Innocents Lost (13 page)

“Would you have searched as hard for me if she had been any other child?”

The pistol shook in Preston’s grasp. A part of him no longer cared if the girl on the table lived or died. He wanted to kill this son of a bitch more than anything he had ever wanted in his entire life. It didn’t matter what happened to him now. Everything of importance was gone. He had brought this suffering on his family. He was responsible for his daughter’s painful, lonely death and for chasing away the love of his life. Shooting this monster was the only way he could begin to atone.

He raised his Beretta to the man’s face again.

There was a grunt from somewhere on the ground to his left. He spared a quick glance. Dandridge was crumpled on the floor, hair matted with blood.

“We’re the same, you know,” the old man said. “We both hunt children.”

The man smiled.

Preston bellowed in anguish. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Here’s what you’re going to do if you want this child set free,” the man said, all traces of his former levity gone. “There is a rope on the ground to your left. You’re going to use it to bind the girl’s father’s wrists behind his back. And I mean tight. Then you’re going to remove his handcuffs from his belt and shackle yourself. If you try anything foolish, her blood will be on your hands.”

“And then what? Neither of us will be able to defend her. You kill us, and then you kill her anyway. What’s to stop you?”

“I give you my word that if you do as I say, I’ll set the girl free.”

“Your word means nothing to me. How many children have you killed already?”

“I lost count a long time ago.” This time, the man’s smile was almost wistful. “You have no leverage for negotiation. Either you do exactly what I tell you, or I bleed her right here and now.”

The man slid the scalpel toward Maggie’s chin for emphasis. She writhed and screamed through the dirty sock. Tears rolled from her eyes. The first drop of blood dripped to the floor from the edge of the table.

“You do, and I promise you will suffer like no man has ever suffered before.”

A garbled sound from his left.

Preston refused to break eye contact with the old man, fearing what would happen if he did.

“Please,” Dandridge repeated, the word slurred. “Please…do it.”

“He’ll kill all of us,” Preston snapped.

“My daughter…I don’t care what happens…” He spat out a mouthful of blood. “…happens to me. But Maggie…if she dies, I die with her anyway.”

Preston looked quickly at the sheriff, who pleaded with his eyes. Were their situations reversed, Preston knew he would have wanted the exact same thing. When all that remains is hope, relinquishing it is fatal.

“The rope is on the floor between the two of you.”

Preston couldn’t bear to look at the man any longer. That awful smile made him ill.

“Are you sure?” Preston asked. “If I do this, neither of us will be able to protect her.”

“If there’s a chance…for Maggie, I need…need to take it.”

“He’s going to kill her regardless.”

“What would you do…if it was your daughter?”

Preston closed his eyes for a long second, then slowly lowered his pistol. He didn’t need to see the man to know that the smile had widened. It radiated a coldness he could feel even from across the room. He holstered his Beretta and walked toward Dandridge, detached, as though moving through a dream. The rope lay at his feet, frayed and crisp with dried blood. He picked it up and knelt behind the sheriff, who had rolled onto his belly and positioned his hands behind his waist.

“Handcuff yourself first,” the man said.

“Buy how am I supposed to tie—?”

“Bind them in front of you. You’ll still be able to work the rope into a knot.”

Preston removed the cuffs from the sheriff’s belt and clicked them around his wrists. The finality of the sound brought with it the reality that he was never leaving this mountain.

“I’m sorry,” Dandridge whispered.

“So am I.”

Preston looped the rope around the sheriff’s wrists and tied it tight, hoping he had left just enough wiggle room that Dandridge could shed them in a pinch, but not so much that the man would immediately notice and vent his frustrations on the child.

“All right,” Preston said, turning toward the worktable. “I did what you asked, now let the girl—”

The man was no longer there.

Maggie had turned her head to face him, teary eyes wide, panicked. She shrieked through her gag.

Preston’s stomach dropped.

Maggie wasn’t looking at him.

She was looking behind him.

He heard a whistle of air, then a
crack
.

An explosion of pain from the back of his head, a metallic taste in his sinuses.

He toppled forward toward Dandridge, unable to raise his arms to break his fall.

Blackness claimed him before he landed on the prone sheriff’s back.

VI

Dandridge grunted and strained to scoot out from under Preston’s weight. A pair of dirty, callused feet passed in front of him, hooked yellow nails like talons, a vast network of bulging veins. The cuffs of the man’s pants were ragged and crusted. A blunt wooden mallet dangled from his grasp, dripping blood. It fell from the man’s withered hand as he passed and clattered to the ground inches from Dandridge’s face. There was hair crusted into the congealed blood on the flattened end.

He wormed away and tried to prop himself on his side, but the way he was bound made it nearly impossible.

Pressure on his wrists. His arms were jerked behind him with nearly enough force to dislocate his shoulders. Something slithered beneath his bindings. Another rope was tied around the first. He tugged to no avail. Comprehension dawned and the ground dropped out from beneath him.

He was now secured to the wall.

There was a scraping sound from somewhere out of sight. He craned his neck as far as it would go and caught a glimpse of the man restacking the crates he had toppled in his hurry to reach his daughter. The man rounded them, leaned under the edge of the table, and slid his camcorder back out where he could reach it.

Dandridge’s head throbbed. He was certain he could feel his blood pumping in time with his pulse out of what felt like a crater in his skull. A wave of dizziness nearly made him vomit. Even thinking hurt. He was so groggy that his thoughts had become disconnected, threads unraveling faster than he could grab the ends. His eyes closed of their own volition, but he managed to force them open again.

The man now stood behind the crates. He set the camera on the top crate, snapped out the small viewing screen, and tilted the camcorder so that it faced the table where his daughter shuddered as she cried. A tiny red light bloomed from above the lens and there was a soft whirring noise. He held a small chalkboard in front of the camera.

