Cold Fear

by Rick Mofina

  Taylor hustled, pulling on his jeans and boots. Lola had picked up something and would bolt the instant he opened the tent. But he had to take care of business fast; afterward, they would go.

  “You stay, girl! Sit!”

  Lola yelped, but sat. Her tail wagged her impatience as Taylor crawled out to relieve himself by a tree. Quickly, he slipped on his lighter pack, affixed a fresh battery to his radio, clamped a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich in his mouth, gave Lola a dog biscuit, opened the tent.

  “Go find it, girl.”

  Lola yelped, leading Taylor at a trot deep through the forest they had gridded early yesterday. He knew they were skirting the edge of a grizzly’s feeding zone. He double-checked his pack for his bear spray and bell.

  During a search for a lost woman in the Rockies in Colorado, he had startled a sow. Miraculously, he backed away without a scratch, although he trembled uncontrollably for the rest of the day. The next morning, he and Lola found the woman, or what was left of her. The grizzly had disemboweled her. One of her arms was missing. The woman, a tourist from Germany, was the mother of a little boy and little girl. Taylor cried that night. Rangers tracked and killed the bear. Lola was now moving faster, leading him out of the forest to the rocky edge.

  “Whoa!”

  The ledge was a sheer drop of several hundred feet, a shocker to come upon without warning from the forest.

  “Dead end, girl.”

  Lola yipped back. Panting, assuming her posture that said, This is it, Todd. I’ve found it. Then she sneezed. Taylor surveyed the rocky stretch of ledge, beautiful against the brilliant, rising sun.

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  Lola barked, giving an indication it was somewhere along the rugged cliff top.

  “Hey, careful!”

  The entire ledge was fissured with crevasses, some no wider than six inches, some a foot or two. But they were deep, plunging treacherously into darkness. Lola was panting, tail wagging at one. At the surface, it ran about twenty feet from the edge into the forest, a gash in the rock maybe twenty inches wide that descended into a dark eternity.

  Lola stood steadfast at one point along the crevasse and yelped as Taylor realized its mouth was big enough to swallow a child. He dropped to his knees next to his dog.

  “Hello!” Taylor called into the crevasse.

  Silence.

  For the next three minutes, he called, lying flat on the rock, listening for the faintest sound of life. Nothing. Suddenly, Taylor’s blood turned cold. Nearly touching his nose were a few threads of fabric, like something torn from a shirt. Next to it, quivering in the wind, a few strands of hair. Some blood droplets. Taylor reached for his radio.

  The FBI evidence team had trouble finding a safe place to put down their helicopter. The winds at the altitude of Sector 23 were rocking the aircraft. Eventually, they found a spot some two hundred yards from Taylor’s detect point and humped it in.

  “Something’s down there,” Taylor said. “Lola’s going nuts up here.”

  “You hear anything?” an agent asked Taylor.

  “Nothing.”

  Powerful flashlights were aimed down the hole; long aluminum poles were extended, prodding the depths for any indication of life. Nothing.

  More experts arrived within minutes.

  SAR people worked one side of the opening with the aim of rescuing a victim, while FBI technicians meticulously studied the evidence at the surface. Using tweezers and a powerful magnifying glass, a technician was confident the strands of hair were similar to Paige Baker’s. They began tapping at the rock to remove blood droplets. Preliminary on-scene testing indicated the trace was human. The fabric was cotton. White. Material and color were consistent with the socks Paige was wearing when she vanished. Everything was photographed and recorded. The area was regarded as a restricted federal crime scene.

  Agent Frank Zander arrived. “What have we got here?”

  Agent William Horn, one of the FBI’s senior evidence people, explained the blood, hair and fabric at the mouth of the crevasse.

  “It doesn’t look good, Frank.”

  “She down there?”

  “At this point, odds are she is.”

  “How soon before you can confirm?”

