Cold Fear

by Rick Mofina

  “So what do you propose?”

  “We’ll keep overturning each stone and give the Baker’s all the rope they want. If they’re innocent, the rope is tied to nothing. But if they’re guilty, that rope will tighten. Around their necks.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Montana State Prison is located some three miles outside Deer Lodge, rising from sweeping grassy prairie like the fortress of a dark kingdom that laid claim to the snow-capped Beaverhead and Bitterroot Ranges of the Rockies behind it.

  The massive penitentiary stood as a gate between condemnation and the promise of heaven, or so David Cohen thought as he drove his rented Neon down windswept Lake Conley Road. Parking in a visitor’s stall outside the prison’s main entrance, he watched a perimeter surveillance patrol pass.

  He was bracing for the U.S. Supreme Court to render its decision in the case of Isaiah Hood, his client. He was beyond the wire a few hundred yards away on death row, awaiting his execution, which would happen in some seventy-two hours if Cohen could not save him.

  The young Chicago lawyer paused to gaze at the mountains, then the manned towers, the twin rows of twenty-foot chain-link fences topped and separated by coils of razor wire. It was futile for Isaiah. But this morning, Cohen would explain clemency options in the event of a negative ruling, which he knew was inevitable. Inside his briefcase, next to his court papers, Cohen had a file folder with a page detailing how his client wished his remains to be handled.

  “Morning, Mr. Cohen.”

  The guards at the desk knew him, as they did most death row attorneys. All endured the same security ritual of having their belongings inspected, then having to pass through a metal detector. To the chime of keys and the hum and clang of half-ton steel doors opening and closing, they were escorted past the cold hard walls of a maximum security prison.

  “Hello, David. I’ll take you over,” one of the older, more serene guards offered. He met Cohen after he had passed through the security labyrinth of the main gate and stepped into the prison’s inner open-air courtyard, save for the high mast poles with cable strung between them to deter aircraft escapes.

  The two men chatted about the weather while moving along the walkway. It paralleled the graveled interior sterilized of ‘ground clutter’ between the chain link fences with waist-high waves of more barbed wire and motion detectors. They came upon death row, a small cinder-block prison within the prison, set back from the buildings that housed the general population. It resembled a low-ceilinged bunker. Privately, some lawyers called it the mausoleum.

  Inside, stern-faced guards received Cohen, bringing him through more steel doors, leading him to the right and the small visitor’s room, furnished with a wooden table and chairs, along with a TV that was muted. The guards left on to calm inmates. Alone, waiting for his client, Cohen opened his briefcase, scanned his court papers, then studied the page for Hood’s final arrangements: “After cremation, ashes will be distributed in the Livingston Range.” This would be his task after he watched Hood die. He ran a hand over his face, wishing he had not become a lawyer. He glanced at the silent color TV showing news updates of the little girl lost in Glacier National Park. He wondered, for a moment, if she would be found.

  Isaiah Hood sat at the edge of his bed staring at the large color poster of the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes he believed he could step into it, feel the crisp purifying air, inhale the alpine, hear the murmur of the crystalline streams. As his death sentence neared, he would fall into long statue-like trances that lasted entire days. He would slip into another existence as he raised his arms, reaching into the picture, preparing to receive the message he believed would save him.

  It was an eerie scene for the guards who looked in on him, haunting some at home as their final conscious image before they fell asleep.

  When Hood first arrived on death row, the doctors who saw him concluded that he had abnormally acute senses of smell, hearing and sight. Plus, he had a disturbingly high “apprehension of the mind.” One doctor put it simply: “The patient has an almost animal-like sense of intuition.” But more important, the psychiatrists said, Hood was a psychopath with a destructive psychological neurological disorder with stress-activated seizures, which, if unchecked, risked cardiac arrest. They believed his problems had their genesis in the severe beatings he endured from his father, Brutus Hood.

  Brutus was an angry, violent man whose hands were amputated cleanly at the wrists in a sawmill accident near Shelby. For years afterward, the coworkers who saved him talked about it at the town bar: “It was like someone splashed buckets of red paint everywhere.” Hood’s old man went through life embittered by the hooks at the end of his arms, taking out his rage on his wife with daily beatings, until one day she “stepped off” of a mountain.

  “She was depressed because her slut of a daughter got herself pregnant again, by some brave over in Browning. And she’s gonna get rid of it. Like we should have done with you. You’re a worthless piece of nothing.”

  The old man had screamed that at Hood on the day they found her. In a whiskey rage, he clubbed his son on his head, his jaw and his forearms as Isaiah tried in vain to defend himself from those terrifying metal hooks. Hood’s pregnant sister tried to protect him.

  “Stop beating him. It is not his fault.”

  “He’s no good to anybody. Your mother killed herself because of you both. You know that’s true.”

  Hood’s bruises and welts stayed longer than his sister. A short time after the funeral, she took a bus to Seattle and never returned.

  Keys clanked on Hood’s steel cell door.

  “Your lawyer’s here, Isaiah. Let’s go.”

  Hood stood and slipped his hands and wrists through the handcuff port so they could be snapped into cold steel handcuffs.

