Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  Someone had done this same thing before. The historical account was all around him. Was he looking at the perpetuation of some sadistic experiment that began long before he was even born or a copycat mimicking the twisted wiles of a serial killer surely long since dead and buried?

  And, again, what exactly was that strange reflection of light?

  He was alone in the room and the sands were rapidly draining from the hourglass. He would have ample opportunity to thoroughly study the pictures and answer his questions later. Right now, there was still a little girl in grave danger, and he would be damned if he allowed her face to appear on the wall beside him.

  The reality of the situation struck him like a fist to the gut.

  They had now cleared three of the rooms, and if the killer was down there with them, he had to be hiding in one of the dark, rounded tunnels that connected the chambers, or he was in the last remaining room.

  Where Dandridge was at this very second.

  A moment’s hesitation. He could either return to the central hub and advance through the main channel into the room, or he could take the most direct route and approach it from the rear. Neither option held the slightest appeal, but if the sheriff had walked blindly into an ambush…

  His decision made, Preston hurried into the tunnel that linked the two chambers from the back as fast as caution would allow. Even with his penlight, the darkness was smothering, the vertical posts supporting the earthen roof watchful sentries passing within inches of him. Someone could easily be hiding behind any one of them, pressed against the wall, and he wouldn’t know until he was right on top of them.

  A tingling feeling, like the sensation of an impending lightning strike, made every hair on his body stand on end.

  Light reached into the tunnel from ahead, growing incrementally brighter as the passage curved toward the final remaining room. Were it even possible, the awful stench grew stronger. Through the arched opening, he saw the edge of a wooden worktable, heard a muffled whimper. Not in the voice of an adult, but in that of a child. A rope bound a tiny white wrist to the table.

  Preston reached the end of the tunnel and flattened himself against the stone wall. His heart was beating so hard and fast that it caused his field of view to throb in time with his pulse. He heard scuffing footsteps, the clamor of metal wheels on the floor, and the clatter of surgical implements. A flood of warring emotions threatened to cripple him. He was terrified, but his rage superseded everything else. He wanted to see the man who had robbed him of his life and forced Savannah to suffer. The monster needed to have a face.

  And then the monster needed to die.

  Deep breath. In. Out.

  Pistol steady, finger tight on the trigger.

  He swung into the chamber and targeted the shadowed form leaning over the frightened child on the filthy table. The man pressed the tip of a scalpel gently into the girl’s neck beside her trachea. She pinched her eyes shut and tried not to shake as she cried, for even that slight movement summoned a trickle of blood that rolled across her skin and dripped to the wooden surface.

  “Welcome, Special Agent Preston,” a scratchy, frail voice said. “You’re just in time to watch her die.”

  IV

  Les crouched at the edge of the clearing in a clump of junipers. He’d been watching for movement, listening for any sound, for what felt like an eternity. He had expected to find policemen crawling all over the site, excavating the entombed corpses and combing through the dirt, dusting for fingerprints, making casts of footprints, and snapping pictures from every conceivable angle. The last thing he had expected was to come upon the first twisted pine without having heard a single voice. Surely they were around here somewhere. After all, he couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes behind the sheriff and the man in the suit. So where had they gone?

  His mind raced through the possibilities while he hid, barely able to see the exposed remains in front of him and the central cairn beyond through the emerald branches. The others must have discovered something important elsewhere in the woods. That had to be it. They were all gathered around some critical piece of evidence, or perhaps they had cornered the killer and were snapping cuffs on him at this very moment.

  But he would have heard them. Situated on the top of this knoll with the sheer canyon to the west, the acoustics would have carried their voices across a significant distance.

  His thoughts returned to the petroglyph. The small figures. The alignment of the stars and the sun on this very day. The spirals, the swirling vortices.

  The larger figure of the man in the pit.

  Les knew where the others had gone, but the prospect of following them scared the hell out of him.

  There was no way he could go after them. Not down there. He couldn’t even find the courage to set foot in the clearing. Who could blame him though? He wasn’t a trained law enforcement officer. He wasn’t even sure he would be able to fire the gun he had taken from the deputy’s body if he had to. What was he supposed to do?

  Turning around wasn’t an option. He had already established as much. And there was no way he was going to wander off on his own in this forest where someone like Henson could be so easily overcome. That pretty much left doing exactly what he was doing now: cowering in a cluster of shrubs and waiting—

  His vision wavered. No. It was the clearing itself. The air shimmered like heat rising from a desert highway, making the dirt appear almost fluid.

  The ground beneath him trembled almost imperceptibly. Had it been doing so all this time and he had only just noticed it?

  He craned his neck so he could see the sky. Through the snarled branches of the corkscrew pine, he saw the blazing sun rising into the tranquil blue. He had to shield his eyes against the glare. Ribbons of heat distorted the golden orb, which was now closer to this point on the Earth than at any other time of the year.

  A faintly metallic taste filled his mouth.

  An aspen leaf fell from one of the trees in front of him. It was snared by a momentary updraft before again descending, spinning as though trapped in a cyclone.

