The Calm Before The Swarm (14 page)

"I don't get it," he whispered. "Where did
these come from?"

"They arrived in the mail here at the
Federal Building today. Plain white envelope. No return address. A
handful of partial fingerprints we're comparing against the
database now. We're tracking the serial numbers on the film to try
to determine where they were processed."

There were a dozen pictures. One of him
approaching a small white ranch-style house. Another of him
standing on the porch, glancing back toward the street while he
waited for the door to be answered. Several of him talking to a
disheveled woman, Patricia Downey, mother of Tyson, who had
disappeared five hours prior. He didn't need to check the date
stamp to know that these had been taken nearly three months ago in
Pueblo, just over a hundred miles south of Denver. No suspects.
Loving mother and doting father, neither of whom had brushed with
the law over anything more severe than a speeding ticket. Middle
class, decent neighborhood. And an eight year-old boy who had never
made it home from the elementary school only three blocks away on a
Thursday afternoon.

"This doesn't make sense," Preston said.
"Why would anyone take these pictures, let alone mail them to
us?"

He parted the blinds again and looked out
upon the back yard. Nine girls still giggled and played. Savannah
swung high, launched herself from the seat, and landed in a
stumble. She barely paused before clambering back into the
swing.

"Look at the last one," Moorehead said.

Preston's stomach dropped with those somber
words. He shuffled past a series of pictures that showed him
walking back to where he had parked at the curb after the hour-long
interview with the Downeys.

"Jesus."

His heart rate accelerated and the room
started to spin.

In one motion, he removed his Beretta from
the recess in his desk drawer and jerked open the curtains again.
Little girls still slid and jumped rope, but only one swing was
occupied. The one upon which his daughter had been sitting only
moments earlier swung lazily to a halt. As did the branches of the
juniper shrubs behind the swing set.

"No, no, no!" he shouted.

The phone fell from his hand and clattered
to the floor beside the faxed pages, the top image of which
featured a snapshot of his house from across the street, centered
upon Savannah as she removed a bundle of letters from the
mailbox.      

He ran down the hall and through the
kitchen.

"Phil!" Jessie called after him. "What's
going on?"

He burst through the back door and hit the
lawn at a sprint, nearly barreling into one of the girls twirling
the rope.

"Savannah!"

The activity around him slowed. Two of the
girls stared down at him from the top of the slide, faces etched
with fear. He ran to the girl on the swing, a dark-haired,
pigtailed slip of a child, and took her by the shoulders.

"Where's Savannah?"

Startled, the girl could only shake her
head.

Preston shoved away.

"Savannah!"

He shouldered through the hedge and hurdled
the split-rail fence into the small field of wild grasses and
clusters of scrub oak that separated the houses in this area of the
subdivision.

"Savannah!"

A crunching sound behind him.

He whirled to see Jessie emerge from the
junipers down the sightline of his pistol.

"What's wrong?" she screamed. "Where's
Savannah?"

She must have read his expression, the
panic, the sheer terror, and clapped her hands over her mouth.

Preston turned back to the field, tears
streaming down his cheeks, trembling so badly he could barely force
his legs to propel him deeper into the empty field toward the rows
of fences and the gaps between them where paths led to the
neighboring streets.

"Savannah!"

His voice echoed back at him.

He fell to his knees, rocked back, and
bellowed up into the sky.

"Savannah!"

June 20
^th

Present Day

I

22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

"How much farther?" Lane Thomas asked. He
swiped the sweat from his red face with the back of his hand.

Dr. Lester Grant had grown weary of the
question miles ago. These graduate students were supposed to be the
future of anthropology, and here they were braying like downtrodden
mules.

"We're nearly there," Les said, comparing
the printout of the digital photograph to the surrounding
wilderness.

It was the summer session, so rounding up
volunteers had been a chore, even though the opportunity to be
published in one of the academic journals should have had them
chomping at the bit. Granted, they had left the University of
Wyoming in Laramie several hours before the sun had even thought
about rising and driven for nearly three hours before they reached
the end of the pavement and the rutted dirt road that wended up
into the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. Another hour of
navigating switchbacks and crossing meadows where the road nearly
disappeared entirely, and they reached the foot of the game trail
that the hiker who had emailed him the photographs had said would
be there. That was nearly two hours ago now. They'd taken half a
dozen breaks already, and would be lucky if they'd managed to reach
the three mile mark.

"Can we switch off again?" Jeremy Howard
asked in a nasal, whiny tone. "Breck's making it so that I'm
bearing all of the weight."

"Give me a break," the blonde, Breck Shaw,
said. She hefted the handles of the crate they carried between them
for emphasis, causing Jeremy to stumble.

"That's enough," Les snapped. They were
adults, for God's sake. Sure, the crate containing the university's
magnetometer was quite heavy, but they all had to pay their dues,
as he once had himself.

They proceeded in silence marred by the
crackle of detritus underfoot.

The path had faded to the point that it was
nearly non-existent. At first, it had been choppy with the hoof
prints of deer and elk, but after they had crossed over the first
ridge and forded a creek, it had grown smooth. Knee-high grasses
reclaimed it in the meadows. Only beneath the shelter of the
ponderosa pines and the aspens, where the edges of the trail were
lined with yellowed needles and dead leaves, was it clearly
evident. How had that hiker found this path anyway? They were
hundreds of miles from the nearest town with a population large
enough to support a WalMart Supercenter, and at an elevation where
there was snow on the ground eight months out of the year. And this
was so far out of the commonly accepted range of the Plains Indian
Tribes, a generic title that encompassed the Arapahoe, Cheyenne,
Crow, and Lakota, among others, that it made precious little sense
for the site in the photographs to exist in the first place.

Which was what made the discovery so
thrilling.

