screen that contained rows of thumbnail images. Double-clicking the first one brought up a black and white picture of a row of dead children lined shoulder-to-shoulder on canvas tarps in a progression of decomposition, from the nearly skeletal remains on the left to a young boy on the right who looked like he could have just been sleeping. “This picture was taken on June 25th, 1942. The children were found displayed just like you see them now in Montana, about fifteen miles south of the Canadian border in Glacier National Park. “Now if you look at the victims individually, you’ll see they don’t have any traits in common. Different eye color. Different hair length and color. Totally different age, facial structure, and body types. The only similarity is in the pictures in front of you. Each of those photos was taken at the time of death, and each has that optical illusion Marshall called a glory.”

  “But didn’t he say it was the sun that caused them? These were obviously taken inside in a dark room.”

  “Caused by the flash, they speculate.”

  “Who did they make for the killer?”

  “There was never a collar, but a Flathead County Sheriff’s Deputy named Frank Johnson, who was investigating three of the abductions, including the kidnapping of his own nine year-old daughter, disappeared around the same time they found the bodies. Coincidentally, a drifter washed up on the shore of the Whitefish River two weeks later. They were never able to ID him based on how long he had been in the water and the damage caused by the local wildlife.”

  “And they never did find Johnson?”

  “Actually…” Preston held up a finger to signify he needed a minute, closed out the screen, and opened another. “He did eventually turn up. Or rather, his body did anyway. Thirty-three years later and across the Canadian border. By the side of Highway 40 outside of Edmonton. A single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution-style.”

  “Edmonton?” The sheriff’s eyes flashed with recognition. “Cochran was an officer in Edmonton.”

  “Exactly.” Preston opened the first thumbnail image. “The discovery of Johnson’s body was overshadowed by this.” He gestured to the screen. “They found the children just like this three days prior.”

  The picture showed a small clearing ringed by evergreens. Dead children hung by their necks from the canopy, heads lolled to the side, naked, bare feet pointing at the dirt. Wires connected them through the branches in what at first appeared to be a sadistic mockery of a carousel. A circular trench had been carved into the earth below them, above the top of which a series of corroded car batteries stood, connected by jumper cables. A metal pole had been planted in the center, the rusted, T-shaped post of an old clothesline. The trunks of the trees from which the children dangled had grown in spirals. And on the ground, small, flat stones had been arranged in a medicine wheel design

  Preston waited for Dandridge to comment, but the sheriff only furrowed his brow and delved into the copies of the photographs.

  “There are twelve of them this time,” Dandridge said. “Six. Twelve. Twenty-eight. An obvious escalation.”

  “And again, each of those photos was taken at the time of death.”

  “And all of them have that reflection.”

  “What are the chances of catching it in every single picture?”

  “Unless the killer was somehow creating it, the odds against it have to be astronomical.”

  “Precisely.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Preston paused to formulate his words. He needed Dandridge to reach the same conclusion that he had, and it definitely wasn’t the kind of thing that could be spoon-fed.

  “The connection between these two cases and ours is undeniable. And there’s an element of escalation, but there’s also an evolution of the methodology. The killer is refining his work as he goes. Hung children become posed. Car batteries are supplanted by a gas generator. Thirty-five millimeter film gives way to digital video. And I think that the manner in which the killer presents the scene has become more brazen, almost as though he’s showing off, flaunting his crimes since he knows there’s nothing we can do to stop him. With the murders in Montana seventy years ago, the killer had to have removed the bodies from the scene and laid them out somewhere different. That was the last time he felt any sort of fear of the consequences.”

  “Then the killers are somehow connected. There’s no way one person could have done them all. Cochran was in his seventies. He would have been a toddler when the first set of victims was found. No. We’re dealing with multiple murderers here. They knew each other, or at least knew of each other’s work. They’re trying to improve upon a common theme, to one-up the killer who came before them, or at least put their personal stamp on it.”

  “You’re missing the key factor.”

  “That they were law enforcement officers assigned to the previous case?”