  He caught motion from the corner of his eye, but when he turned, he saw only the decomposing remains of a posed child. The wind must have blown the young boy’s straw-like hair. That had to be it. For a heartbeat, he thought he had seen the lifeless form shiver.

  Suddenly, he didn’t feel quite right. His body felt like a struck tuning fork, and every hair on his body rose electrically.

  Something was definitely wrong here.

  Was the dirt between the stacked stones of the medicine wheel a lighter shade of brown than it had been a moment ago?

  He remembered the article he had read about the vortices in Sedona, Arizona. People claimed they experienced a preternatural sensation of calmness and relaxation in their proximity. What he felt now was the complete opposite.

  More movement to his left.

  When he glanced in that direction, he saw just the skeleton of a child, which shifted ever so slightly like a mirage.

  His body tightened, as though every muscle cramped in unison. He needed to stretch, to yawn out the tension in his jaw.

  He prayed this sensation wasn’t a precursor to an acute attack of his MS.

  Joints popping, he stood and stepped out from the underbrush. He was certain of it now. The ground was definitely vibrating. The topsoil appeared to be sifting itself and the detritus swirled on a breeze he couldn’t feel.

  He paused near the boy’s carcass and reached tentatively toward it. His fingertips tingled and a static charge raised the hair on his head. The sensation diminished when he retracted his arm.

  What in the name of God was happening here?

  He picked his way across the clearing, slowly stepping over the rows of stones, which tapped and rattled. Turned earth marked the holes where the DVDs had been reburied. When he reached the central cairn, he climbed the spiraling trunk of a pine until he could lean over the top of the wall and peer into its depths
. The mouth of a chute led downward into darkness, the sunlight behind him casting his shadow ten feet down the wall over a series of iron rungs.

  A faint humming that reminded him of the sound of overhead power wires emanated from below.

  He cupped his hand over his brow and glanced over his shoulder toward the rising sun, which had cleared the upper canopy of ponderosa pines. Soon it would reach its zenith, and, if he was correct, shine directly down the tube.

  Les shivered at the thought.

  What was going to happen when it did?

  V

  Preston sighted down the man’s face, the details exaggerated by the dirty glow from the bulb. His eyes were recessed in shadow; the deep wrinkles in his forehead and cheeks a sharp contrast. Gray stubble. Sagging jowls. Ears with disproportionately large lobes. A tangled mane of greasy white hair. Hunched, bony shoulders. He wore a threadbare black suit that could have been stolen from the casket of a man buried a hundred years ago. It hung loosely on his cadaverous frame. He looked fragile, although he radiated a level of strength that belied his appearance.

  “Drop the scalpel and back away from the girl,” Preston said. It took every ounce of his restraint to keep from shooting the man in his twisted face. The last thing he wanted was for the scalpel to end up impaled in Maggie’s throat.

  The little girl whimpered and closed her eyes as tightly as she could. Preston willed her to find a safe place somewhere in her mind.

  “Did you know that you can use a coat hanger to find a shallow grave?” the man asked, his voice like a rake across concrete. Preston couldn’t see his eyes, but he could feel their stare crawling all over his skin, a swarm of mosquitoes searching for the weakest point from which to draw blood. “One of those metal ones. All you have to do is straighten it out and use it as you would a divining rod.”

  “Get that blade away from her neck—”

  “You see, it’s a little known fact, but as a body decomposes, it emits electromagnetic radiation, a faint signal not dissimilar to radio waves. The wire detects and aligns itself with the frequency so that it vibrates in time with harmonics that only it can hear.” A horrible smile filled with black teeth, sharpened by decay, stretched the man’s face. “And children, well…they’re so full of potential they act like little capacitors.”

  Preston bared his teeth and fought against his rage. At this range, there was no chance he would miss the shot. He could put a bullet between the man’s eyes with the slightest application of pressure on the trigger and paint the chamber in a spray of blood and gray matter before the body even registered its demise. But if the man’s hand even twitched…

  “Why do you think that is? Hmm?”

  “I don’t care why. Now get that scalpel away from her or so help me I’ll—”

  “Be responsible for her death. Now…put down your gun. You aren’t going to shoot me. With a flick of the wrist, I can open her common carotid artery and she’ll bleed to death in a matter of minutes. So do us both a favor and get that out of my face before it starts to make me nervous and my hands shake worse than they already do.”

  Again, the sickly smile of a corpse.

  Preston kept his pistol targeted between those shadowed eyes.

  The man shrugged and pressed deeper with the scalpel. Maggie screamed and bucked from the table. Blood swelled around the tip of the blade and dribbled down her neck, but fortunately there was no arterial spurt.

  The warning received, Preston lowered his barrel to the man’s chest.

  “Why are you doing this?” he whispered.

  “What you really want to know is why I killed your daughter. Isn’t it obvious?” The man appeared genuinely disappointed when Preston didn’t immediately reply. “Because I needed you to find me.”

  “That’s why you sent me the pictures, the email? Because you wanted me to catch you?” Preston’s face flushed with anger. “This is just a game to you? If you wanted me, there was no reason to involve Savannah. She was just a little girl! She never did anything to deserve this! None of them did!”

