Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  They needed to discover a clue that would lead them to the professor’s whereabouts right now or, if the pattern held true, he might not reappear until they were old men themselves. Fortunately, Grant had been in his late forties, and if Preston was correct in his assertion that the whole point of the murders was to secure a younger, more functional body, then they probably wouldn’t have to wait the full thirty-some years. Of course, Preston would undoubtedly lose his patience and his mind well before then anyway, even if he managed to live that long with a broken heart and only his rage and obsession pumping through his veins.

  The poorly ventilated room had absorbed the meaty scent of the blood crusted in the clothes on the floor, the pockets of which yielded nothing. They tossed the couch cushions and every drawer, searched the mantle, and shook out every book on the shelves. Neither knew exactly what they were looking for. They prayed they would recognize it when they found it. Maybe they could ascertain the climate the professor expected to encounter based on the clothes they could assume he packed from those he left behind. Perhaps there was a record of how much money had been in the floor safe, or if there had even been any money at all. Bank statements that listed withdrawals could prove useful. The deeds to out-of-state property. A hurriedly scribbled note with an airline flight or bus number, or the residua on the page below the one upon which it had originally been written.

  Anything.

  Anything at all.

  They both knew they were counting on a miracle, but what else did they have to go on? Without a warrant, they couldn’t obtain the surveillance camera footage from the bus depots or airports, which weren’t about to let them kick back and view the recordings at their leisure, and their unofficial interviews of the employees had yielded only a handful who might have seen a man fitting Grant’s description, but none of them could recall where he might have been heading. Several of their statements had even proven contradictory. Grant couldn’t have been in two places at once, could he?

  The living room gave up no secrets and the entryway closet revealed only a single bare hanger, which they concluded had once held a winter jacket since those that remained were all lightweight.

  Dandridge tore apart the master bedroom while Preston worked on the study. No files had been saved onto the hard drive of the desktop computer since before Grant found the medicine wheel and none of the emails in the inbox had been opened after the one that contained the pictures that had sent Grant into the mountains above Lander. When Preston read it, he heard the old man’s voice in his mind and imagined the words spoken through that awful smile. He wondered if even now it was affixed to the professor’s face, if he was having a good laugh at their expense, which only served to amplify his frustration.

  There was nothing here. Searching the house was a fool’s errand, but it was all they had. He understood the danger of hope all too well, that it was a scalpel that could be used to keep a man alive or be driven straight through his heart.

  The desk drawers produced nothing of consequence, the lone closet even less. There were academic texts and various monographs with a few hardcover novels between, stacks of journals and yellowed newspapers, and a shoebox full of photographs of Grant with a woman who must have once meant something to him. Preston pocketed a stack in hopes of tracking down the reasonably attractive brunette, or at least so that he could have some pictures of the professor to show to potential witnesses. An accordion file contained all of Grant’s bills and statements. His 403B suggested Grant would be working long past retirement age, and he never appeared to carry a balance of more than a couple grand in his savings account at any given time. A quick survey led Preston to believe that the professor could have been socking away a decent amount of cash. With the rate the banks and the stock market were failing, it made sense. Better to have no return on his money than to lose it.

  He heard footsteps in the hallway and set the file aside. When they were done here, he would take the file folder and the computer tower with him. He didn’t figure the professor would return and report them missing.

  Dandridge met him outside the door and confirmed his findings with a shake of his head. The expression of futility on his face matched how Preston felt. The sheriff inclined his head back in the direction from which they had come to signify his intention to search the kitchen. Preston nodded and slipped across the hall into the bathroom. He figured it would take all of about thirty seconds to clear it.

  There was nothing but a proliferation of mildew in the shower, nothing hidden in the tank of the toilet, the bowl of which smelled badly of ammonia. Apparently Grant had been blessed with a few spare moments to tend to his bladder before he split.

  Preston opened the medicine cabinet and wasn’t surprised in the least to find the toothbrush and toothpaste still there. Cochran’s hideous smile was proof enough that oral hygiene wasn’t a priority. Grant had left behind his deodorant and cologne, his razor and shaving cream, and a fairly broad spectrum of lotions. At least wherever he was now, Grant’s dry skin had to be giving him some serious grief.

  Bottles of over-the-counter and prescription drugs lined the top shelf. Advil, Tylenol, Motrin. The man must have been prone to headaches. The first bottle was labeled methylprednisone, and looked as though it contained a small vial of fluid. There were several more in labeled boxes with trade names Preston didn’t recognize: Avonex, Betaseron, and Copaxone.

  Preston held them in his palm one at a time. They each contained several single-use syringes. That was an awful lot of prescription medication for one man. He didn’t think he had much more than expired antibiotics in his cabinet. He studied the labels carefully. Intramuscular injection, once a week. Subcutaneous, daily and every other day. All of them still had several available refills.

