Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  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.

  Les watched the coffee swirl in the cup until it eventually stilled. The waitress said something, but he was still focused on his coffee. There was something about the way it had swirled…

  "I said, that'll be two eighty-nine."

  He slid a five across the counter. She closed it inside the drawer without offering to make change.

  With a nod in her direction, he carried his cup to the condiment station, loaded it with powdered creamer and sugar, and stirred it with a tiny plastic straw. A miniature whirlpool formed, growing deeper and faster as he stirred. He paused and waited for it to settle, then twirled the straw in the opposite direction.

  "Interesting."

  He snatched the cup from the sticky counter and rushed out the door.

  The parking lot passed in a blur as he hurried back to his room. He set the coffee on the nightstand, opened his laptop, and grabbed his digital camera from his bag. A few moments later, he had downloaded the pictures and perused them one by one. He focused on the trees. All of them spiraled counterclockwise. Every single one of them. This was no aberrant growth pattern. There had to be some kind of external force acting upon them, something centered in a radius of no more than twenty-five yards. But what kind of force could be confined to such a small, isolated region and still produce an effect strong enough to alter the genetic nature of the trees? Neither the wind nor the elements could have caused it. Radiation? The needles on the pines had appeared withered and the ground had been barren, but if that were the case, how large would the deposit of radioactive ore have to be? And surely an amount that significant would kill the trees long before triggering such a bizarre mutation, but what other forces could be locally contained?

  Les thought about the coffee. With the force generated by stirring, he had created a cyclone, a spiraling vortex. He recalled the similar trees at the vortices in Sedona, Arizona. What invisible factor could make a physical object turn in a circular fashion over time? A circle inherently implied something cyclical—

  His brow furrowed.

  He opened the file the magnetometer had fed into his computer. The data had been reconstructed into wedge-shaped grids in hazy shades of gray; however they demonstrated streaky artifacts reminiscent of the refraction of light from the facets of an enormous gemstone. He had been distracted at the time contemplating the incongruities of the medicine wheel, but he clearly remembered Jeremy saying that he didn't think the sensing device was functioning properly. Now that he looked at the physical reconstruction of the upper strata of earth, he knew exactly what was wrong. The buried disk cases were readily apparent, as was the topsoil, which looked as though it was composed of a composite of calcite sand and ordinary dirt. But below that, the signal could reach no deeper, as though it abruptly stopped against a brick wall, which cast streaky lines throughout the entire image. It was a layer of ferromagnetic material that overloaded the signal receptors. By far the densest he had ever encountered at an archaeological site.

  He leaned back and took a sip of his now cold coffee. It tasted like it had been brewed using a sweat sock for a filter.

  The medicine wheel had been built on top of an incredibly large buried metal object.

  But why? And more importantly, what was it?

  VI

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  Dandridge dialed his home number and listened to it ring while he watched the forensics techs work. They were already in the process of uncovering the fourth similarly-posed child's remains. Working counterclockwise around the outer ring of cairns, the bodies grew fresher with each subsequent disinterment. This one appeared to be the body of a young boy. His short, dark hair had receded from the exposed bone of his forehead so that his hairline was now mid-scalp, the folds of skin bunched on the back of his knobby cervical spine. Connective tissue shimmered silver on the bones, like moonlight from a snake's scales. Desiccated knots of muscles and curdling clumps of adipose tissue clung in sections to the bones, which were caramel-brown with crusted blood and dirt. The broken mandible hung askew by one temporomandibular joint, the opposite temporal bone deformed by a depressed fracture that matched the one on the forehead of the girl from the video.

