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.
II
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.
Factoring out all of the kidnappings for ransom, the abductions by estranged parents or family friends, and the crimes of opportunity, where the child was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, left Preston with a much smaller field to investigate. By narrowing his scope further to encompass only missing children from stable, two-parent, at least superficially loving homes, he winnowed the cases in his jurisdiction down to a handful each year. And of those, if he set the age range at Savannah's at the time of her disappearance, plus-or-minus three years, he was left with four cases annually over the past six and a half years. Not an average of four. Not three one