  “Would you have searched as hard for me if she had been any other child?”

  The pistol shook in Preston’s grasp. A part of him no longer cared if the girl on the table lived or died. He wanted to kill this son of a bitch more than anything he had ever wanted in his entire life. It didn’t matter what happened to him now. Everything of importance was gone. He had brought this suffering on his family. He was responsible for his daughter’s painful, lonely death and for chasing away the love of his life. Shooting this monster was the only way he could begin to atone.

  He raised his Beretta to the man’s face again.

  There was a grunt from somewhere on the ground to his left. He spared a quick glance. Dandridge was crumpled on the floor, hair matted with blood.

  “We’re the same, you know,” the old man said. “We both hunt children.”

  The man smiled.

  Preston bellowed in anguish. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do if you want this child set free,” the man said, all traces of his former levity gone. “There is a rope on the ground to your left. You’re going to use it to bind the girl’s father’s wrists behind his back. And I mean tight. Then you’re going to remove his handcuffs from his belt and shackle yourself. If you try anything foolish, her blood will be on your hands.”

  “And then what? Neither of us will be able to defend her. You kill us, and then you kill her anyway. What’s to stop you?”

  “I give you my word that if you do as I say, I’ll set the girl free.”

  “Your word means nothing to me. How many children have you killed already?”

  “I lost count a long time ago.” This time, the man’s smile was almost wistful. “You have no leverage for negotiation. Either you do exactly what I tell you, or I bleed her right here and now.”

  The man slid the scalpel toward Maggie’s chin for emphasis. She writhed and screamed through the dirty sock. Tears rolled from her eyes. The first drop of blood dripped to the floor from the edge of the table.

  “You do, and I promise you will suffer like no man has ever suffered before.”

  A garbled sound from his left.

  Preston refused to break eye contact with the old man, fearing what would happen if he did.

  “Please,” Dandridge repeated, the word slurred. “Please…do it.”

  “He’ll kill all of us,” Preston snapped.

  “My daughter…I don’t care what happens…” He spat out a mouthful of blood. “…happens to me. But Maggie…if she dies, I die with her anyway.”

  Preston looked quickly at the sheriff, who pleaded with his eyes. Were their situations reversed, Preston knew he would have wanted the exact same thing. When all that remains is hope, relinquishing it is fatal.

  “The rope is on the floor between the two of you.”

  Preston couldn’t bear to look at the man any longer. That awful smile made him ill.

  “Are you sure?” Preston asked. “If I do this, neither of us will be able to protect her.”

  “If there’s a chance…for Maggie, I need…need to take it.”

  “He’s going to kill her regardless.”

  “What would you do…if it was your daughter?”

  Preston closed his eyes for a long second, then slowly lowered his pistol. He didn’t need to see the man to know that the smile had widened. It radiated a coldness he could feel even from across the room. He holstered his Beretta and walked toward Dandridge, detached, as though moving through a dream. The rope lay at his feet, frayed and crisp with dried blood. He picked it up and knelt behind the sheriff, who had rolled onto his belly and positioned his hands behind his waist.

  “Handcuff yourself first,” the man said.

  “Buy how am I supposed to tie—?”

  “Bind them in front of you. You’ll still be able to work the rope into a knot.”

  Preston removed the cuffs from the sheriff’s bel
t and clicked them around his wrists. The finality of the sound brought with it the reality that he was never leaving this mountain.

  “I’m sorry,” Dandridge whispered.

  “So am I.”

  Preston looped the rope around the sheriff’s wrists and tied it tight, hoping he had left just enough wiggle room that Dandridge could shed them in a pinch, but not so much that the man would immediately notice and vent his frustrations on the child.

  “All right,” Preston said, turning toward the worktable. “I did what you asked, now let the girl—”

  The man was no longer there.

  Maggie had turned her head to face him, teary eyes wide, panicked. She shrieked through her gag.

  Preston’s stomach dropped.

  Maggie wasn’t looking at him.

  She was looking behind him.

  He heard a whistle of air, then a crack.

  An explosion of pain from the back of his head, a metallic taste in his sinuses.

  He toppled forward toward Dandridge, unable to raise his arms to break his fall.

  Blackness claimed him before he landed on the prone sheriff’s back.

  VI

  Dandridge grunted and strained to scoot out from under Preston’s weight. A pair of dirty, callused feet passed in front of him, hooked yellow nails like talons, a vast network of bulging veins. The cuffs of the man’s pants were ragged and crusted. A blunt wooden mallet dangled from his grasp, dripping blood. It fell from the man’s withered hand as he passed and clattered to the ground inches from Dandridge’s face. There was hair crusted into the congealed blood on the flattened end.

  He wormed away and tried to prop himself on his side, but the way he was bound made it nearly impossible.

  Pressure on his wrists. His arms were jerked behind him with nearly enough force to dislocate his shoulders. Something slithered beneath his bindings. Another rope was tied around the first. He tugged to no avail. Comprehension dawned and the ground dropped out from beneath him.