  “Don’t know. The opening is too narrow and tight for us to drop a rescuer or tech down there. We’re flying in some small fiber-optics cameras, listening devices. Looks like this thing stretches to the bottom, four hundred feet, maybe more. We need an exceptional length of fiber for the camera, we’re waking up a high-tech firm in California. We’ll need some time, Frank.”

  Zander nodded.

  “This is your scene, Bill, and my investigation. Nobody who is here now is permitted to leave. All radio contact goes through you to me. It’s all need-to-know. Nobody talks to anybody until it is determined exactly what we have here. It is critical now that nothing leaks from here. Critical.”

  Horn nodded.

  Before Zander returned to the command center, he looked at the FBI evidence technicians in their hooded jumpsuits with gloves. They glowed in the dawn against the backdrop of the sky and mountains as they worked silently on what Zander believed was the grave of Paige Baker.

  FORTY-ONE

  A nation away from the FBI’s secret investigation at the crevasse of Sector 23 in Montana, a constable with the Ontario Provincial Police was ending her night shift east of Toronto, patrolling RV campsites near the Sandbanks Provincial Park.

  The waters of Lake Ontario lapped against the vast sand beaches as she cross-checked license plates with the tourist alert sheet on her clipboard. She locked on to a California tag for Meyers, knocked on the door of their thirty-foot motor home, informing Willa Meyers to call the San Francisco Police Department right away. “A family emergency.”

  An SFPD dispatcher took her call at approximately 4:00 A.M. Pacific Time. She paged Inspector Linda Turgeon, who was sleeping but had the call patched to her home. Turgeon told Willa Meyers what had happened in Montana.

  “My dear Lord, no!” Willa was horrified, explaining that she and Huck had no idea their niece was lost in the Rocky Mountains.

  “We purposely avoided the news because of Isaiah Hood’s impending execution,” Willa said; then she told Turgeon about Lee’s secret family history. “We wanted them to join us in Canada. It was a delicate family matter. Lee was receiving counseling. Doug didn’t even know everything. We wanted to get Lee as far away from the hood case as possible at the time of the execution. We didn’t know they had returned there.”

  Willa told Turgeon that when a San Francisco reporter recently reached them asking questions about Emily’s past, she figured it was somehow related to Hood’s execution, not to Paige.

  Turgeon consoled Willa, then called Sydowski, catching him on his way out of his room in the Sky Forest Vista Inn near Kalispell. He took extensive notes as Turgeon enlightened him.

  Now, Sydowski was finishing his third coffee watching the sun climb as Zander’s chopper returned from Sector 23 to the helipad near the command center. The two men talked near a stand of spruce behind a fire crew dorm.

  “I think we found her, Walter.”

  “Alive?”

  “No. Blood, hair and clothing fragments at the mouth of a narrow and deep rock fissure, just under two miles from the campsite.”

  “You confirm her body is there?”

  “No. It’s going to take a few hours to get some equipment up there. No one, absolutely no one, knows what we’ve got there.”

  “I’ve got an update on Emily Baker,” Sydowski said. “SFPD contacted Emily’s aunt. Emily is the sister of Rachel Ross, the child murdered in Glacier twenty-two years again by Isaiah Hood, the guy who is going to be executed.”

  Zander was dumbfounded.

  “Why didn’t we know this from the outset?” He shook his head. “That happened in the same region. The Bureau, or Montana, should have known.”

  “Turns out Emily was Natalie Ross
at the time. Natalie’s mother changed her name shortly after the tragedy. As you know, Natalie Ross was the witness, the only witness, who saw Hood kill her sister. Her testimony helped seal his death warrant.” He filled Zander in on the rest of the story. “Emily would never speak of her past. Began undergoing counseling for it as Hood’s execution date loomed.”

  Zander stared into the sunlight piercing the spruce.

  “Damn, Walt. What do you make of it?”

  “In my time, I’ve seen them all. The devil told me to do it, the voices told me, my dog told me. I’ve had the most upstanding people, finest-looking people, look me straight in the eye and say they had to kill their infant child because God told them it was the Antichrist. But--”

  Zander looked at Sydowski. “But what?”