  “Right. Johnson is investigating the abductions in Flathead County. He disappears around the same time the remains of the children are found and an unknown drifter is pulled out of the Whitefish River. He turns up dead more than thirty years later at the same time the police discover the children hung from the trees. And then Cochran, one of the officers involved, vanishes, only to reappear here, another thirty-some years later, the indisputable murderer of twenty-eight children. He now has only half of his face. Do you see the pattern?”

  “By that logic, one of us should have disappeared.”

  “One of us did. Just not ei
ther of us.”

  “Grant?”

  “It fits the pattern.”

  Dandridge scoffed. “You and I both know the professor is incapable of killing anybody.”

  “You didn’t see his expression when he fell into the pit, and then again when he saw Cochran’s body. It was the smile. The same smile I saw on Cochran’s face when he was still alive. The more I think about it, the more I realize that Grant wasn’t supposed to be there. His function was to lead us there, but he should have stayed at the motel. All of the other officers who had been there had their throats slit. It should have just been the two of us.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Remember the petroglyph Grant told us about?” Preston switched to a different screen, which showed the picture taken from the rock in Banff National Park side-by-side with the one on the wall in the underground warren. They were nearly identical. “Both were carved at the same time, roughly a thousand years ago. And they both depict the exact same event. Smaller figures underneath an alignment of stars corresponding to the Summer Solstice. A larger figure in the pit below connected by wavy lines to another suspended above. That was me. Cochran was trying to recreate the scene from the petroglyph, only I don’t think he anticipated Grant would end up hanging from my legs when everything started to happen, making him the closest to the tunnel.”

  “You need to get some sleep. You aren’t making any sense.”

  “Think about it. After the professor fell on Cochran, you were alone with him. You talked to him. You looked him in the eyes before you shot him. You heard what he said, how he said it. Tell me he was the same man that killed your daughter. Tell me his mannerisms were the same. His voice. His expressions. Tell me that when you looked into his eyes you saw the same monster inside.”

  Preston brought up an image of Cochran’s lifeless body sprawled on the ground, a mess of blood surrounding the ruin of his head.

  “Tell me he was the same person.”

  IV

  Dandridge rose from the table and paced the room. In his mind, he relived the last minutes of Cochran’s life for the thousandth time. Grant plummeting down onto the old man. Dragging Cochran out from under the professor and to his knees. The old man whining and crying.

  How did I get here?

  The trembling hands, the expression of fear he had not once seen on the face of the demon that had killed his child. Those eyes. They had appeared to age, to reflect an inner confusion. The way Cochran pawed so pathetically at his fractured clavicle.

  Help me. Please. Please help me…

  “He took a hard blow to the head,” Dandridge said, more to himself than to Preston. “A concussion can alter mannerisms, speech patterns, induce confusion.”

  Preston merely stared at him without speaking a word.

  Dandridge ransacked his memory.

  The mixed expression of surprise and terror on the old man’s face when he shoved the barrel of the pistol into his eye. The way he had shrunken back, tried to look away.

  I don’t know why I’m here.

  The old man had neither begged for his life nor hurled epithets. There had been no gloating as Dandridge would have expected. No bargaining. No struggle. There hadn’t even been acquiescence.

  Only confusion.

  And every reaction suggested that Cochran wasn’t faking it.

  I don’t know why I’m here.

  Dandridge relived the kick of the weapon in his hand, the warmth on his skin. The faintly sulfurous smell of gunpowder. The explosion of blood and cranial matter. The body slumping to the ground at his feet.

  He remembered Marshall’s words from the following day, about the bodies generating a small magnetic field above the ground and the generator producing a much larger one below.

  The only reason two fields of varying strength would be significant is if you’re trying to create some sort of primitive, low-energy particle accelerator. Even then, one of the two magnetic fields would have to be flipped, or polarized, to accelerate electrons toward a target.

  The larger stick figure above the pit on the petroglyph. Preston strung up by his wrists.

  The figure below, the old man who had defiantly killed his daughter before his very eyes. A different man than the one who had cowered on his knees before the bullet removed the majority of his skull.

  There’s no source of electrons, no target…

  But there had been, hadn’t there?

  A murderer who had once been a police officer who had disappeared during the investigation of similar killings.

  The federal agent who would follow him to the ends of the earth to learn his daughter’s fate and avenge her.

