Innocents Lost (8 page)

“Oh God,” he whispered. “Please don’t. Please…”

A single light bulb bloomed with a snap and the camera drifted out of focus before rectifying again. The bronze glare illuminated a small room with bare cinder block walls decorated with black arcs and spatters. Cobwebs swayed from the ceiling. A dark silhouette with a long head and stooped shoulders was framed in the center. It leaned away from the camera and his daughter screamed. In one swift motion, the man ducked out of sight, leaving Preston with the fleeting glimpse of sagging ears and a bulbous nose in profile. A green chalkboard blotted out the view. The same combination of numbers and letters from the file name were written on it. And then it was gone.

Preston sobbed out loud.

There. On a workbench built from particleboard. Savannah. Bound to the table by her wrists and ankles with thick, frayed ropes. Naked. Bruised. Her skin covered with filth. Trembling. Whimpering.

Preston looked directly into her wide eyes, saw the fear, the horror, the pain, and something inside of him broke. Tears streamed from his eyes. He felt as though he were being torn apart from the inside out. The last of his hope was yanked from his grasp by cruel talons that ripped it to bloody shreds before his very eyes.

“Daddy,” his daughter cried. “Where’s my daddy? I want to go home. Please. I need to see my mommy. Take me…take me home. Please.”

He wanted to crawl out of his skin. No child should have to endure something like…this. And no parent should be forced to watch.

With a metallic clamor, a cart covered with a display of rusted surgical implements rolled in from the left side of the screen. The shadowed man stepped in front of his baby girl and perused the utensils one at a time, tracing a finger along the contours of each, almost lovingly. When he finally settled upon the one he wanted, he lifted it from the towel-draped tray and turned toward Savannah. The tip of the scalpel glinted and screams erupted from the speakers.

Preston had to turn away. He couldn’t bear to watch, even though he knew he should. This had all been his fault, and he should have been able to take the pain in her stead. But he couldn’t…couldn’t watch the child he loved more than anything he had ever known be made to suffer in a way that no loving God would ever allow.

He rubbed the smooth fabric between his fingers and stared through tear-blurred eyes at the sun rising over the houses across the street while he listened to his daughter call out for him from across time and from beyond the grave, listened to her beg for him to come and save her, to take her home, to make the pain stop. He listened to her scream in agony, beyond the point where she could even form words.

There was a loud
crack
that he felt as much as heard.

And then his daughter, his beautiful Savannah, cried no more.

Over his own sobs, Preston heard sounds like duct tape being ripped away from skin and the panting breathing of the man laboring, hard at work.

He bared his teeth and slammed his elbow into the side window. A spider web of cracks splintered away from the point of impact. He bellowed a mixture of emotions he could no longer control.

His hands curled into fists and his teeth ground with a screech. He was going to hunt down the man who had done this to his daughter, and he was going to destroy him, body and soul.

Nothing else mattered.

It was all he had left to live for now.

III

Les had already tried calling every number he could think of several times. The number on the card Deputy Henson had given him had only reached voicemail, and both the police and sheriff’s department dispatchers had promised to have someone call him back as soon as they could. Unfortunately, neither sounded as though they believed a word he said. Apparently, the majority of the available manpower was already at the site and outside of radio range. In such a small county and even smaller town, they were understaffed and unprepared for the kind of emergency they now faced. Les didn’t know what to do. If he was right, then the killer was already in their midst and he could only speculate as to the significance of the solstice to the man who had staged the frightening burials.

He felt caged. He needed to get out of there, get the blood circulating through his brain again, but at the same time, he didn’t want to stray too far from the phone in case someone finally returned his call. His car was impounded and he couldn’t imagine there were any car rental agencies anywhere nearby, at least none that would be open this early in the morning. What was he going to do anyway, drive back up the mountain to pass along his suspicions? The prospect of returning to the medicine wheel, especially if the killer was already waiting there, scared the living hell out of him. But he couldn’t stand idly by while something terrible happened either.

Why did he feel any sort of responsibility anyway? This wasn’t his problem. He had simply been the unlucky one who had stumbled upon that horrible clearing. Yet someone had wanted him to. Why? It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense for a criminal to call attention to his crimes. Did he want to get caught? No way. That didn’t stand to reason. The man had wanted his work to be discovered by someone who would potentially understand its significance. Was he merely trying to show off, or did Les have a part to play in the endgame?

He should just find the nearest Greyhound station and hop a bus back home. After all, he’d done nothing wrong, and if the police needed him to answer more questions, they knew where to find him. It wasn’t as though he was going to make a break for the border.

But he knew what it boiled down to. Professional curiosity. It was an anthropologist’s Achilles’ heel. He had entered this profession because there were so many questions for which there were no easy answers. There were so many societies that had made their mark on the planet and then just disappeared. What could have caused a primitive culture capable of charting the patterns and orbits of celestial bodies millions of miles away, to vanish into thin air? And currently of greater importance, what was the function of the medicine wheel, an elaborate construct built to foretell a single date in a time before calendars, and why had one been erected now, hundreds of years after its meaning had been lost to the ages?

He again turned his attention to the picture of the petroglyph. Many Native American cultures believed that they were birthed from the heart of the earth and rose to the surface, where their Creator awaited them in a world of his conception. It almost appeared as though the larger of the stick figures was in the process of ascending, being born not onto the same plane as the assembly of smaller figures gathered to bear witness, but into a higher level of existence altogether, possibly a godlike state. Surely the wavy lines implied some sort of movement or maybe even metamorphosis, but when taken in a modern context, its implied meaning fell apart. Someone out there, however, obviously believed in its theoretical function. Was this person following the design like a blueprint in an attempt to undergo some sort of spiritual or physical ascension? Les shook his head. A man would have to be out of his mind to think in such a way, but any man who was capable of killing twenty-eight children in order to recreate a rite depicted in a petroglyph etched more than a thousand years ago had left his right mind long ago.

