“This doesn’t make sense,” Preston said. “Why would anyone take these pictures, let alone mail them to us?”
He parted the blinds again and looked out upon the back yard. Nine girls still giggled and played. Savannah swung high, launched herself from the seat, and landed in a stumble. She barely paused before clambering back into the swing.
“Look at the last one,” Moorehead said.
Preston’s stomach dropped with those somber words. He shuffled past a series of pictures that showed him walking back to where he had parked at the curb after the hour-long interview with the Downeys.
“Jesus.”
His heart rate accelerated and the room started to spin.
In one motion, he removed his Beretta from the recess in his desk drawer and jerked open the curtains again. Little girls still slid and jumped rope, but only one swing was occupied. The one upon which his daughter had been sitting only moments earlier swung lazily to a halt. As did the branches of the juniper shrubs behind the swing set.
“No, no, no!” he shouted.
The phone fell from his hand and clattered to the floor beside the faxed pages, the top image of which featured a snapshot of his house from across the street, centered upon Savannah as she removed a bundle of letters from the mailbox.
He ran down the hall and through the kitchen.
“Phil!” Jessie called after him. “What’s going on?”
He burst through the back door and hit the lawn at a sprint, nearly barreling into one of the girls twirling the rope.
“Savannah!”
The activity around him slowed. Two of the girls stared down at him from the top of the slide, faces etched with fear. He ran to the girl on the swing, a dark-haired, pigtailed slip of a child, and took her by the shoulders.
“Where’s Savannah?”
Startled, the girl could only shake her head.
Preston shoved away.
“Savannah!”
He shouldered through the hedge and hurdled the split-rail fence into the small field of wild grasses and clusters of scrub oak that separated the houses in this area of the subdivision.
“Savannah!”
A crunching sound behind him.
He whirled to see Jessie emerge from the junipers down the sightline of his pistol.
“What’s wrong?” she screamed. “Where’s Savannah?”
She must have read his expression, the panic, the sheer terror, and clapped her hands over her mouth.
Preston turned back to the field, tears streaming down his cheeks, trembling so badly he could barely force his legs to propel him deeper into the empty field toward the rows of fences and the gaps between them where paths led to the neighboring streets.
“Savannah!”
His voice echoed back at him.
He fell to his knees, rocked back, and bellowed up into the sky.
“Savannah!”
ONE
June 20th
Present Day
I
22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming
“How much farther?” Lane Thomas asked. He swiped the sweat from his red face with the back of his hand.
Dr. Lester Grant had grown weary of the question miles ago. These graduate students were supposed to be the future of anthropology, and here they were braying like downtrodden mules.
“We’re nearly there,” Les said, comparing the printout of the digital photograph to the surrounding wilderness.
It was the summer session, so rounding up volunteers had been a chore, even though the opportunity to be published in one of the academic journals should have had them chomping at the bit. Granted, they had left the University of Wyoming in Laramie several hours before the sun had even thought about rising and driven for nearly three hours before they reached the end of the pavement and the rutted dirt road that wended up into the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. Another hour of navigating switchbacks and crossing meadows where the road nearly disappeared entirely, and they reached the foot of the game trail that the hiker who had emailed him the photographs had said would be there. That was nearly two hours ago now. They’d taken half a dozen breaks already, and would be lucky if they’d managed to reach the three mile mark.
“Can we switch off again?” Jeremy Howard asked in a nasal, whiny tone. “Breck’s making it so that I’m bearing all of the weight.”
“Give me a break,” the blonde, Breck Shaw, said. She hefted the handles of the crate they carried between them for emphasis, causing Jeremy to stumble.
“That’s enough,” Les snapped. They were adults, for God’s sake. Sure, the crate containing the university’s magnetometer was quite heavy, but they all had to pay their dues, as he once had himself.
They proceeded in silence marred by the crackle of detritus underfoot.
The path had faded to the point that it was nearly non-existent. At first, it had been choppy with the hoof prints of deer and elk, but after they had crossed over the first ridge and forded a creek, it had grown smooth. Knee-high grasses reclaimed it in the meadows. Only beneath the shelter of the ponderosa pines and the aspens, where the edges of the trail were lined with yellowed needles and dead leaves, was it clearly evident. How had that hiker found this path anyway? They were hundreds of miles from the nearest town with a population large enough to support a WalMart Supercenter, and at an elevation where there was snow on the ground eight months out of the year. And this was so far out of the commonly accepted range of the Plains Indian Tribes, a generic title that encompassed the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota, among others, that it made precious little sense for the site in the photographs to exist in the first place.
Which was what made the discovery so thrilling.
