Read Innocents Lost for Free Online

site. An inordinate amount of time and care had gone into designing something meant to be seen.
    This promised to be the longest night of his life.
    "You're going to want to see this," an evidence tech he recognized as Brad Stewart said from his left, where two large piles of stones had been removed from one of the cairns and stacked to either side of it, framing a maw of shadows.
    Dandridge reluctantly approached, accepted the proffered flashlight from Stewart, and shined it into the hollow base of the cairn.
    "At a guess," Stewart said, "I'd wager she was killed roughly two years ago, but we'll have to wait for the ME for a more official assessment."
    "She?"
    "That's our working assumption. She's still too young and skeletally immature to tell definitively."
    Dandridge crouched and had to cover the lower portion of his face with his handkerchief to combat the stench.
    A handful of flies buzzed lazily at the periphery of the light's reach.
    "For the love of God," Deputy Miller said from behind him. There was a crashing sound in the underbrush, then a retching noise as Miller was absolved of his dinner.
    Dandridge studied the recess with the flashlight. A fully-articulated skeleton had been posed to face the center of the medicine wheel. Its palms had been drawn together and placed against the left side of its skull, its head canted slightly toward them in a twisted mockery of a peacefully sleeping child. There was a depressed fracture slightly anterior to the coronal suture, from which a spider web of cracks expanded. And based upon the size of the bones and the presence of the epiphyseal growth plate lines, he estimated she couldn't have been more than twelve years old. Rusted lengths of barbed wire had been wound around and through the skeleton to hold the remains in place. Tangles of hair and tattered skin still adorned the barbs. Clumps of blackened flesh clung to the bones at random intervals, while the rest had turned the color of rust and were crusted with flaking scales of dried blood. Frayed tendons had retracted and pulled away from their moorings, where the gristle of muscle attachments reminded him of the nubs at the ends of gnawed drumsticks. The cartilaginous joints were ebon and rotted, yet somehow managed to hold the appendages together. Flies crawled on the dirt, which was slimy and lumpy with the foul dissolution of the tissues that had sloughed from the body as it decomposed.
    "All of the teeth are still intact," Dandridge said, sweeping the beam across the small face. "It shouldn't take long to provide a positive ID from dental records."
    "If we're right, it might be even easier than that," Stewart said. "We were waiting for you before we watched the disks. There are tins buried halfway between the central and outer cairns, just like the professor said. We're still carefully digging them out of the ground. So far, the samples we've loaded all confirm the presence of a video file in the neighborhood of half a gigabyte."
    "How long is that?"
    "Depending upon resolution, somewhere between twenty and forty minutes."
    "And you haven't watched them yet?"
    "We took samples of the blood smears and dusted for prints, but no, we saved that honor just for you."
    Dandridge glanced at the remains one final time. He only hoped she hadn't suffered too badly. His gut, however, insisted otherwise.
    "We have the disk that corresponds with this cairn loaded and waiting on a laptop," Stewart said. He paused. "Are you ready to do this?"
    Dandridge nodded and rose to his feet. The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was watch that infernal disk. He already had a pretty good idea of what it contained.
    Stewart nodded toward the nearest overhead light, which had been mounted in the upper reaches of one of those sickly pines. An evidence tech he hadn't worked with before sat on a level portion of the twisted trunk, computer in his lap, a stack of tins in plastic evidence bags to his right. He looked up when Dandridge