Innocents Lost (16 page)

After visiting his wife this morning—sitting in a chair at her bedside and watching her lapse in and out of drug-fueled catatonia—he had sprung for a box of overpriced chocolates at the gift shop and wandered down the hall to check on the professor. He had found Grant’s room empty, the linens bunched at the foot of the bed, the wardrobe bare, save for a crumpled hospital gown. The charge nurse had been genuinely surprised when he asked where the professor had gone. Grant hadn’t even been cleared to leave his bed to use the bathroom with assistance, let alone attempt to bear weight. The sutures in his legs were too fresh, the bones nowhere near healed. A quick search of the wing had proven a waste of time. It wasn’t until they widened their search to include the entire facility that a cafeteria worker reported that she had seen a man in a wheelchair rolling himself out the front doors toward a waiting taxi.

There had been no previous discussion of discharge against medical advice, nor had Grant been anything other than the model patient. He had simply changed into the clothes they had cut off of him in the emergency room, gathered his few belongings, and slipped out without a word.

Dandridge hadn’t known the man long, but this impetuousness didn’t fit with his established behavior patterns. Thus, when a call placed to the taxi service had revealed a destination of Laramie, Dandridge had volunteered to follow up himself. He was still the sheriff after all.

A call to the university had confirmed what he suspected. Grant hadn’t been in contact and his office was locked up tight. That meant he had to have gone home, but as Dandridge opened the door and stepped into the sparsely-furnished living room, he knew Grant had already come and gone.

“Dr. Grant?” he called.

The empty house swallowed his words.

A wheelchair lay overturned on the floor beside a pile of clothing, including the pair of jeans that had been cut to mid-thigh to gain access to the compound fractures. He turned right down the main hallway. Droplets of blood spotted the carpet. He passed a bathroom on his left, a study on his right, and entered the master bedroom at the end. Several garments were strewn across the bed. Drawers stood open, their contents hanging over the lips. The closet door was ajar, hangers scattered on the floor, shirts and pants crumpled beneath the rails where they had once hung. There was a floor safe in the corner, door wide open, empty inside. A scrap of paper with the combination was on the floor beside it, folded and worn as though it had been inside a wallet for a long time.

Where had the professor run off to in such a hurry?

Dandridge was confident he would find him soon enough.

The real question was why?

He glanced at the kitchen on his way back to the living room. The refrigerator door was open, the inner light splayed on the linoleum. Cupboard doors hung wide. A box of cereal rested on its side, raisins and flakes everywhere.

A cordless phone had been cast aside onto the couch. He picked it up and hit the redial button.

“’Lo?” a young man’s voice answered.

“This is Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge. With whom am I speaking?”

There was a long pause. Dandridge imagined the kid running through recent events to determine if he was in the clear of whatever he had done that he probably shouldn’t have.

“Eric Wright, sir.”

“Mr. Wright, can you tell me why someone would have called your house from this number?”

“You’re calling from Dr. Grant’s house, right? I have it on Caller ID. My roommate’s in several of his classes. Lane Thomas. He left about half an hour ago. Said he needed to do a quick favor for Dr. Grant.”

“Do you know what that favor was?”

“Yeah. Sure. He said the professor needed a ride over to the health center on campus since his legs were all busted up or something.”

“And that’s where your roommate is now?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like I’m his mom or anything. He doesn’t need to run all his plans past me.”

“Can you give me Mr. Thomas’s cell phone number?”

Dandridge committed it to memory and hurried back out to his Blazer, already dialing as he peeled away from the curb. Lane answered on the third ring and corroborated what his roommate had told him. He had picked Grant up roughly half an hour prior and dropped him off at the Student Health Center with a duffel bag stuffed so full it looked like Grant anticipated staying for several weeks. Lane said Grant could barely walk and had to bite his lip against the pain with every step. By the time he hung up, Dandridge had pulled into the parking lot behind the clinic.

He ran through the door and surprised the receptionist, who sat at a desk beside a triage nurse. The nurse was currently occupied with a kid who wore a hat that showcased his Greek letters low across his brow in an effort to hide his obviously broken nose.

“Did a man named Lester Grant check in with you?” he nearly shouted.

“Sir. I’m sure you understand that patient privacy is regulated by HIPAA—”

“Yes or no? Or do I cuff you for obstruction?”

It was a bluff, but with the way her eyes widened, she didn’t know it. She scanned through the list of registrants with a manicured fingernail, looked back up at him, and shook her head.

“Damn it,” Dandridge said, rushing back out to his car.

He leapt into the driver’s seat, grabbed his radio, and, even though he had yet to formulate solid justification as to why, prepared to put out an APB on Grant.

Something caught his eye and his heart skipped a beat.

The radio fell from his hand and clattered to the console.

He slowly climbed out and walked across the parking lot.

There was a bench with the beaming face of a real estate agent on the street beyond.

A pole with a bright blue sign stood beside it. On the sign was the letter A. The bus route.

Dandridge glanced down.

Several dark droplets of blood dotted the sidewalk. He dabbed one with a fingertip.

Still damp.

If there had been cash in the safe in Grant’s closet, they were never going to find him. He could have gotten off at any stop, boarded any transfer, or simply gone straight to the Greyhound station. He could be on a bus to anywhere in the country at this very moment, or he could be holed up in a motel under an alias. All Dandridge could hope was that someone had noticed a man who must have been walking with great difficulty, a pained expression on his face, leaving a trail of blood behind him. But by the time they tracked down someone who remembered seeing him, too much time would have elapsed.

He returned to his Blazer to go through the motions, hoping to get lucky, all the while wondering what had gotten into the professor’s head to make him run.

