Innocents Lost (15 page)

An understanding passed between the agent and him. Preston released his stare with a lone, slow nod.

Dandridge looked back at the old man. He committed the expression of fear on that sagging face to memory.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” the old man whined again.

Dandridge pulled the trigger. The crown of the old man’s skull came away in his grasp with a handful of hair and scalp. Blood splashed across the floor and drained from walls pocked with chunks of bone and spongy gray matter. The body toppled awkwardly backward, legs crumpled beneath it.

A cloud of gunpowder smoke hung in the air.

The gun fell from his hand with a clatter.

Dandridge shambled across the room. He barely glanced at Preston as he shouldered past and started up the ladder on numb arms and legs.

The ground now barely shivered. By the time he reached the top, it was completely still.

He climbed out of the hole under the baking sun, clambered over the fallen rock wall, and crossed the clearing.

In his mind, he saw a beautiful twelve year-old girl kneeling on the ground, hair like spun gold blowing in the breeze. She smiled up at him and he took her in his arms for the last time.

Barbed wire tearing his uniform shirt, gashing his skin, he cradled his daughter’s lifeless body to his chest, and cried softly into her neck.

V

Preston studied the ruined corpse at his feet. It looked so frail, so weak. A wave of repulsion, of unadulterated hatred washed over him. In his final moments, the old man had cried like the children he had slaughtered without remorse. He hadn’t defied his fate with his final breath. There had been no epithets. Only a meek, pathetic old man who preyed on children because they were weaker than he was, because they were helpless against him.

With a bellow of rage, Preston raised his heel and drove it down onto what little remained of the man’s face. Over and over. Bones snapped. Blood dripped from his foot. The dead face became a bruised and bloody pulp. A smoldering paste poured out of the exit wound.

Everything he had worked for, everything he had sacrificed over the last six years to bring him to this place in time…and now it was over. This monster would never hurt another soul again. It was of little solace, however. His daughter was still gone, and she would never be coming back. She had died down here. In the darkness. In pain. His name on her lips. His Savannah, the light of his life, had called the only name that had ever truly mattered to him with her dying breaths.

Daddy…

He closed his eyes and imagined he could sense her presence with him, smell her, hear the precious sound of her voice.

She was free now. As he knew that she would want him to be as well.

Preston turned away from what was left of the old man.

The professor groaned and attempted to sit up.

“Don’t try to move,” Preston said. He walked around the mess, knelt beside Grant, and placed a hand on the professor’s chest to dissuade him from rising. “Just try to relax. We’ll find a way to get you out of here, but you won’t be walking on those legs for a while.”

Grant moaned and rolled his head to the side. He stared at the carnage for a long moment. Preston was sure he saw the ghost of a smile on the professor’s face before Grant again looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.

Preston clapped the professor on the shoulder in silent thanks, and started back up the ladder toward the clearing, where the solstice sun shone down on the shattered remains of his broken heart, and on the daughter to whom he could finally bring peace.

Chapter Six

June 22nd

I

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

By the time the sun set, the clearing was again crawling with law enforcement officers. The FBI had airlifted in portable generators and enough sodium halide domes to light up a football field. Cords duct-taped into bundles the size of Preston’s arm ran everywhere. They snaked through the forest, along the stone spokes of the medicine wheel, and down into the hole, from which a column of light shone up into the night sky. Field agents from every available government agency sifted through the aftermath of the day’s ordeal. Nearly the entire staff of forensics investigators had been flown in from the Bureau office in Denver.

Preston could only stare in awe at the intricately choreographed dance.

All of the stones had been unstacked from the outer cairns and meticulously tagged, photographed, and dusted. The bodies inside had been laid bare and photographed. It turned out the barbed wire that had bound them was a single continuous piece, run between the cairns under the outer ring of stones. They had unraveled it, divided it into sections, and tagged it with the victim number that corresponded to the body it had been wrapped around. The remains had been bagged and now rested off to the side where they awaited thorough evaluation by a team of medical examiners who were prepared to drop their current case load and devote their full attention to the children, whose remains, after being missing for so long, would need to be returned to their families, who would now have to mourn the loss of their sons and daughters.

Preston knew how they would feel, for he had already spent the majority of the afternoon saying goodbye to what little was left of his baby girl. He had always hoped that finding her would bring a measure of closure, to at least allow the wounds to begin to heal, but the hole in his heart remained. He now knew the pain would never pass.

What kind of person would that make him if he allowed it to?

Dandridge had spent the better part of the evening consoling his wife, who now rested comfortably in a pharmaceutically-induced sleep under the watchful eyes of the physicians at Lander Regional Hospital, where Dr. Lester Grant would soon be placed in recovery following the orthopedic surgery that had replaced his tibial shafts with titanium rods. Preston owed the man a debt of gratitude. At some point, he was going to have to swing by the hospital and express his thanks. It was the least he could do for the man who could have left him strung up in the trees for Lord only knew what to happen.

That’s why he was still here.

There were too many unanswered questions. He needed to know what the killer had expected to happen, and he needed to be able to rationalize what he had felt and seen. The glowing lights, the mirror-like reflections without visible sources. The humming sound. The magnetic pull that had affected his keys, his pistol, even his fillings. He needed to know why the killer had told him about the electromagnetic properties of the decomposing children, if that was even true. But most of all, he had to know why. Why had his daughter been stolen from him, and why had she needed to die?

He looked over to where Dandridge stood at the edge of the clearing with a blank expression on his face, staring somewhere in the middle distance. Both of his hands were in splints. Preston hadn’t seen him return. After everything they had been through, the sheriff should have stayed with his wife, where he could console her, and, in turn, allow himself to be consoled. Preston envied him that luxury. Soon enough he would have to tell Jessie, who would close the door on him and seek comfort in the arms of her new husband and continue to live through her new child. His obsession to find Savannah had consumed so much of his being that it was all he knew now. Without the hunt, what was he supposed to do? There was no life left for him to resume.

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 to 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.