Innocents Lost (5 page)

"Please," she sobbed. "Please. No. I'll be good. I promise. I…I won't tell anyone."

Footsteps scuffed to her right and she turned in that direction. Her cheekbone was bruised, and a scabbed laceration ran through the crusted hair above her left ear.

A man's voice gently shushed her.

"I…I can't watch this," Miller said, shrinking away from the group.

Dandridge only wished he could do the same, for they all knew what was about to happen. The evidence was bound in barbed wire across the clearing.

The girl shook her head again and repeated the word "no" over and over. A metal cart rolled into view with a clatter. Rusted surgical implements from a bygone era were spread out evenly on a bloodstained towel.

"Mommy!" she screamed. "I want my mom! Please. Let me go. I need to go home!"

A green blur suddenly filled the screen. The lens focused on a poorly erased chalkboard upon which the same series of numbers and letters that adorned the disk and its case had been scrawled. In the room beyond, the child's pleas turned to screams. The chalkboard jittered before being jerked away from the camera.

A shadow crossed over the supine girl's body and the recorder zoomed in on the frightened child's face and torso. She was so young, her cheeks still chubby, what little skin showed through the filth was smooth and porcelain. The shadow shifted and there was the sound of metal against metal.

The girl screamed and thrashed.

Again, there was a shushing sound, which only served to increase her exertions.

A pointed shadow traced the slope of her neck down to her jugular notch before the tip of a scalpel appeared, followed by a hand, the wrinkles in the knuckles lined with dried blood. The man pressed the blade into the skin, which dimpled and then parted with a swell of dark blood.

The child's cries were so filled with terror and pain that Dandridge found himself praying for them to end.

She trembled as the scalpel drew a line down the center of her narrow chest, then bucked so hard she nearly buried the blade in her upper abdomen.

The man made a growling sound and pulled the scalpel away. There was a crash as he slammed it onto the tray of utensils.

Ribbons of blood trickled to either side of the incision when she arched against her restraints in an effort to seize the momentary opportunity. She screamed for her mother and father, for help, for the pain to stop, until a large hand closed over her mouth and nose, and held her face still. Her muffled screams faded to whimpers and her eyes opened impossibly wide, the irises shivering.

A hammer struck her hairline from the top of the screen with a sickening crack, then disappeared again, trailing a tangle of hair. Blood pooled in the depression in her frontal bone where the skin had torn. She fell abruptly silent, her body motionless.

"Oh, God," Dandridge whispered. The laptop suddenly felt as though it was on fire, burning his legs, and he wanted nothing more than to hurl it to the ground. He had never seen anything so horrible in his life.

The girl's eyes glazed over and her lids slowly began to close.

After a moment's hesitation, the man loosened his grip and removed his hand from her face. Her lips had split under the pressure, smearing her entire mouth with blood.

"I don't think…I can't watch this," one of the officers said from behind Dandridge, then scampered away to vomit in the forest.

The child's chest rose and fell, subtly, slowly.

Dandridge had to look away, but only saw the girl's remains kneeling at the point where the cairn had been removed from above her.

He glanced back down at the monitor in time to see the hand return with the scalpel, which slid back into the incision past the depth of the blade.

Her only response was a sudden gasp and a flutter of her eyelids.

Dandridge forced himself to watch through tear-blurred eyes as warmth drained down his cheeks. He needed to know this monster, needed to understand him. For when the time arrived, and he swore it would, he was going to find this man, and he was going to kill him.

On the screen, the little girl was peeled apart, one strap of flesh, one muscle, one silvery tendon at a time in a careful and practiced display of vivisection skills until there wasn't enough blood left in her body to pump through her heart and the deep skeletal muscles shimmered wetly.

By the time the video ended, Dandridge sat alone, his body numb, his stomach roiling.

He surveyed the clearing, and through the assortment of twisted pines and aspens, counted twenty-six other lives similarly ended. And he was going to have to endure the videographies of their final moments.

Then he was going to hunt this man down, and he was going to rid the world of a scourge the likes of which it had never known before.

But first he needed to track down the satellite phone they carried for use in the remote areas of the county. It was imperative that he call his wife and physically make her check on their daughter. He couldn't imagine what would become of him if his beautiful child ended up on a film like this one.

No child should be subjected to such a violation of the body and soul.

IV

24 Miles North-northwest of Rawlins, Wyoming

Preston spiked his cell phone against the dashboard in frustration. He immediately regretted the decision and fished it from the floorboard to make sure it still worked. Anger seethed inside of him, but unfortunately, the scenario had played out just as he had expected. Without evidence of a crime, his department had been unable to act. He had heard the disbelief in his superior's voice after waking him from a sound sleep. Randall Washington was the new Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge. There was no history between them as there had been with M. Stephen Moorehead before his promotion, who might at least have humored him based on a photograph that he appeared to have sent himself. Washington, on the other hand, made no secret of his suspicions that Preston flirted with a breakdown, and that the pattern he discovered was circumstantial at best. His superior was disinclined to buy into the notion of a serial abductor in this day and age who planned his crimes to coincide with the pagan celestial calendar. While Preston didn't necessarily blame the Bureau for its doubts, tonight he needed its help for the sake of a child, and it had forsaken him.