III

June 27th

Evergreen, Colorado

Preston sat at his kitchen table, laptop open before him. He planned to make good use of the time off the Bureau had forced upon him. Two paid weeks to get his life in order, grieve his loss, and return ready to work once more. He had initially resisted. After all, what did he have to do? The only pursuit that had kept him going was now gone.

And then he had received the call from Sheriff Dandridge, and suddenly he knew there was still much work left to be done.

Dandridge had just arrived. He paced the kitchen, rubbing his weary eyes. Like Preston, he hadn’t had more than a few uninterrupted hours of sleep in a single stretch during the last week. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation or a shared delusion, but both of them were convinced that even though Cochran was dead, the evil was still out there somewhere, and Grant was the key to finding it.

Preston had yet to take off the suit he had worn to Savannah’s funeral that morning. Despite everything leading up to it, the service had been beautiful. His baby girl had finally been laid to rest in a small white casket on top of a forested knoll overlooking a thin stream lined with aspens. A marble angel knelt above her grave, the pedestal that supported it engraved with the epitaph
Let thy child rest in hope and rise in glory
. He had purchased the adjacent plot, and smiled at the thought of being reunited with her sometime soon.

But first, there was something he needed to do. For her. For himself. For the children he felt, deep down, would one day need his help.

“Any news about Grant?” Preston asked.

“We lost his trail at the Greyhound station in Cheyenne. We found several eyewitnesses who remember seeing him, but none of them saw him board a bus or noted his destination. Since he paid in cash, we don’t even have a credit card trail to follow. There were a dozen different busses departing during the timeframe we pieced together, heading in any number of directions. I’d wager he hopped a bus to Denver since it was the closest destination. From there he could have transferred to another cross-country bus or skipped over to the airport. He could be anywhere in the world by now.”

Preston nodded. The professor’s sudden flight didn’t sit well with him either. His most vivid memory of the man was the expression on his face as he fell away into the waiting mouth of the tunnel. There had been no fear in that expression. In fact, Preston was almost certain Grant had smiled. He had witnessed the same momentary expression when the professor had seen the old man’s corpse on the ground beside him. Had Grant not bolted without explanation, Preston probably never would have even remembered, but now that he did, those mental images haunted him.

“And what did you find that was so important that you couldn’t just tell me over the phone? This wasn’t the best time to drive down here, you know. My wife’s been a wreck since Maggie’s funeral yesterday, and the docs have her so doped up that she hasn’t even gotten out of bed since.” He poured himself a cup of coffee, sat down beside Preston, and sighed. “Sorry. I don’t think I’m dealing with all of this very well either. There’s a part of me that can’t let it go. Heck. Grant probably just wanted to get away from everything so he could recuperate in peace. The guy potentially saved both of our lives, and here I am, prepared to track him to the ends of the earth based on nothing more than a gut instinct. Maybe I’m having a breakdown like everyone seems to think.”

“Then it must be contagious,” Preston said. He opened the manila folder beside his laptop, pulled out a stack of printouts, and slapped them down on the table in front of the sheriff.

“What are these?”

“Copies of the photographs that were pinned up on the walls in the southern chamber of the bomb shelter.”

“They look like they were taken a hundred years ago.”

“More like seventy, actually. The top six photographs were taken between 1939 and 1941.” He moused through a string of menus until he opened a screen that contained rows of thumbnail images. Double-clicking the first one brought up a black and white picture of a row of dead children lined shoulder-to-shoulder on canvas tarps in a progression of decomposition, from the nearly skeletal remains on the left to a young boy on the right who looked like he could have just been sleeping. “This picture was taken on June 25th, 1942. The children were found displayed just like you see them now in Montana, about fifteen miles south of the Canadian border in Glacier National Park. “Now if you look at the victims individually, you’ll see they don’t have any traits in common. Different eye color. Different hair length and color. Totally different age, facial structure, and body types. The only similarity is in the pictures in front of you. Each of those photos was taken at the time of death, and each has that optical illusion Marshall called a glory.”

“But didn’t he say it was the sun that caused them? These were obviously taken inside in a dark room.”

“Caused by the flash, they speculate.”

“Who did they make for the killer?”

“There was never a collar, but a Flathead County Sheriff’s Deputy named Frank Johnson, who was investigating three of the abductions, including the kidnapping of his own nine year-old daughter, disappeared around the same time they found the bodies. Coincidentally, a drifter washed up on the shore of the Whitefish River two weeks later. They were never able to ID him based on how long he had been in the water and the damage caused by the local wildlife.”

“And they never did find Johnson?”

“Actually…” Preston held up a finger to signify he needed a minute, closed out the screen, and opened another. “He did eventually turn up. Or rather, his body did anyway. Thirty-three years later and across the Canadian border. By the side of Highway 40 outside of Edmonton. A single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution-style.”

“Edmonton?” The sheriff’s eyes flashed with recognition. “Cochran was an officer in Edmonton.”

“Exactly.” Preston opened the first thumbnail image. “The discovery of Johnson’s body was overshadowed by this.” He gestured to the screen. “They found the children just like this three days prior.”

The picture showed a small clearing ringed by evergreens. Dead children hung by their necks from the canopy, heads lolled to the side, naked, bare feet pointing at the dirt. Wires connected them through the branches in what at first appeared to be a sadistic mockery of a carousel. A circular trench had been carved into the earth below them, above the top of which a series of corroded car batteries stood, connected by jumper cables. A metal pole had been planted in the center, the rusted, T-shaped post of an old clothesline. The trunks of the trees from which the children dangled had grown in spirals. And on the ground, small, flat stones had been arranged in a medicine wheel design