  He closed his eyes and thought for a long moment, then gathered the prescriptions, headed back across the hall, and sat in front of the computer. Opening a search engine, he typed the drug names in one at a time and quickly scanned the first matching articles. Methylprednisone was a corticosteroid that needed to be administered by a health care professional. It was used to alleviate pain in joints. Maybe that explained the OTCs, as well. The Avonex and Betaseron were beta interferons. And all of them combined pointed to the treatment of one specific malady.

  Preston called for Dandridge and typed the name of the disease into the search engine. He knew of it, but very little about the specifics. It was an autoimmune disease that attacked the central nervous system, resulting in demyelination, which meant that the axons in the neural pathways could no longer effectively pass signals. It affected the ability of the nerve cells in the brain to communicate with the spinal cord and could possibly cause permanent neurological deficit and loss of conscious muscle control. There was no cure, only treatments designed to prevent acute attacks and ease the suffering after them. But without pharmaceutical intervention, attacks would leave the subject crippled…or worse.

  They had finally caught a break.

  Dandridge entered the study and leaned over his shoulder.

  “Multiple sclerosis?” the sheriff asked, reading the header. “I don’t get it.”

  Preston held up the pile of prescriptions.

  Slowly, a smile spread across Dandridge’s face.

  “Think he knows?” the sheriff asked.

  “If he doesn’t yet, he will soon.”

  “And if he sees a doctor and tries to get those prescriptions filled…”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then his timetable will be drastically accelerated. Either way, he picked a lemon and he’s going to want to get himself into a new vehicle as soon as he realizes it.”

  “He’s going to start taking children again.”

  Their eyes met and they shared the truth neither could bear to vocalize.

  More children were going to die.

  “But that will lead us to him,” Preston whispered. “From there, we just need to make sure he�
��s never able to do it again.”

  “And this time, we’ll leave no doubt.”

  Epilogue

  June 21st

  Three Years Later

  I

  27 Miles West of Helena, Montana

  Preston crouched at the base of a pine trunk in the heart of a cluster of scrub oak, stroking the soft flank of his German shepherd, Wylie, to keep him from whining. He fished a milk bone out of his pocket every few minutes to calm the excited dog. The sun beat down on the forest, drying the detritus to the point that a single errant match could blacken half the state. He couldn’t quite see the bottom of the ravine through the dense grove of firs, but he had a good idea of what awaited them down there. What looked like ribbons of heat rising from the ground made the forest shimmer. His free hand caressed the Beretta in his shoulder holster. He prayed that once Dandridge was in position and they were ready to roll, he would have the opportunity to use it.

  “Good boy,” he whispered.

  The whipping wind stole the words from his lips.

  Any moment now, a crackle of static on his walkie-talkie would signal Dandridge’s readiness. The last nine years of Preston’s life had been building up to this moment. He couldn’t wait for it to be over.

  Sixteen months ago, on February 18th, an indigent had been treated at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, Montana for an acute attack of what the triage nurse in the emergency room termed “MS-like symptoms.” He had simply wandered in off the street in the middle of the night and split before the tab could be settled. There had been thirty-six similar cases over the preceding three years across the Western United States and Canada. Preston and Dandridge had investigated each and every one of them. Unofficially, anyway. But it wasn’t until the former sheriff showed the charge nurse in the ER at St. Peter’s one of the pictures of Grant that they knew they had finally found him. The vagrant had registered under a false name and the address he had listed proved non-existent. There had been little of any real value to go on, but at least they had pinned him down geographically.

  Confirmation came thirty days later on March 21st when Kyle and Liza Covington reported the abduction of their ten year-old son Craig to the Boulder Police. Preston had followed the investigation through his channels at the FBI and built a case file from afar. Three months later, on June 19th, he added Rachael Sutter, who was taken in broad daylight from the park across the street from her house in Townsend. By the time nine-year-old Victoria Timonson went missing on her way home from school on September 20th, Preston had transferred to the small Helena Field Office. When Jennifer Metcalf was abducted four days before Christmas from her backyard a mere fifteen miles away, he was the first on the scene, barely beating Officer Keith Dandridge of the Helena Police Department.

  The sheriff of a county in which twenty-eight children were found heinously murdered generally didn’t fare well at re-election time, but that hadn’t mattered to Dandridge, who hadn’t had the desire to run again anyway. Not after returning home at the end of his shift one day to find his dead wife on their bed, still clutching the bottle of Sominex she had downed to usher herself into a permanent sleep. Like Preston, Dandridge said he kept the house to remind him of what should have been, even if subconsciously he knew the real reason was that one day he would return there with the intention of rejoining his family in the ever-after. He was overqualified for the job of a beat cop, but the force had been happy to welcome him aboard, and he had been even happier to gain access to their considerable resources, most notably the surveillance equipment with which he became intimately acquainted during whatever free time he could spare. The rest was spent surveying the 976,000 acres of Helena National Forest, which sat at the epicenter of the abductions, with Preston and the German shepherd he had purchased and trained to track specific scents. Among them, the smell of the tattered bed linens they had removed from Grant’s house.

