Innocents Lost (4 page)

Chapter Two

June 21st

I

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge surveyed the site from the edge of the forest. The scene before him was beyond his worst nightmares. In his eleven years in law enforcement, he had been involved in some of the most ghastly cases in the Rocky Mountain region, most notably the Schoolhouse Slaughter in Pine Springs eight years ago. A disgruntled, bipolar teacher named Irving Jepperson had lined up his class of twelve sixth grade students at the front of the room and fired upon them at close range with a shotgun. Four of the children had managed to escape through the window while the custodian and another teacher subdued him. Eight eleven and twelve year-olds had been heaped on the floor at the foot of a chalkboard peppered with buckshot and spattered with blood, bone fragments, and gray matter when he arrived. There had been nothing left of their faces or upper torsos, leaving the parents to identify their children by their blood-soaked clothing and shoes. And somehow, even that carnage paled by comparison to the horror that unfolded before him now, perhaps not in sheer ferocity, but in the palpable evil that emanated from the clearing.

The amount of planning that had been invested into the creation of this tableau was staggering.

A ring of halogen lights encircled the wagon wheel design. They provided precious little illumination, and instead cast long shadows from the rock cairns and walls. More lights would have to be airlifted in with a supply of portable generators, but not until they had thoroughly scoured the ground for evidence. They couldn't afford for the rotors of a chopper to blow away even a single footprint, and the nearest other suitable landing area was a mile and a half to the northeast. For now, the ERT crew was gathering whatever they could find and photographing even the smallest stone from every appreciable angle.

With such an elaborate setup, Dandridge knew they would only discover what the killer wanted them to find. This was no haphazard burial site. An inordinate amount of time and care had gone into designing something meant to be seen.

This promised to be the longest night of his life.

"You're going to want to see this," an evidence tech he recognized as Brad Stewart said from his left, where two large piles of stones had been removed from one of the cairns and stacked to either side of it, framing a maw of shadows.

Dandridge reluctantly approached, accepted the proffered flashlight from Stewart, and shined it into the hollow base of the cairn.

"At a guess," Stewart said, "I'd wager she was killed roughly two years ago, but we'll have to wait for the ME for a more official assessment."

"She?"

"That's our working assumption. She's still too young and skeletally immature to tell definitively."

Dandridge crouched and had to cover the lower portion of his face with his handkerchief to combat the stench.

A handful of flies buzzed lazily at the periphery of the light's reach.

"For the love of God," Deputy Miller said from behind him. There was a crashing sound in the underbrush, then a retching noise as Miller was absolved of his dinner.

Dandridge studied the recess with the flashlight. A fully-articulated skeleton had been posed to face the center of the medicine wheel. Its palms had been drawn together and placed against the left side of its skull, its head canted slightly toward them in a twisted mockery of a peacefully sleeping child. There was a depressed fracture slightly anterior to the coronal suture, from which a spider web of cracks expanded. And based upon the size of the bones and the presence of the epiphyseal growth plate lines, he estimated she couldn't have been more than twelve years old. Rusted lengths of barbed wire had been wound around and through the skeleton to hold the remains in place. Tangles of hair and tattered skin still adorned the barbs. Clumps of blackened flesh clung to the bones at random intervals, while the rest had turned the color of rust and were crusted with flaking scales of dried blood. Frayed tendons had retracted and pulled away from their moorings, where the gristle of muscle attachments reminded him of the nubs at the ends of gnawed drumsticks. The cartilaginous joints were ebon and rotted, yet somehow managed to hold the appendages together. Flies crawled on the dirt, which was slimy and lumpy with the foul dissolution of the tissues that had sloughed from the body as it decomposed.

"All of the teeth are still intact," Dandridge said, sweeping the beam across the small face. "It shouldn't take long to provide a positive ID from dental records."

"If we're right, it might be even easier than that," Stewart said. "We were waiting for you before we watched the disks. There are tins buried halfway between the central and outer cairns, just like the professor said. We're still carefully digging them out of the ground. So far, the samples we've loaded all confirm the presence of a video file in the neighborhood of half a gigabyte."

"How long is that?"

"Depending upon resolution, somewhere between twenty and forty minutes."

"And you haven't watched them yet?"

"We took samples of the blood smears and dusted for prints, but no, we saved that honor just for you."

Dandridge glanced at the remains one final time. He only hoped she hadn't suffered too badly. His gut, however, insisted otherwise.

"We have the disk that corresponds with this cairn loaded and waiting on a laptop," Stewart said. He paused. "Are you ready to do this?"

Dandridge nodded and rose to his feet. The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was watch that infernal disk. He already had a pretty good idea of what it contained.

Stewart nodded toward the nearest overhead light, which had been mounted in the upper reaches of one of those sickly pines. An evidence tech he hadn't worked with before sat on a level portion of the twisted trunk, computer in his lap, a stack of tins in plastic evidence bags to his right. He looked up when Dandridge approached, quickly stood, and handed over the laptop. Dandridge sat on the tech's former perch and the others gathered around to watch. The tech offered one of the bagged tins from the pile, upon which several numbers and letters had been scratched.

"We suspect the top number is the victim's chronological order," the tech said. "The numbers below it are the month and day. No year. And there's still some debate, but I'm pretty sure the letters on the bottom line are abbreviations for vernal and autumnal equinox, and summer and winter solstice."

"How do I make this thing play?" Dandridge asked.

"It's already primed. You just have to double-click the file name."

Ordinarily, this was where the tech would not-so-discreetly mock his inferior technical skills, but tonight, no one envied him the task at hand.

Dandridge did as he was instructed and the media player opened. After a moment, a gray rectangle with a control bar beneath it appeared.

