Innocents Lost by Michael McBride Page A

already witnessed the worst of it, but the camera lens tended to create a barrier of unreality between the atrocity and the viewer. The grim truth would set in when he finally saw what was left of Savannah with his own eyes, when he finally touched the decomposed skin of the cheek he had kissed so many times.
    An old Ford pickup barreled around the bend and nearly sideswiped them. Preston managed to hug the slanted shoulder and the edge of the forest at the last second.
    “Jesus,” Dandridge said from the seat beside him. The sheriff braced one hand on the dashboard and clung to the door handle with the other. All of the color had drained from his face, throwing the expression of anger and determination into stark contrast. Despite his obvious discomfort, he didn’t once ask Preston to slow down.
    Preston had already disclosed everything he knew to the sheriff, from the abductions leading up to Savannah’s disappearance to the pattern he discovered in the children who went missing after her. He described the photographs taken of him while he investigated the Downey kidnapping, the snapshot of his daughter in front of his house, and the picture that had led him to Dandridge’s house that very morning. In exchange, Dandridge detailed the horror of the clearing the professor and his students had discovered, the construction of the stone medicine wheel, the condition of the corpses committed to the cairns, and the computer disks exhumed from the ground. The sheriff confirmed Preston’s belief that the man who had orchestrated this whole thing had deliberately drawn them all into his web with the pictures he had sent to Preston and the university, but neither could divine the reason he would risk allowing them to close in on him when he had outmaneuvered them every step of the way. And the way Dandridge described the medicine wheel—a sadistic tableau of suffering—Preston was certain it had been meant to be found. But why? Was it possible they were dealing with a lunatic who simply craved infamy, his face on the cover of every newspaper across the country?
    “How much farther?” Preston asked. The uneven road made his teeth chatter.
    “Maybe five miles. Can you go any faster?”
    “Not without killing us both.”
    “I’m willing to take that chance.”
    The Cherokee slid sideways through a turn before righting and accelerating through a trench formed by the encroaching wilderness.
    “It could be nothing, but I noticed something odd on both of the videos,” Dandridge said. “Did you see that strange reflection of light right at the end? Almost like a glare or a sunspot, coming from—”
    “Savannah’s chest,” Preston finished for the sheriff. “You saw the same thing on the other one?”
    “Yeah, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is. I thought it was just a trick of the light in the first one. But two can’t be a coincidence.”
    “It could have been a reflection of the overhead bulb or of a light mounted to the camera from the…blood. The shifting of the camera as the killer shut it off. I don’t know.” The trunks of the trees raced past to either side, packed together like cornstalks. “What I want to know is, what’s the significance of the medicine wheel? Are we dealing with a crazy Indian making some sort of political statement or reenacting some ancient ritual?”
    “I don’t care who he is or why he did it. I just want my daughter back. And then I’d like nothing more than to tear him apart like he did to those children.”
    Preston didn’t tell the sheriff he would never get that opportunity. The man’s life belonged to him, and he would be the one to end it in the manner of his choosing and over however long he decided to make the pain last. It was his right as a father, and the last thing he would ever be able to do for his baby girl.
    Ten minutes passed in silence as they wended higher into the mountains and crossed through meadows where the road became little more