  “To me, the pieces here just don’t quite fit.”

  “I think they do. It’s just a matter of which category. Just a matter of time, Walt. Look at everything we’ve got so far. The ax, the T-shirt, his hand, her past, his temper, the girl’s corpse. I think we’ve got them beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “I don’t. Not yet. It is still largely circumstantial.”

  “What about the mother’s background, her history?”

  “I see it as a reason for their strange behavior.”

  “I see it as damning.”

  “Frank, you have no linchpin to bring it all together. Nothing physical, irrefutable.”

  “She’s in the crevasse.”

  “What if she fell?”

  Zander’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’m going to find out, Walt. Give me time. I am going to get them on the box as soon as possible.”

  “It’s your case. How you handle it is up to you.”

  Within twenty minutes, everything was conveyed to Lloyd Turner, FBI Special Agent In Charge, and Nora Lam of Justice, who immediately shook her head.

  “What’s you’re hurry? Why not see what your investigation at the crevasse yields? It might give you your trump card.”

  “We’re holding a pretty winnable hand now, Nora.” Zander said.

  “I agree with Frank. A polygraph might help at this stage,” Turner said.

  “You know he has to agree, cooperate and be Mirandized?” Lam said. “You must advise him of his right to a lawyer.”

  Doug was escorted once again to the task force room and seated before the investigators. He listened as Zander explained the situation.

  “Doug, we’ve got a problem and we need your help.”

  He emphasized how the search was expanding, “more people, more resources,” but the job of ruling out all other possibilities in Paige’s disappearance required a lot of work. “We’re going through permits trying to locate and talk to every other party in the area at the time.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Well, Doug,” Zander said. “An investigation is largely a process of elimination. We want to eliminate all potential options quickly so we can concentrate on valid ones.”

  “I see.”

  “The most disturbing one we have to deal with is that something has happened to Paige--an animal, or a stranger in the park. Do you follow me?”

  Doug looked at his hands. That other family made him uneasy.

  “I--I. Yes.”

  “We have to look at everyone. It is critical.”

  “Yes.”

  “We want to eliminate you.”

  Doug said nothing. He had known for a long while that was coming.

  “Doug, your wound, the ax, her T-shirt…”

  Doug sniffed; tears welled…he knew.

  “Can you appreciate where I am going here?”

  His pulse galloped. “Yes,” he said, his heart breaking

  “Would you agree to take a polygraph?”

  Doug swallowed.

  “It’s just a tool, but it might help us, help everyone.”

  Before Doug realized his head was nodding, Zander asked him to voice his answer.

  “Yes, I will take a polygraph.”

  “Then I have to tell you certain things first because the law requires it.”

  “What things?”

  “You have the right to remain silent…”

  Jesus, Doug could not believe…

  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  How does a life come to this…?

  “You have the right to consult with an attorney and have them present with you while you are being questioned.”

  Screaming at Paige. Shouting at my daughter with the bloody ax in my hand. The terror in her eyes…

  “If you cannot afford to hire an attorney, one will be appointed to represent you before any questioning, if you wish one.”

  For God’s sake, I’m just a teacher, a husband, a father. Days before, we were like any other American family, struggling through an airport, embarking on a vacation.

  “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you?’

  No I do not understand any of this. Lord, help me…help Paige….

  “Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?”

  Doug looked into Zander’s eyes.

  “I want a lawyer before I take the test.”

  FORTY-TWO

  The phone rang in David Cohen’s Deer Lodge motel room at 5:14 a.m.

  “I’d like to speak to David Cohen, the lawyer for Isaiah Hood?”

  “That’s me. Who’s this?”

  “Nick Sorder, Capitol News Radio in Helena. I’m calling for your reaction to the development in the case. Governor Nye’s office issued a statement this morning. Actually, late last night, from the time on our fax.”

  A statement? He knew nothing about this.