Les didn’t realize how accustomed he’d grown to the constant chatter of starlings and finches until the sounds were gone. Only the wind whistled through the dense forestation, the pine needles swishing as the branches rubbed together. The ground was no longer spotted with big game and rodent scat. Patches of snow clung to the shadows at the bases of the towering pines and beneath the scrub oak, evidence of what he had begun to suspect. The air was indeed growing colder.
An unusual tree to the left of the path caught his attention. The trunk of the pine had grown in a strange corkscrew fashion, almost as though it had been planted by some omnipotent hand in a twisting motion. He fingered the pale green needles, which hung limply from branches that stood at obscene angles from the bizarre trunk.
“Can we take a quick break so I can get my coat out of my backpack?” Breck asked.
Les didn’t reply. He was focused on an aspen tree several paces ahead. It too had an unusual spiral trunk. What could have caused them to grow in such a manner? He was just about to run his palm across its bark, which looked like it would crumble with the slightest touch, when he noticed the large mound of stones at the edge of the clearing ahead.
“We’re here,” he said.
He slipped out of his backpack and removed his digital camera.
“It’s about time,” Lane said. “I was starting to think we might have walked right past…”
Les’s student’s words were blown away by the wind as he walked past the first cairn and began snapping pictures. The clearing was roughly thirty yards in diameter. More corkscrewed trees grew at random intervals. They weren’t packed together as tightly as in the surrounding forest, but just close enough together to partially hide the constructs on the ground from the air. There were more mounds of stones in a circular pattern around the periphery of the clearing, all piled nearly five feet tall. He paused and performed a quick count. There were twenty-seven of them, plus a conspicuous gap where there was room for one more. Short walls of stacked rocks, perhaps a foot tall, led from each cairn to the center of the ring like the spokes of a wagon wheel. The earth between them was lumpy and uneven. Random tufts of buffalo grass grew where the sun managed to reach the dirt, which was otherwise barren, save a scattering of pine needles.
&
nbsp; “Why don’t you guys start setting up the magnetometer,” he called back over his shoulder as he stepped over the shin-high stack of stones that had been laid to form a complete circle just inside the twenty-seven cairns, and approached the heart of the creation.
At the point where the spokes met, more twisted trees surrounded a central cairn, which was wider and taller than the others. As he neared, Les could tell that it wasn’t a solid mound at all, but a ring.
The formation of stones was a Type 6 Medicine Wheel like the one at Bighorn in the northern portion of the state, only on a much grander scale. Medicine wheels had been found throughout the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming all the way north into Alberta, Canada. They predated the modern Indian tribes of the area, which still used them for ceremonial rituals to this day. No one was quite certain who originally built them or for what purpose, only that they were considered sacred sites by the remaining Native American cultures, all of which had various myths to explain their creation. If this was a genuine medicine wheel, then it would be the southernmost discovered, and the most elaborate by far.
The emailed photographs had given him no reason to question its authenticity, however, now that he saw it in person, he was riddled with doubt. The stone formations were too well maintained. Not a single rock was out of place, nor had windblown dirt accumulated against the cairns to support an overgrowth of wild grasses. No lichen covered the stones, which, upon closer inspection, appeared to be granite. And the pictures had been taken in such a manner as to exclude the odd trunks.
Here he was, standing in the middle of what could prove to be the anthropological discovery of a lifetime, and he suddenly wished he’d never found this place. It was an irrational feeling, he knew, but there was just something…wrong with the scene around him.
He reached the center of the clearing and used the coiled trunk of a pine to propel himself up to the top of the ring of stones. The ground inside was recessed, the inner stones staggered in such a way as to create a series of steps. And at the bottom, in the dirt, saved from the wind, was a jumble of scuff marks preserved by time. The aura of coldness seemed to radiate from within it.
“Dr. Grant,” Jeremy called from the tree line. “We need a little help setting up this machine.”
“You’re just trying to force that piece where it doesn’t belong,” Breck said.
“Then you do it, Little Miss Know-It-All.”
Les sighed and climbed back down from what he had unconsciously begun to think of as a well, and headed back to join the group. For whatever reason, he dreaded assembling the magnetometer.
He suddenly feared what they would find.
II
Evergreen, Colorado
Preston sat in his forest-green Jeep Cherokee, staring across the street toward the dark house. He couldn’t bring himself to go in there. Not today. But he couldn’t force himself to leave yet either. Once upon a time, it had been his home, a place filled with love and laughter. Now it was a rotting husk, a shadow of its former self. The white paint had begun to peel where it met the trim, and there were gaps in the roof where shingles had blown away. The hedges in the yard had grown wild and unkempt, the lawn feral.
His life had ended in that house. The world had collapsed in upon itself and left him with nothing but pain.
And it had been all his fault.