  Dandridge recalled what Marshall had said about the strange lights Preston had seen, the very same optical illusions that had been caught on film over the chests of each and every one of the victims at the time of their passing, that had appeared to rise from the ground where the DVDs immortalizing their deaths had been buried, almost as though they had been captured within and released at the moment the sun reached down the chute and the rumbling in the earth reached a crescendo.

  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.

  Visible light fell on the electromagnetic spectrum. Could the polarized light, if the wavelength and intensity were just right, have flipped the orientation of the subtle field generated by the bodies of the children?

  “Break it down to its most simplistic components,” Preston said. “Look at it like a virus. Johnson picks it up while investigating the kidnappings in Montana. He carries it for thirty-some years until it triggers the killings in Edmonton, where the disease is passed to Cochran. After another long period of dormancy, it manifests again in Lander. Now Grant is carrying it, wherever he might be.”

  “And it should have been you instead.”

  Preston nodded.

  “But this isn’t a virus,” Dandridge said. “There’s no germ that can cause someone to abandon his life and spend the next thirty years in hiding before popping up out of nowhere to begin killing. And what would be the point anyway?”

  “The body ages. To survive, there needs to be a new one. A younger one.”

  “Some sort of transfer of souls? Are you listening to yourself?”

  “What do you think those pictures showed, those lights rising from the children’s chests when they died? They were in a dim room. And no video recorder uses a flash.”

  “You think Cochran knew how to extract their souls from their bodies.”

  “I think whoever carved the petroglyphs did.”

  “You realize how crazy that sounds?”

  Preston’s eyes locked onto his. The agent’s only answer was silence.

  Dandridge turned away and resumed his pacing. His head ached and his teeth screeched as he ground them. There was a surreal logic to Preston’s theory that was impossible to ignore, however, the rational part of him insisted that there was no way something so strange could happen, not in the real world where men beat their wives, where mothers dumped newborns in Dumpsters, and where demented people simply killed children without even understanding why themselves.

  “What if I’m right?” Preston whispered.

  Dandridge stood at the sink and stared out over the unkempt back yard and the decaying swing set, where once there must have been laughter and life. He imagined his daughter’s bedroom, the shrine it would become. No one would touch her belongings. Maggie’s stuffed animals would collect dust. Her bed would remain unmade. The clothes on the floor would never be picked up or washed. They would leave her door closed to contain her scent and only open it when they needed to smell her, to feel close to her, to remember her when their memories began to fade.

  “What if the man who killed our little gi
rls is still out there?”

  Dandridge wiped the tears from his eyes and bit his lip. He thought long and hard before turning back to face Preston, a man to whom he would be bound by pain for the rest of his life. A measure of calmness descended upon him, bringing with it a sense of purpose. His eyes sought Preston’s and he finally spoke.

  “Then we need to find him.”

  V

  Laramie, Wyoming

  Light glowed behind the windows of only two of the houses on the block, both of them toward the end of the street, when Preston pulled to the curb behind the sheriff’s Blazer. No silhouettes appeared in either as they passed. No one walked the street. The moon hid behind a bank of clouds promising early morning rain, its light barely staining them gray. Darkness clung to the front of the bungalow, a shadowed face under the cowl of the roof.

  A gentle breeze rustled his hair as he climbed out of the car and quietly eased the door shut behind him. Somewhere in the distance, a barking dog was answered by another. He met the sheriff on the walkway leading to the front porch, and watched the desolate street while Dandridge picked the lock. They entered the living room and closed the door behind them before flicking on their flashlights.

  There had to be something here, something the sheriff hadn’t noticed in his hurry the first time he entered Dr. Grant’s home. Or at least they hoped. They wouldn’t have another opportunity. Once the university realized Grant wasn’t coming back, his belongings would be cleared out to make room for another professor, and they needed to inspect it in exactly the condition Grant had left it.

  The authorities were no longer actively seeking the professor. While Dandridge had been able to instigate an APB initially without evidence of a crime, it had been called off in short measure. Risking one’s health by sneaking out of the hospital AMA didn’t warrant police intervention, and both he and the sheriff knew they had about as much chance of selling their theory to any law enforcement agency as they would selling audio books to the deaf.