  “Stand back, please.”

  The heavy cell door opened to two large guards, one holding a belly chain. He slipped around the waist of Hood’s orange prison jumpsuit, locking a link to the wrist cuffs so that Hood appeared to be holding his hands navel-high in prayer as they escorted him to the interview room where Cohen waited.

  After Hood’s sister ran off, it was just him and his old man living in their ramshackle frame house far away from anybody else near the edge of Glacier National Park. They existed on his old man’s disability pension and self-pity. Hood essentially raised himself and came to spend most of his free time in the mountains, wandering off for days to camp in the park, explore lost trails, survive by hunting and fishing. After dropping out of high school, he became a backcountry guide, one of the best because he knew virtually every inch of the region as it evolved into his sanctuary, his home, the place where he healed, where he did not have to pay for the sins of his father.

  Then came the day Hood encountered the two little girls and he committed a sin of his own.

  It happened so long ago--the passing of time had reduced his contented years in the mountains to a fading boyhood memory, one that Hood had been trying desperately to recapture as a middle-aged man. Did it even happen? Was there ever a time when I was free?

  He had just turned nineteen when it happened. Twenty when convicted. For twenty-three hours of every day, for the last twenty-two years he had been paying for his sin. Caged and forgotten in an eight-by-four-foot stone and steel tomb.

  Over the past months Hood felt his father’s rage seething beneath his skin, bubbling in increasing degrees. All his life he had been paying. And in a few days, the state of Montana would demand payment in full.

  They would take the shred of life he had left.

  Well, it was not going to happen.

  Hood knew from his visits into the picture.

  A message was coming to him.

  He was not going to die in this prison.

  ***

  Cohen accepted that Hood’s case stood a million-to-one chance of success with the Supreme Court. He and Lane Porter, Hood’s other lawyer, had scrutinized the file relentlessly since taking it on. Lane was experienced
with death row cases but was back in Chicago working from home because she was due next week to give birth to her second child. It had always troubled her that some early records were destroyed in a storeroom fire in Helena years ago. The state’s staff assured the attorneys a complete file had subsequently been assembled from copies stored elsewhere, but they could never completely shake the fear that something was missing.

  It made the case even more difficult. The chances for a successful appeal were not good, according to the lawyers Cohen and Porter consulted at their high-powered law office in the Sears Tower. Most attorneys there opposed the death penalty, and the firm took on many hopeless cases pro bono. At the outset, Hood pleaded not guilty, assured by counsel he had a case of reasonable doubt. But he lost. Now, Hood’s appeal argument was that not only was he convicted on circumstantial evidence and represented by ineffective counsel at trial, but he categorically claimed innocence. It was dramatic and raised Hood’s constitutional rights, but there was no startling fresh evidence, nothing found in case law to form the foundation of a potentially successful challenge. Although Cohen and Porter had submitted a solid appeal citing Eighth Amendment violations and other facts to support their client’s claim, Cohen knew Isaiah would soon be dead.

  ***

  The clinking of chains and keys signaled Hood’s arrival, the guards delivering him to Cohen, who stood and positioned a chair for Hood. Once they were alone, Cohen said, “How are you doing, Isaiah?”

  Hood’s brown hair was flecked with white strands. His tiny black eyes pushed into a ruddy face creased, pitted and scarred, as if a glacier had passed over it. It held the pallor of skin deprived of natural sunlight.

  Hood’s eyes searched Cohen’s.

  “Any word from the court?”

  “Nothing. I am sorry.”

  Hood’s chains clinked and knocked as he flattened his hands on the table.

  “Lane have her kid yet?”

  “Not yet.” Cohen opened a file folder. “Let’s go over a few points. I’ve spoken today with the governor’s office and the office of the attorney general in Helena about seeking relief. Their response is to wait for the outcome with the Supreme Court but they have not closed the door….”

  Hood gave part of his attention to the TV news as Cohen began summarizing the strengths of their appeal to the Supreme Court, most of which Hood knew by heart. The sound was off but it was clear from the pictures it was something significant about that big story the guards were talking about, that little girl lost in Glacier National Park.

  “…that the Petitioner’s conviction was derived from a constitutionally invalid confession and from the testimony before the Court of a sole witness, being a 13-year-old child…counsel failed in effective cross-examination at trial...mitigating and circumstantial evidence….”

  Hood could locate anyone lost in Glacier National Park. It is sunny and warm the last day he sets foot in it, twenty-two years ago. He can hear the girls and smell the fragrance of freshly-laundered clothing before they near the spot where he is sitting. It is at a forest edge near a goat ledge deep in northern Glacier, not far from an abandoned turn-of-the-century trapper’s trail. They are laughing, chasing butterflies.

  He is just there.

  They stop dead in their tracks and swallow. He has startled them and it makes them laugh nervously.

  “Hello,” he says.

  The older one glances over her shoulder, as if knowing they should return. Sensing danger. They just stood there. Frozen.

  “How about a game?” he says.

  The little one giggles.