“No,” Dandridge whimpered. “Please, God. You promised…”

The man made no reply. He merely set down the chalkboard and walked around to the other side of the table toward Maggie.

She sobbed and shook her head from side to side, strained against her bindings.

Dandridge struggled to his knees and threw himself forward, but the ropes held fast. He worked his wrists back and forth, the braid tearing through his skin. Blood trickled into his palms, and still he jerked. His shoulders popped and it felt like he might de-glove the flesh on his hands.

“Don’t do this. Let her go. Do whatever you want to me. Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my daughter.”

The man tilted his head and offered a tight-lipped, placating smile, not without an element of sympathy, and lifted the scalpel from where he had set it down on the blood-crusted particleboard beside Maggie.

“No!” Dandridge shouted. “We did what you wanted! You said you wouldn’t hurt her! You promised to let her go!”

The man sighed and slowly rolled his eyes to meet Dandridge’s.

“I said I’d set her free. I never once said anything about letting her live.”

Dandridge bellowed and hurled himself away from the wall. Over and over. Joints cracked. Bones snapped. Skin tore. Blood flowed freely from his wrists. He screamed and thrashed. Begged. Pleaded. Cursed. Vowed. Right up until the moment the man opened his baby girl’s neck with a flick of his wrist.

A hollow gasp, and the crying ceased.

A whistle of air.

A gurgling sound.

Dandridge collapsed to his knees in tears. From the corner of his eye, he saw a strobe of golden light, and Maggie’s small, naked body fell still on the table. He lolled onto his side and sobbed.

He heard the patter of fluid on the ground, as though someone had left a faucet running.

Bare feet crossed in front of him again and he lunged for them, trying to trip them with his shoulder, to latch onto them with his teeth. He was going to kill this man if he had to rip off his own arms to do it.

The man stooped, grabbed Preston by the shirt collar, and dragged him toward the doorway, trailing a wet smear in his wake.

“I’ll give you a moment to say goodbye,” the man said, and with that, pulled the unconscious agent into the dark tunnel, leaving Dandridge alone with his pain and his sorrow…and the lifeless body of his daughter.

VII

Les resisted the urge to call down the tube, and instead paced around the central cairn, careful not to trip over the short walls that formed the spokes of the wagon wheel design or step in any of the blood. What in the name of God was he doing here anyway? He wanted to run away, yet the thought of being alone in the woods with a killer who was intimately more familiar with them than he was frightened him. But if the man who had done all of this was down there, somewhere underground, then walking away would be the safest thing he could do. However, if there was more than one man involved, his theory fell apart. At least out in the open, he would be able to see anyone approaching with enough advance warning to get a head start. Of course, that also left him uncomfortably exposed.

He simply didn’t know what to do, so he continued to pace and hoped the right choice would present itself.

The sun cast strange and shifting shadows from the twisted trees onto the shivering ground as it neared its zenith. The air around him wavered as though the earth had begun to bake. There had to be some outside force stronger than the sun’s rays acting upon the clearing, but for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what.

He looked heavenward again and noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Nearly hidden by the branches over the stone well was a web of ropes a shade lighter than the bark. They’d been strung between the upper reaches of the trees in a crisscrossing fashion. He had to climb up onto the stones to clearly see them. Several black carabiners hung in the middle.

A metallic clang rose from the hole beneath him.

He gasped and leapt down from the stone ring.

Someone was climbing up the ladder.

It was probably the sheriff and the other man, but he couldn’t afford to take the chance. Everything about the situation felt wrong. Why had there been no voices preceding the sound of footsteps on the rungs?

He stumbled when he hit the ground, righted himself, and sprinted toward the forest. Behind him, the sound faded to nothingness, and was replaced by a humming noise that seemed to originate from both inside of him and all around him at once. It coincided with the vibrations underfoot, as though his body somehow conducted it. Hurdling stones and round-ing the rotting remains of a young boy, he plunged into the underbrush and flattened himself to the dirt. He could barely see into the clearing through a clump of wild grasses and the overhanging branches of scrub oak. After a moment, a head emerged from the well, followed by a pair of stooped shoulders.

Les closed his hand over his mouth and focused on slowing his breathing.

It wasn’t the sheriff or the man in the suit, or any sort of officer for that matter. The man was far older. From this distance, he appeared to be well into his seventies, and yet he moved like a man half his age. He had greasy white hair and a black suit jacket so filthy it could have been peeled off a recently disinterred corpse. There was no physical way this man could be the killer, but if he wasn’t, then who in the world was he and what was he doing here?

Les unconsciously shrunk back into the shrub.

The old man climbed up onto the top of the ring of stones, took a moment to steady himself, and then stood up. He reached into the needled canopy. In his right hand, he held a long rope, similar to those strung through the branches. He struggled with something for nearly a minute, both hands working out of sight, and then jumped to the ground, still holding the rope, which angled up into the trees, and then straight down into the hole. He must have run it through the carabiners.

The ground vibrated with such urgency under Les’s chest that he was certain it affected the electrical impulses in his heart, its very beat. His watch shifted on his wrist, the hasp opening of its own accord.

Slinging the rope over his shoulder, the old man grasped it in both hands and walked away from the central cairn. His face clenched with the exertion. He was hauling something up the tunnel, something heavy. When he reached the outer ring of cairns, no more than fifteen feet diagonally to Les’s right, he kicked aside a stone to expose a metal eye ring staked into the dirt. With obvious difficulty, the old man fed the end of the cord through the hole and then continued to tug. His eyes bulged and he bared his decayed teeth with the exertion. He abruptly turned toward the middle of the clearing.