He drew a deep breath to steady his nerves, aligned the cursor with the
PLAY
button, and tapped the mouse.

The video began to roll.

II

Evergreen, Colorado

Preston imported the photograph into his image enhancement program and magnified it to the limits of its resolution, searching for anything that might provide a clue to the child's location. A bookcase next to the bed displayed the spines of young adult novels without any library stickers or other distinguishable markings. The poster beside it was of the Jonas Brothers, another of Hannah Montana was cropped at the edge of the picture by the pink curtains drawn back from the window. Either a night light or a digital clock produced a weak glow from the opposite side. The comforter was a uniform peach color and the bed appeared to be a standard-issue single. With her eyes closed and her bangs obscuring her features, he couldn't ascertain a single identifiable characteristic beyond hair color, and whatever subtle hue existed was attenuated by darkness.

"There has to be something here," he said. Why else would it have been sent to him before the fact? He had already checked the wire, and there had been no abductions within the last twenty-four hours, nor had any of the recent victims matched the pathetic description he had been able to generate: Caucasian female; blonde hair; approximate age of ten to twelve years old; eye color, height, and weight all indeterminate.

He sharpened the contrast and scooted back from the screen. The photograph had been taken from roughly two feet away from the window, and at an angle in order to peer around the partially-drawn drapes. Further manipulation of contrast and resolution allowed him to scrutinize the reflection on the glass from what appeared to be a streetlamp behind the photographer. He could clearly see the reflection of the camera, and the dark silhouette of the man holding it to his face: slumped shoulders, unkempt hair above a long face, ears with sagging lobes. No other details were readily apparent, as though the man existed in a perpetual state of shadow.

Preston could see the cut of the asphalt as a vague reflection, the hint of green from the lawn on the opposite side of the street at the foot of a dark, ranch-style house with a sedan parked in the driveway. It could have been any street in any neighborhood. He studied the periphery of the image. To one side, the reflection of a purple crabapple tree with white blossoms. To the other, a deciduous hedgerow.

"Damn it!" he shouted, knocking over the chair in his hurry to stand.

He had to be missing something.

After pacing the kitchen with his palms pressed against his forehead for several minutes, he righted the chair and sat in front of the monitor once again. He zoomed in as tightly as he could on the reflection of the house across the street, a ghost of an image through which he could see the outline of the small girl's shoulder under the bundle of blankets. There was no address on the house or the mailbox, at least that he could see. He focused on the car parked in the driveway, a newer model Saturn. More magnification distorted the vehicle, but allowed him to zoom in on the rear of the sedan and its license plate. The design was blurry, but he had seen it enough times to know which state had issued it. Two numbers to the left, what looked like a one above a zero, the trademark cowboy on the back of a bucking bronco beside it, and a combination of four numbers and letters to the right, none of which were legible thanks to the unfortunate alignment with the hedge.

A partial plate on a common model of car wouldn't get him far. However, Wyoming wasn't so overpopulated that license plates were assigned at random. The numbers on the left side indicated the county in which the vehicle was registered. A quick search confirmed that the number ten corresponded with Fremont County. Granted, there was no guarantee that the car wasn't parked in front of a house in a different county or state entirely, but it was all he had to go on, and if he left right this very moment, he could be there before sunrise.

Preston folded the laptop closed, tucked it under his arm, and sprinted toward his bedroom. He grabbed his keys and his sidearm from the nightstand and hurried to the garage. The Cherokee's tires screamed on the concrete as the car rocketed backward into the street. He slammed the brakes, punched it into gear, and raced toward the highway.

He was never going to make it in time. The abductor had a lead of several hours and knew exactly where he was going. All Preston had was a sparsely populated county filled with dozens of towns divided by mountainous topography. The largest city and county seat, Lander, seemed like the safest place to start, but what did he propose, cruising the streets one at a time until he found the house he had seen only in reflection? It didn't matter now. The first order of business was to alert the local authorities and see if he could call in a personal favor from someone in his unit at the FBI. He still had a long drive ahead of him, and mobilizing the locals to increase their patrols in any number of towns in a county spread out over nine thousand square miles based on a partial plate lifted from the image of a sleeping child when no crime had yet been committed was going to be a hard sell.

He snapped open his cell phone and began making the calls.

They were never going to find this little girl in time.

Unfortunately, he feared, that was the whole point.

III

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

Sheriff Dandridge realized he was holding his breath and had to force himself to breathe. The video began with a clattering sound and perfect blackness marred by soft whimpering. He heard the scrape of footsteps before a single overhead bulb hanging from a cord bloomed with a snap, casting a weak bronze glare over a small room with cinder block walls. Cobwebs swayed in the upper left corner where they connected the rotting wooden joists above. With a rustling noise, the camera lowered and centered upon a workbench made of particleboard, the surface scarred with cuts and gouges, and coated with a black crust. The floor beneath it was bare, packed earth or stone.

"Do any of you recognize this place?" Dandridge asked.

The others answered with shakes of their heads as though they had all lost their voices at once.

Dandridge returned his attention to the monitor. The whimpering grew louder and metamorphosed into shrill, panicked shrieks. A scuffing sound off screen, and a dark form eclipsed the view. The screams grew louder until they became a squeal of feedback. A man's back resolved in the center, the glare turning him into a silhouette of darkness, shoulders slumped, arms straining against the flailing body he held down on the workbench. After several unendurable minutes, the shadowed man stepped away and the camera focused on a young girl. She was bound to the table by thick, frayed ropes that stretched her arms and legs toward the four corners. Her dark hair was tangled and matted, her naked body smeared with dirt and blood. She bucked and screamed, then fell perfectly still. Her eyes widened and she shook her head violently from side to side, releasing a rush of blood from her nose.