  The onset of winter and the feet of snow that accumulated in the Big Belt Mountains allowed them to narrow their search parameters. After all, a man might be able to hide in those woods forever, but there were only so many places where he would be able to survive when the temperature plummeted below zero for days at a time and the frequent snowstorms prohibited travel, yet he had still eluded them.

  Volunteers had tromped through the forest following the last two kidnappings, but had found no sign of either child. Neither search had lasted very long as they had encountered nothing of significance. No sign of fresh tracks off the beaten paths, shreds of clothing, or, God forbid, human remains. The searches had been instigated out of futility more than anything else. There had been no signs to indicate the children had been taken anywhere near the forest. The community had simply felt the need to do something productive instead of sitting on its collective hands waiting for the bodies to be found in a Dumpster somewhere, or worse still, never found at all. Only Preston and Dandridge had known that somewhere out there in those steep valleys, under the shadows of the sheer, icy peaks, was a man who had already killed the children and intended to use what was left of them to make his escape from a body that by now had to be rapidly failing him.

  The walkie-talkie under Preston’s jacket hissed with static, a brief burst that barely stood apart from the wind. He looked for Dandridge through the overlapping branches, which shifted and changed directions with the unpredictable gusts, but couldn’t even see the bottom of the hill in front of him, let alone the rise on the other side. He had to trust that the partner fate had thrust upon him was preparing to break cover and begin his approach.

  He tied Wylie’s leash around the tree trunk and scattered the remainder of the biscuits onto the dirt, hoping the distraction would prevent the dog from barking and betraying their presence. Raising his pistol, he crawled through the brush and started down the slope through knee-high wild grasses, keeping the thick forest between him and their ultimate goal.

  The Division of Wildlife had provided the break they needed. One of their tagged black bears had been dumped in a campground at the edge of the National Forest, its right front paw mangled from a trap. The anterior aspect of its throat had been slit so deeply it barely remained attached to the body. The wound had been inflicted postmortem, presumably after the bear had already bled out. Its movements prior to its death had been tracked by satellite and its last known location marked about eight miles up Thompson Canyon on the southern slope of Mt. Vance. Dandridge had taken the call from the Park Ranger and begun an investigation he expected to lead him nowhere. After all, it was a bear, not a person, and the poachers in the area were rarely caught. If the men who stalked dangerous game like bears knew one thing, it was how to cover their tracks. Dandridge had gone through the motions regardless, and even studied the satellite images charting the bear’s range with the Ranger, who had said, innocuously enough, “We think he had a den in one of those caves up there on Vance. There are a ton of them through there. All sorts of strange natural formations out there by Crook’s Grove.”

  “Crook’s Grove?” Dandridge had asked.

  “That’s just what we DOW guys call it. Nothing official or anything like that. It’s just got these weird trees that grow like corkscrews. You know… crooked?”

  Mere minutes earlier, a young girl named Jerica Moore was abducted from the playground of Jefferson Elementary School. The teacher’s aides had searched the surrounding neighborhood and every nook and cranny in the building while the principal attempted to contact her parents at work. He finally reached her father an hour later. Douglas Moore confirmed that neither he nor the child’s mother had picked her up, and notified the police himself. When the call finally went out, Preston and Dandridge were already on their way up the winding washboard road toward the grove the Ranger had mentioned.

  Four hours later, as the midday sun approached its zenith, they had crested a ridge and glimpsed the stony face of Mt. Vance. Wylie had fought against his leash, attracted by a strong scent that matched the strip of fabric in the plastic bag in Preston�
�s pocket. They had studied the topographical and satellite maps on the way, and had a good idea of what to expect. The forest grew up against the steep granite slope at the base of a bowl eroded by seasonal runoff. There was a stream several hundred yards downhill. No trails led to their position, only an almost magnetic pull that drew them across interminable fields and under the lush canopy, over steep ridges and down stone-studded embankments.

  And now, they converged at the edge of the uneven copse of twisted firs and stared in the direction of the mountain. An occasional scuffing sound broke the silence unmarred by birdsong. They kept the wind in their faces so as not to betray their scent or the sound of their footfalls. Preston adjusted his grip on his pistol until it felt just right, and raised his stare to meet Dandridge’s. The gravity of the moment hung between them. Everything they had ever done had led them to this point. The past and future blended into the moment. This was where both their old and new lives ended.

  “You remember our deal?” Dandridge whispered.

  Their eyes locked for a long moment.

  Preston finally nodded, and together they struck off toward the granite cliff, an occasional gray blur through the branches above them. The trees thinned significantly ahead, creating gaps through which they could easily be seen. They clung to the trunks, staying low to the ground, moving slowly, cautiously, so as not to make even a single twig snap. He listened for a child’s cry, but heard only the wail of the wind. Deep down, he knew better than to hope that the little girl was still alive. She’d been dead the moment Grant took her.

  He crinkled his nose as they neared a small clearing in the center of the grove. A glance at Dandridge confirmed that he had smelled it as well. His sense of relief that they had found Grant after all this time was dampened by the implication of the stench.