His child, the light of his life, had been stolen from him because of his involvement in a case, and he still didn’t know why. Over the last six years, he had begun to piece together a theory. Unfortunately, that’s all it was. A theory. Grasping at straws was what his superiors had called it before his termination. Over the past year, nearly eight hundred thousand children were reported missing. While most were runaways, more than a third of them were abducted by family members or close friends. Many of these children resurfaced over the coming weeks, while still others never did. It was the smallest segment, the children who vanished at the apparent hands of strangers, that was the focus of his attention. At least privately. Professionally, he performed his job better than he ever had. After Savannah’s abduction, he had thrown himself into it with reckless abandon, and at no small personal sacrifice. On a subconscious level, he supposed he hoped that by helping to return the missing children to their frightened parents that the universe might see fit to return his to him. But there was more to it than that. It was a personal quest, an obsession, and it had finally led him to a pattern.
Factoring out all of the kidnappings for ransom, the abductions by estranged parents or family friends, and the crimes of opportunity, where the child was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, left Preston with a much smaller field to investigate. By narrowing his scope further to encompass only missing children from stable, two-parent, at least superficially loving homes, he winnowed the cases in his jurisdiction down to a handful each year. And of those, if he set the age range at Savannah’s at the time of her disappearance, plus-or-minus three years, he was left with four cases annually over the past six and a half years. Not an average of four. Not three one year and five the next. Exactly four. And they were spread out by season. One child each year in the spring, another in the summer, a third in the fall, and a fourth in the winter. And all within two weeks of the four most important dates on the celestial calendar—the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.
The kidnappings were the work of a single individual: The man who had stolen his daughter from him. The same man who had sent the photographs of him at the Downey house, who had been within fifty yards of him at a point in time when if Preston had known, he could have prevented the abduction of his cherished daughter, and the twenty-three children who came after her, with a single bullet.
Why could no one else see it? Why didn’t they believe him?
Because he knew all too well that the parents of missing children would say or do anything if there was a chance of learning the fate of their son or daughter, even if it meant formulating a theory from a set of points that on paper appeared completely random, like forming constellations from the stars in the night sky.
Preston focused again on the house, but still couldn’t bring himself to press the button on the garage door opener and pull the idling Cherokee inside. There was only solitude waiting for him within those walls, and the heartbreaking memories he was forced to endure with every breath he took. The house was a constant reminder of the greatest mistake of his life, but more than that, it was a beacon, the only location on the planet that Savannah had ever called her own. He still held out hope that wherever she was, one of these days she would simply appear from nowhere and return to her home. To him. It was the reason he would never allow himself to sell it. The one wish he allowed himself to pray would come true.
It was all he had.
He slid the gearshift into drive and headed south, pretending he didn’t know exactly where he was going. Ten minutes later he was on the other side of town, parked in front of a Tudor-style two-story, upon which the forest encroached to the point of threatening to swallow it whole. Light shined through the blinds covering the windows. With a deep breath, he climbed out of the car and approached the porch.
The house positively radiated warmth, reminding him of what should have been. He pressed the doorbell and backed away from the door.
Shuffling sounds from the other side of the door, then a muffled voice.
“Just a second.”
The door opened inward. A woman stood in the entryway, cradling a swaddled baby in the crook of her left arm. She brushed a strand of blonde bangs out of her eyes with the back of her right hand, which held a bottle still dripping from recently being heated in boiling water.
“Hi, Jessie,” he said.
She still had the most amazing eyes he’d ever seen.
“Philip,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“He’s beautiful, Jess.” He nodded to the baby. “How old is he by now?”
“Phil…”
; They stood in an awkward silence for several long moments.
“You remember what today is?” Preston finally asked.
“Of course,” she whispered. “Do you honestly think I could ever forget?”
He shook his head and looked across the lawn toward the forest.
“What happened to us, Jess?”
“I’m not getting into this with you again.”
“Does he at least treat you well?”
“Who? Richard?” Anger flashed in her eyes. “He’s emotionally stable, physically available, and isn’t hell-bent on his own systematic destruction. And I don’t cringe when he touches me. What more could a girl want?”
“But does he make you happy?”
She sighed. “Of course, Phil. I wouldn’t have married him if he didn’t.” The baby started to cry, and quickly received the bottle. Jessie shuffled softly from one foot to the other in a practiced motion Preston remembered well. Only it had been with a different child, in a different lifetime entirely. “Why are you really here?”
“I needed to know that you were okay.” He glanced back at her and offered a weak smile before looking away again. It was still impossible to think of her as anything other than the woman he had loved for the better part of his life, since the first time he had laid eyes on her. It hurt deep down to think of her as anything other than his wife. “That’s all.”
He had to turn away so she wouldn’t see the shimmer of tears in his eyes, and used the momentum to spur his feet back toward his car.
“Phil.”
He paused, blinked back the tears, and turned to face her again. Even with the recent addition of the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, she was still the most stunning woman he had ever seen. And the baby seemed to make her glow. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her his name.
Vector Borne Page 39