Les paused. There had been a conspicuous gap in the outer ring of the medicine wheel. Twenty-seven cairns, not twenty-eight. For the man who had set up this whole scenario to finish the wheel, he still needed one more body. Was it possible that at this very moment a child was in mortal danger? Was there a terrified little boy or girl down there in the pit with him right now? Was that child already dead?

He couldn’t wait around any longer. Time was flowing past and he would never be able to forgive himself if his inaction proved to be the death of an innocent child.

Grabbing his laptop and tucking it under his arm, he raced toward the door. He patted his pocket to make sure he had his cell phone and closed the door behind him. The rising sun barely peered over the eastern horizon, a red stain that faded to blue overhead and then finally to black to the west, where the stars dissolved into nothingness. Across the parking lot, several interstate truckers fueled their tanks. More milled around the rigs parked in the rear, preparing once again to hit the road after an uncomfortable night’s rest.

Les ran to the closest trucker, a scrawny man who wore a flannel shirt, dirty Levis, and a hat that sat way too high on his head. The man had just hung the nozzle back on the pump and was about to haul himself up into the red Kenmore cab.

“Hey,” Les called. “I need a lift just up to the end of Country Road Nineteen. Can you help me—?”

“I’m headed south from here and have to be in Denver by three if I hope to have any help on the loading dock. Sorry, man. I wish I could help you out, but time’s money.”

“I’ll pay you fifty bucks.”

The trucker shook his head, smiled not unsympathetically, and climbed up into his cab without another word.

“Damn it,” Les snapped. “A child is in serious danger. I need—”

The slamming door cut him off.

He was just about to run toward the trucker in the next bay when a voice called out from his right.

“Fifty bucks to get you up to CR Nineteen, you say?”

Les spun to see the short order cook who had eyed him from the kitchen in the diner hours ago.

“Yeah. Will you do it?”

“Let me see the cash.”

Les fished out his wallet and removed all of the bills. He sifted through the small stack of tens, fives, and ones.

“I only have forty-eight.”

“That’ll do,” the man said, plucking the money from Les’s hand and leading him back around the side of the building to where an old Ford F-150 pickup waited. The white paint had turned the color of dirt, the wheel wells were rusted into intricate lattices, and the tires were so bald that the belts showed through the rubber.

Les hurried around to the passenger side and climbed in the moment the cook unlocked the door.

“Thanks,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

The cook nodded and gunned the engine, which knocked so badly it felt as though the entire vehicle were being peppered with bullets. Thirty seconds later, they were skidding sideways out of the dirt lot and onto the asphalt.

Les pried his cell phone from the pocket of his pants and tried dialing the same numbers again. Maybe he’d get lucky and actually get to talk to a real live officer. If not, then soon enough he would make them listen, face-to-face.

IV

Dandridge slammed the brakes and skidded into his driveway, tearing through the police tape and nearly running down the officer in the process. He leapt out the door of the Blazer and sprinted toward the front door. Sharon ran from the living room and met him on the front porch, where she collapsed into his arms. She sobbed uncontrollably, but he couldn’t find the words to console her. Not now. The run down the mountainside had helped him focus his panic and helplessness into determination. There was no time to allow his emotions to get in the way. Someone had taken his daughter from inside his house, and if he ever wanted to see her again, he was going to have to find her in a hurry. He knew that the element of time was crucial in cases like this. Even traveling at the speed limit, such a large head start could place his little girl nearly a hundred miles away in any direction; however, for whatever reason, he thought not. He would have checkpoints set up on all of the major highways regardless, but he was certain that whoever abducted Maggie—a sheriff’s daughter for Christ’s sake—was the same man who had erected the tableau of death. Call it deductive reasoning or just gut instinct. The man intended to keep Maggie close, and he was going to do unthinkable things to her if Dandridge didn’t find her right now.

He shed his wife and hurried into the house. Sharon wailed and grabbed for him, but he jerked his arm away. She fell to the ground and cried out for him. The pain in her voice tore him up inside.

“Have you found anything?” he asked as he entered the living room. His walkie-talkie squawked for what seemed like the thousandth time and he silenced it. He spent every day of his life helping every damn person in the county with their inane problems. Right now, he had his own and everything else was just going to have to wait. Drunks could drive off into ditches and couples could scream and beat the heck out of each other for all he cared. He was going to find Maggie if it cost him his job, and he was going to kill the son of a bitch for having the audacity to even touch his child.

“We found a good number of viable prints in the bedroom, but we’ll have to wait for the lab to prepare an analysis,” the officer said. He sat on the couch like he owned the place, still holding his notebook in his hands. Dandridge’s arrival must have interrupted his wife’s statement. “We have to make sure they don’t belong to either you or your wife first.”

“Any other…samples?” Dandridge cringed when he said it. They all knew what he meant by samples. Blood, tissue, fibers…semen.

“No, sir.”

Without another word, Dandridge rushed down the hall and into Maggie’s bedroom. An officer knelt below the window, combing through the carpet with tweezers under the purple glow of a black light. He took in the room at a glance: rumpled bed linens on the floor; nothing broken; window open and intact; no blood or outward signs of a struggle.