The Fremont County Sheriff's Department had been somewhat more helpful. A bored-sounding dispatcher, who had slurped her coffee even as she spoke, had promised to pass along his message directly to the sheriff. Regrettably, he was out in the field at that very moment. As were all of his deputies. At this time of night, Preston imagined them closing down some roadhouse or other around a pitcher of beer, but he still held out hope that the sheriff would return his call in time to get his cars on the street.

So for now, he was on his own.

At least until the child was reported missing.

He goosed the accelerator and watched the needle top one hundred. The terrain flashed past in the darkness, rugged rock formations and vast expanses of fields interrupted by long snow-fences, only sporadically highlighted by streetlamps and limned by the occasional light of the moon when it managed to permeate the gray ceiling of clouds. He was already halfway across the state, heading northwest on Highway 287. Barring anything unforeseen, he should arrive in Lander about an hour before sunrise.

Only his intuition told him it would be too late.

V

Lander, Wyoming

Les paced the small motel room. His arm still ached from the shot of Betaseron. At least he had kept his medication in his backpack instead of his car as he'd originally intended. The last thing in the world he needed right now was for the stress to trigger an acute attack of his multiple sclerosis. Lord knew he had enough to deal with right now without winding up in the hospital.

The television droned beside him, but he had no idea what was on. He merely needed the sound of voices for company, even if he couldn't focus on the words. His students had been given a clean bill of health and a little Ativan for their anxiety, but he still bore the guilt of involving them with a heavy heart. There was no way he could have known the kind of hell they would stumble upon, but he had brought along kids who had trusted him, and whether intentionally or not, he had failed them, possibly even ruined them for their chosen field. They had initially been booked in the rooms next door to his, but Lane had managed to rouse his girlfriend from bed, and she had driven across the state to pick them up and return them to Laramie. Les was grateful they had been able to get home tonight so they could resume some semblance of normalcy in the morning.

After hours of tossing and turning because his brain refused to shut down, he had finally given up trying and decided to let his thoughts run and see where they would take him. The fact remained that the medicine wheels had originally been built for a purpose, and while the years may have scoured that purpose from the collective memory of the descendents of the ancient Native Americans who had designed them, there was obviously someone out there who at least thought he knew their function. Why else go to such great lengths to mimic a relatively obscure anthropological structure when whoever had built it could just as easily have buried the bodies in unmarked graves and been done with it? It was too convenient to think that the entire setup had been assembled simply for show. The meticulous nature of the construction and the maintenance of the site were proof enough for him, so what did its creator hope to achieve? And more importantly, why had it been necessary to involve an anthropologist, specifically him? He couldn't help but think that it was to answer the question he now pondered: what did the medicine wheel do?

Unfortunately, that answer was lost somewhere in time.

What
did
he know? The Native Americans who had first built them certainly hadn't called them by that name, an archaic term that carried negative, and arguably racist, connotations. There was a spiritual element to them, possibly in the harmony of man and nature motif. They didn't serve as protection from the elements, nor had they been designed with defensible perimeters. On a superficial level, they served as a celestial calendar, primarily to mark a single day in the year with remarkable precision, on sacred land saved from snowfall only during the summer months. So what made that one day, the summer solstice, so significant? What transpired on that single day, be it spiritual or scientific, that made it so important? It was the longest day of the year, and the point at which the northern hemisphere was closest to the sun. Did that imply there were different gravitational forces at work, similar to the moon's influence on the tides? And why the corkscrew trees? What had caused them to grow in such a manner, and only in the direct vicinity of the medicine wheel? They had obviously been there before the stone creation had been erected. Were they the reason this particular location had been chosen in the first place?

His thoughts strayed to the mystical concept of energy vortices. He scoffed, but here he was contemplating gravitational pull. Could there be a relationship between the two? While the notion of a physical energy that could neither be qualified nor quantified made him roll his eyes, he couldn't argue the fact that some force other than genetics had acted upon the trees to cause the unnatural growth.

He was running in circles in his mind and accomplishing nothing. Maybe a cup of coffee would serve to sharpen his mental acuity. It couldn't hurt anyway, and the fresh air would do him some good.

There was a truck stop on the south side of the parking lot outside the motel. This whole section of town could have been dropped into the modern world from the Seventies. The motel was a blocky, two-story affair with external concrete walkways and a pool that had been filled to support a garden of dead junipers and skeletal rosebushes that stood guard over a pole that must have once flown a flag. He crossed the barren parking lot to the sprawling fuel station, a square shack from which the smell of fried eggs and burnt toast originated. A series of brightly-lit bays dominated the front of the building, housing enough pumps to fuel an entire fleet of semis, while the dirt lot behind it was packed with rows of truckers presumably sleeping in the cabs of their tractor-trailers.

A bell jangled overhead when he walked through the front door. To his left, a hairy bear of a man eyed him through the opening to the kitchen, behind a counter lined with circular stools. A plump waitress wearing a blonde wig that appeared a size too large leaned over a magazine next to the cash register. She didn't even raise her eyes. An ill-stocked convenience store consumed the other half of the building. The lights were off and no one manned the desk. He could see the empty pots on the burners at the back beside the fountain drink machines at a glance, and had to interrupt the waitress.

"Could I get a coffee to go?" he asked.

The woman's stare slowly rose from the page. She turned away from him without a word.

Les offered a smile to the short order cook, who bowed his head and returned to the griddle where he scraped at the black crust on the stainless steel.

The waitress set a paper cup in front of him and poured into it from a brown plastic carafe.

"Creamer and sugar's on the stand behind you," she said, pecking at the keys on the register.