Les didn't realize how accustomed he'd grown
to the constant chatter of starlings and finches until the sounds
were gone. Only the wind whistled through the dense forestation,
the pine needles swishing as the branches rubbed together. The
ground was no longer spotted with big game and rodent scat. Patches
of snow clung to the shadows at the bases of the towering pines and
beneath the scrub oak, evidence of what he had begun to suspect.
The air was indeed growing colder.

An unusual tree to the left of the path
caught his attention. The trunk of the pine had grown in a strange
corkscrew fashion, almost as though it had been planted by some
omnipotent hand in a twisting motion. He fingered the pale green
needles, which hung limply from branches that stood at obscene
angles from the bizarre trunk.

"Can we take a quick break so I can get my
coat out of my backpack?" Breck asked.

Les didn't reply. He was focused on an aspen
tree several paces ahead. It too had an unusual spiral trunk. What
could have caused them to grow in such a manner? He was just about
to run his palm across its bark, which looked like it would crumble
with the slightest touch, when he noticed the large mound of stones
at the edge of the clearing ahead.

"We're here," he said.

He slipped out of his backpack and removed
his digital camera.

"It's about time," Lane said. "I was
starting to think we might have walked right past..."

Les's student's words were blown away by the
wind as he walked past the first cairn and began snapping pictures.
The clearing was roughly thirty yards in diameter. More corkscrewed
trees grew at random intervals. They weren't packed together as
tightly as in the surrounding forest, but just close enough
together to partially hide the constructs on the ground from the
air. There were more mounds of stones in a circular pattern around
the periphery of the clearing, all piled nearly five feet tall. He
paused and performed a quick count. There were twenty-seven of
them, plus a conspicuous gap where there was room for one more.
Short walls of stacked rocks, perhaps a foot tall, led from each
cairn to the center of the ring like the spokes of a wagon wheel.
The earth between them was lumpy and uneven. Random tufts of
buffalo grass grew where the sun managed to reach the dirt, which
was otherwise barren, save a scattering of pine needles.

"Why don't you guys start setting up the
magnetometer," he called back over his shoulder as he stepped over
the shin-high stack of stones that had been laid to form a complete
circle just inside the twenty-seven cairns, and approached the
heart of the creation.

At the point where the spokes met, more
twisted trees surrounded a central cairn, which was wider and
taller than the others. As he neared, Les could tell that it wasn't
a solid mound at all, but a ring.

The formation of stones was a Type 6
Medicine Wheel like the one at Bighorn in the northern portion of
the state, only on a much grander scale. Medicine wheels had been
found throughout the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming all the way north
into Alberta, Canada. They predated the modern Indian tribes of the
area, which still used them for ceremonial rituals to this day. No
one was quite certain who originally built them or for what
purpose, only that they were considered sacred sites by the
remaining Native American cultures, all of which had various myths
to explain their creation. If this was a genuine medicine wheel,
then it would be the southernmost discovered, and the most
elaborate by far.

The emailed photographs had given him no
reason to question its authenticity, however, now that he saw it in
person, he was riddled with doubt. The stone formations were too
well maintained. Not a single rock was out of place, nor had
windblown dirt accumulated against the cairns to support an
overgrowth of wild grasses. No lichen covered the stones, which,
upon closer inspection, appeared to be granite. And the pictures
had been taken in such a manner as to exclude the odd trunks.

Here he was, standing in the middle of what
could prove to be the anthropological discovery of a lifetime, and
he suddenly wished he'd never found this place. It was an
irrational feeling, he knew, but there was just something...wrong
with the scene around him.

He reached the center of the clearing and
used the coiled trunk of a pine to propel himself up to the top of
the ring of stones. The ground inside was recessed, the inner
stones staggered in such a way as to create a series of steps. And
at the bottom, in the dirt, saved from the wind, was a jumble of
scuff marks preserved by time. The aura of coldness seemed to
radiate from within it.

"Dr. Grant," Jeremy called from the tree
line. "We need a little help setting up this machine."

"You're just trying to force that piece
where it doesn't belong," Breck said.

"Then you do it, Little Miss
Know-It-All."

Les sighed and climbed back down from what
he had unconsciously begun to think of as a well, and headed back
to join the group. For whatever reason, he dreaded assembling the
magnetometer.

He suddenly feared what they would find.

Evergreen, Colorado

Preston sat in his forest-green Jeep
Cherokee, staring across the street toward the dark house. He
couldn't bring himself to go in there. Not today. But he couldn't
force himself to leave yet either. Once upon a time, it had been
his home, a place filled with love and laughter. Now it was a
rotting husk, a shadow of its former self. The white paint had
begun to peel where it met the trim, and there were gaps in the
roof where shingles had blown away. The hedges in the yard had
grown wild and unkempt, the lawn feral.

His life had ended in that house. The world
had collapsed in upon itself and left him with nothing but
pain.

And it had been all his fault.

His child, the light of his life, had been
stolen from him because of his involvement in a case, and he still
didn't know why. Over the last six years, he had begun to piece
together a theory. Unfortunately, that's all it was. A theory.
Grasping at straws was what his superiors had called it before his
termination. Over the past year, nearly eight hundred thousand
children were reported missing. While most were runaways, more than
a third of them were abducted by family members or close friends.
Many of these children resurfaced over the coming weeks, while
still others never did. It was the smallest segment, the children
who vanished at the apparent hands of strangers, that was the focus
of his attention. At least privately. Professionally, he performed
his job better than he ever had. After Savannah's abduction, he had
thrown himself into it with reckless abandon, and at no small
personal sacrifice. On a subconscious level, he supposed he hoped
that by helping to return the missing children to their frightened
parents that the universe might see fit to return his to him. But
there was more to it than that. It was a personal quest, an
obsession, and it had finally led him to a pattern.