  “Tell me what it says.”

  “Summarizing quickly, it says with respect to the U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of Hood’s petition for appeal and the Board of Pardons not recommending executive clemency, the governor will not grant your request for a delay. The AG’s office adds that the sentence will be carried out tomorrow as scheduled.”

  Oh, godamn it.

  “Your reaction, sir?”

  John Jackson in his dinner jacket, winking his warning about the governor squeezing his balls so hard they’ll hear the scream in Chicago.

  “Your reaction, sir?”

  “I’m very disappointed. But I have no further comment until I speak with my client.”

  Cohen hung up and hurled the phone to the floor.

  I will take your concerns under advisement and make my decision known to you tomorrow. His black suit waiting. Ashes to be scattered. He did not do it. Whatever happened out there, it was not murder. Emily Baker, or whatever her name is, knows the truth. She knows the goddamned truth. Somehow, it has to be squeezed out of her.

  Cohen sat at the edge of his bed in his boxers and Chicago Bulls T-shirt, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, tears stinging his tired eyes. His stomach quaked.

  Think clearly. It is not over. Cohen attempted to console himself with a hot shower, then flipped on the TV news and pulled on jeans and a fresh shirt. He downed some hot coffee, bit into a muffin he picked up the night before at a truck stop on the return drive from Helena.

  “The long-awaited execution of Isaiah Hood, who murdered a five-year-old Buckhorn Creek girl twenty-two years ago, will go ahead as scheduled tomorrow. In a statement released this morning from Helena, the governor said he will not intervene….”

  Local news mocked him as he worked, sifting through his files.

  “…the search for Paige Baker enters another day in Glacier National…”

  A blue file, a pink file. Case law, that wasn’t it. The green file. Nope. Here, the yellow file. It contained e-mails, faxes, business cards and scribbled contact numbers from reporters with the most recent requests to interview Isaiah Hood. He went through the file. Cohen had rejected all requests. Hood had never, ever, been interviewed. Now most news attention had been drawn to the lost girl story. Here i
t was. Cohen had a priority list of cell numbers for about half a dozen big outlets. All print because it was easier and quicker to get a print reporter inside the prison. Most of the people on the list had called recently saying they were in Montana on the lost girl story in Glacier.

  The New York Times, Denver Bureau, Dianna. K. Strauss. Cohen dialed the number. Busy signal. But a strange one. Maybe a bad connection? He tried the Washington Post. Phillip Braddock. It just rang and rang, unanswered. Cohen dialed the Los Angeles Times. Francis Lord. Out of service range. Damn. USA Today. Lawrence Dow. Voice mail. Damn. Cohen wanted to talk to somebody now. Right now. The San Francisco Star. Tom Reed. He’d heard of him. A hotshot on some big story in California. Saw him on CNN talking about it. Emily Baker was from San Francisco. This could work. Cohen punched Reed’s cell phone number. Come on. The clock was ticking. Ticking. The number rang.

  Not long after the morning sun lit the eastern sky, Tom Reed was waving good-bye to Chester Murdon, standing with his Lab, Sonny, on the porch of his house. They made a perfect picture against the crisp dawn and the glorious snowcapped mountains.

  Thank you, Chester, Reed thought, patting the files that Murdon had given him. They were vibrating on the passenger seat. Reed was speeding into Wisdom, intending to get to the FBI in Glacier without wasting a second. Thanks to Murdon, he had a new angle. Tomorrow, the man who murdered Emily Baker’s sister twenty-two years ago in Glacier National Park would be executed while searchers try to locate Baker’s daughter, Paige, in the same region. It was an incredible story. A haunting tale. He had surpassed everyone; even the Montana press had missed Emily’s connection to Hood. And if the police knew, they certainly were mute on it. Maybe there was more to it?

  It was coming up on the hour, Reed switched on the radio news, bracing for any break in the search. He’d have to alert the desk and Molly, he thought as the dramatic radio jingle led into the news from an AM station in Bozeman.