  The older one recognizes him. He sees it in her face: You’re one of the Hoods. Trash. Keep away from us. That look broke his heart. The others in town would never know how much they had hurt him. He was nineteen and never had a friend in his life.

  “We’re not supposed to play with you. We should go back,” she says.

  “Don’t say that. It hurts. Don’t go. Please. How about a little game?”

  “Okay,” the little one says.

  “Guess what I’m going to do.”

  “What are you going to do?” The little one wants to play.

  Hood had no friends in his life.

  Suddenly, he has two.

  It was CNN reporting the live news conference of the parents of the lost girl. There was an inset picture of her, ten years old. Paige Baker. The anguished mother was talking about her disappearance in front of several dozen microphones.

  Hood knew. It’s her.

  He stared so intensely at the TV news pictures his knuckles whitened. His hands were gripping the table with such force it creaked and his chains chinked.

  “Petitioner’s rights were violated under these articles of the Constitution of the State of Montana and the following Amendments to the Constitution of the United States because…What is it? Isaiah, are you OK!”

  Hood’s body began trembling.

  Cohen banged on the door.

  “Guard!”

  Yet Hood’s brain had slipped into a tranquil trancelike state.

  That face. The older one. The little one.

  The message was coming through now.

  Isaiah would not die in this prison.

  TWENTY-TWO

  FBI Agents encircled Doug and Emily Baker after their news conference near the command center. Bowman was among them.

  “Everybody OK?” She placed her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Doug, these fellas will take you inside to talk to Agent Zander and the other guys. Emily and I will go back now on this flight to wait at the campsite.” Bowman indicated an approaching helicopter.

  Doug took Emily quickly into his arms. His worried eyes were searching hers for something--he didn’t know what. They didn’t have the chance to talk privately after Emily talked to police. Was that coincidence? Doug felt something was happening, something deep beneath the surface compounding his anguish and his guilt for having screamed at Paige before she vanished.

  Bowman gestured. It was time to go.

  Emily pulled Doug’s head to hers. “Be careful,” she said into his ear, then kissed his cheek.

  Doug turned from Emily’s embrace and froze.

  Less than ten feet away, at the entrance to the command center, Bobby Ropa had been watching them.

  The contempt in Ropa’s icy stare chilled Doug, making him uneasy--even more so than when this jerk came upon them arguing on the trail. The way this strange family just stood there spying on them for such a long time before declaring their presence. It was unusual. Now the guy’s face was telegraphing scorn. Disturbing. What if he has something to do with Paige’s disappearance? Doug’s jaw clenched. If this asshole harmed my daughter in any way. Doug swore to God he would--he should just walk up to him and ask what he’s doing here.

  “Dad, I just counted the news trucks. Guess how many?” The man’s son, who was about Paige’s age, ran to his father’s side. Noticing the standoff with Doug, the kid stared, then looked away, as if he possessed a secret too risky for him to conceal. Had this family just been questioned by police? What the hell was happening? The father took his kid and walked off.

  “Right this way, Doug.” Zander had witnessed the tense moment.

  Inside the task force room, Doug finally exhaled, rubbing his face. He agreed to a cup of coffee.

  “You know everybody here, Doug, except Inspector Walt Sydowski from San Francisco PD.” Zander set a ceramic mug on the table before Doug.

  “San Francisco? I don’t understand why you’re here.”

  Zander answered. “It’s basic procedure, in assisting the physical search, that we investigate every link to Paige. That means working with the FBI and local law enforcement in San Francisco, in the remote case her disappearance was premeditated, or involves someone there who followed you here.”

  “But we told you she just ran off.”

  “That’s right.”

  Doug ran a hand through his hair. That other man. “Oh God, you really don’t
think there is more to it?”

  Zander regarded Doug. “We hope not. While the searchers are doing their job, we are working as fast as we can to eliminate all the terrible possibilities, or immediately act on anything concrete.”

  “Well, who was that man who just left? You know he was on the trail the day before Paige got lost. Did you talk to him?”

  “Just finished. You know him? Ever see him before the trail?”

  Doug shook his head. “Just the one time. What did he tell you?”

  “That he and his family came upon your family having a discussion.”

  “What else?”

  “Doug, can you tell us about everything before Paige got lost? It might help us if we overlooked anything. Take us back to the decision to come here for vacation. Would you do that for us? Then we’ll fly you out to Emily.”

  Doug collected his thoughts.

  “For the past few years, Emily was having trouble coming to terms with the deaths of her parents. She grew up here. She witnessed her father’s death. He fell from his horse and was stomped to death. Her mother moved her to San Francisco, then abandoned her to relatives before she died in a homeless shelter. It began when Emily was around Paige’s age, so it was coming up on her and she was having a hard time dealing with it. In fact, she refused to discuss it or reveal much of it to me.”

  “Was it a source of conflict within the family?”

  “Yes, particularly in recent years, as Paige reached the same age. We argued a lot. First in private, then openly in front of Paige.” Doug stopped to grip his coffee mug with both hands, peering into it. “I am ashamed to admit that one argument a few days ago was so loud it forced a neighbor to report it to police. A patrol car came to our house. The officers calmed us down.”