  "Come on," he whispered as the phone continued to ring. He just needed to know that Maggie was safely asleep in her bed. Seeing these children like this, imagining what their parents must have endured, what they would feel when they learned of the ultimate fates of the children they had loved more than life itself, made him
realize that mere inches of wood and sheetrock and quarter-inch panes of glass were a frighteningly inadequate defense against the horrors of the outside world. He needed to believe in the inherent decency of humanity and the fact that he stood between those rare dregs and the rest of the fundamentally good population, but this one night had shown him that true evil thrived even in his small, remote county, and he was woefully unprepared to stand against it. This killer was no man. He was a monster, the living embodiment of everything that was wrong with mankind, a destroyer of innocence.

  He cursed when the answering machine picked up, disconnected the call, and dialed again.

  "You realize you're going to have to call in the Feds," Deputy Miller said.

  Dandridge appraised his deputy for a long moment. Miller looked so young, so out of place. He had seen the man plunge into the heart of brawls between men twice his size and step into the line of fire without showing a hint of fear, but right now, he was a terrified little boy. Dandridge wondered how he must look.

  "Yeah. We don't have much choice in the matter, but do you really think that will change anything?" he asked, and turned away the moment Sharon picked up. "Why did it take so long for you to answer?"

  "It's four in the morning, Keith. Where are—?"

  "Just do me a favor, okay?"

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, then the click of the bedside lamp. She must have recognized the tone of his voice.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I need you to get out of bed, go down the hall, and physically check on Maggie. I just…I just need to know she's okay."

  "What's this all about? Have you been drinking?"

  "I'll tell you about it when I get home. For now, it would make me feel a lot better to know she's sleeping safely in her bed."

  "Keith…"

  He heard the fear in her voice, but now wasn't the time to explain.

  "Please, Sharon," he whispered. "For me."

  She groaned as she rolled out of bed. He heard the squeak of their bedroom door open, then nothing but static.

  He walked past the next two cairns in the progression and stared at the conspicuous gap in the ring. There was a pile of stones at the edge of the forest, a haphazard jumble patiently waiting to be assembled. The blank space frightened him more than any of the entombed remains. It meant that somewhere out there was a child blissfully unaware of the monster that was about to put him or her through the worst kind of hell imaginable, through the most painful of tortures, before he or she ended up here, bound in barbed wire and rotting—

  Sharon screamed into his ear so loudly he had to pull the phone away. It felt like the ground fell out from under his feet. He staggered back toward the others, barely able to breathe, to think. Each step grew faster until he was running, the phone again pressed to his ear. His wife screamed again and started to sob.

  "Maggie," she cried. "She's n-not here. And the w-window's open. Keith. The window's open!"

  "Listen to me, Sharon. I need to hang up so I can call—"

  "Maggie! Where is she, Keith? Where did she go?"

  "Sharon." He struggled to find the air to voice his words. The path tilted from side to side as he sprinted back toward where they had parked their cars. "I have to hang up now so I can call for help. I'll be there as soon as I can."

  "Sheriff," Miller called after him. "Where are you going?"

  "Don't touch the window, Sharon. Don't touch anything at all. If there are fingerprints—"

  "What did you do, Keith? You brought this on us, didn't you? This is your fault. Your fault!" she screamed.

  Dandridge ended the call with a sob. He tripped and fell, but pushed himself back to his feet. Blood dripped from his left palm and from his knees where his slacks had torn.

  The physical pain was nothing compared to what he felt inside. This had to be a nightmare. He saw an image of the terrified child bound to a particleboard workbench, crying, pleading. Saw her eyes widen and heard the crack of bone when the hammer struck. Only her face was different, her hair lighter. In his mind, that child became his daughter, his Maggie, and he was helpless but to watch as she was flayed alive.

  He dialed as he ran, praying to God that someone could get to his house quickly enough to catch up with whoever had stolen his daughter.

  A vision of a man made of shadows stacking stones over a freshly butchered corpse, wired in repose, made him bellow in agony.

  His voice echoed off into the forlorn valley and the darkness that eagerly waited to swallow it whole.

  The phone continued to ring.

  VII

  Lander, Wyoming

  Preston's Cherokee skidded to a halt in front of a light blue ranch-style house. He glanced across the street. A Saturn sedan was parked in front of a white house, just as it had been in the reflection in the photograph. He killed the engine, leapt out the door, and headed straight across the lawn toward the front door. The flowering crabapple tree stood to his right, white with blossoms; the hedgerow lined the driveway to his left. The northernmost window was wide open. He heard sirens in the distance.

  The call had been relayed to his department just under twenty minutes ago and he had made the final leg of the trip at breakneck speed, navigating by his GPS unit, which had struggled to keep up with the directions. There were already two other agents en route, however neither would arrive in under three hours, and time was of the essence. The man still had a sizeable lead on him, but he would have lost time during the abduction and there was no way he would have risked driving as fast as Preston had.

  He could feel it deep down in the very core of his being. Things were about to come to a head.

  A blonde woman in a nightgown, her hair in rollers, threw open the front door and stumbled toward him. She was crying so hard he couldn't understand her words.

  He flashed his badge and introduced himself.

  "When did you first notice she was gone?" he asked, brushing past her into a comfortably furnished living room. A grandfather clock ticked in the far corner against a wall lined with family pictures, which featured the woman, Sharon Dandridge, a square-jawed man who had a former-military look, the same sheriff he had been trying to reach for the last several hours, and the blonde girl he recognized immediately from the snapshot.

  Preston turned right down the hallway toward the bedroom with the open window. The woman trailed behind him.

  "I…I first noticed about…thirty minutes ago," she blubbered. "My husband…he…he…called and told me to get…get out of bed and ch-check on her. He said I needed to do it r-right that second."

  Preston rounded on her and studied her face.

  "Why would he wake you up and make you check on her?" he asked. "Has he ever done that before?"

  The woman only shook her head.

  Something must have alerted the sheriff. Had he received Preston's message about the possible kidnapping and called home to ensure it hadn't been his child? It didn't fit. Surely Dandridge would have returned his call first.

  "Where is your husband now?"

  "He-he's on his way. He's been out on a case all n-night."

  Preston turned to his right and stood in the doorway of the bedroom from the emailed photograph. The peach comforter and covers lay in a rumpled heap at the foot of the bed, the remaining linens fortunately unstained by blood. A bookcase to his right, posters of Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers. There was a desk and a dresser on the wall next to the window. The curtains fluttered inward on a faint breeze.

  "Have you touched anything?" he asked.

  "I…I pulled off the covers, hoping…hoping—"

  "Anything else?"

  "The window sill. I leaned out to see…to see if…" Her voice petered into unintelligible sobs.

  Outside, the sirens grew louder and he heard the squeal of rubber on asphalt.

  "Stay right there. Don't come in. Don't touch anything else."

  He entered the small bedroom, which smelled of the blossoms on the tree outside
the window and something else, vanilla maybe? There were no tracks on the carpet, although a full forensics analysis would find anything invisible to the naked eye, and there was no sign of a struggle. How had the man managed to take the girl from her bed and get her out the window into a waiting car without her fighting against him or screaming loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood? And so far, if this man was a serial child abductor as Preston suspected, he had never been so bold as to break into the house. All of his previous victims had been taken outside of their homes. This was an escalation in his M.O. Why would he change it so suddenly, especially after tipping his hand to Preston with the email? Did that imply an element of diminishing time?

  Alternating shades of red and blue strobed the room through the window. Tires screeched and the sirens died. He heard the crackle of radios, then the clap of footsteps on the sidewalk.

  He glanced back at the doorway, which was now empty. The woman must have headed for the front door to let the officers in. Good. Let them take her statement while he scoured the room. The man who had sent the email had wanted him here first for a reason. There had to be a clue as to why. It couldn't be as simple as the man thumbing his nose at him for being unable to catch him. There was a purpose for drawing him into the chase when he had been no closer to even sniffing the perpetrator's trail than ever before. It was as though he wanted Preston to catch him, but why now? Why after all this time?