by Rick Mofina
“Excuse me,” he said to the nearest FBI agent. “Could you find out if my wife is still at the command center or on her way back?”
The agent made a radio inquiry.
“She’s still there, sir, but they say we can take you there now.” He indicated a helicopter whose pilot was climbing into the cockpit, engaging the ignition.
The helicopter rattled, making its landing approach over the command center. Like Emily had been, Doug was astonished by the scene below, the news crews, satellite trucks, the dizzying scale of the operation geared to finding Paige. Some fifty feet from the ground, Doug saw the banks of news cameras aimed on the landing pad from behind yellow police tape, just as the voice of the young FBI agent alerted him to it.
“Sir, we advise you not to talk to the press at this stage.”
“Why not?” Doug was growing more resentful of being controlled.
“Better to first coordinate with all the agencies, when we know more. So we’re all on the same page.”
Doug swallowed hard. The agencies had failed to turn up anything or offer much hope. It’s time we took control. He searched the scene for his wife as his chopper touched down.
Emily recognized Doug in the cockpit of the descending chopper.
“There’s Doug,” she said, leaving Bowman in the FBI SUV.
“No! Please wait!” Bowman said to the slamming door. Damn.
Emily hurried to the edge of the helipad, waiting for Doug as he crouched until clearing the rotors, taking her tenderly in his arms.
More than three dozen news cameras recorded the scene, pulling in tight to catch the fear, exhaustion in their faces: Emily’s anguished beauty, Doug, haggard but handsome. The image of the well-groomed middle-class couple trapped in torment would become a touchstone for the nation gripped by the drama of a ten-year-old child facing death in an American paradise.
“Doug! Emily! Please talk to us!” Reporters shouted over the chopper, which was lifting off. Bowman and the male agent were tugging at the Bakers.
Doug stopped in his tracks, considering the request.
“This way, Doug, please,” Bowman had his arm. “They’re waiting to talk to you inside.”
Doug ignored Bowman and searched Emily’s glistening eyes. “I think we should make a statement to the press, Emily.”
“I don’t know what I would say.”
“We’ll speak from the heart. Let’s go.”
“Sir, I would not advise--” the male FBI agent was cut off.
“Doug, it would be best if you spoke with all the officials first.” Bowman did not want a scene in front of the cameras and realized it was futile. Doug put a protective arm around Emily and approached the press line. The chopper was gone, underscoring the quiet, and the pack began murmuring over cell phones to newsroom across the USA.
“Grab the air! Go live! It’s the parents. Right, first time they’ve spoken!”
Bowman rushed into the private joint forces room and alerted Zander and the others, who were wrapping up their interview with Bobby Ropa.
“You try to stop them, Bowman?” Zander fired.
“Yes, Doug refused.”
Zander was scanning the networks, finding one with the BREAKING NEWS graphic, then cutting to Doug and Emily Baker, embracing, standing before a cluster of microphones less than one yard away.
“Why not stop it?” Ropa asked.
“Too late now,” Zander said, picking up the nearest phone and ordering the event recorded. “I’m not sure we want to,” he said, watching the TV as if contemplating a chess move.
Different questions were called out simultaneously. Doug took the ones he could pick up.
“Please share with us your thoughts at this point.”
“We came here as a family. We’ll leave here as a family. We will not go home without her,” Doug said.
“Emily, has Paige ever run away?”
“No. Never.”
“Does she have wilderness training or experience?”
“No,” Emily replied, “this was her first outing.”
“It rained after her first night. The temperatures are expected to plummet tonight, which will mark over forty, maybe close to forty-eight, hours for her alone in some of the most dangerous terrain in the nation. What are officials telling you her chances are, Doug?”
“It’s serious. We are well aware this is a life and death situation for our daughter, but we are praying. We will not give up hope.”
Emily joined in. “Paige is an intelligent child, she has her dog, Kobee with her--”
“What breed, ma’am?”
“Beagle. We’re told that will give her some psychological comfort and a source of warmth. She had a sweater, some food.” Emily’s voice began to break. “She has our hearts, our prayers….”
“Mr. Baker, there’ve been reports your daughter used the Internet. Has the FBI indicated any suspicions of an abduction scenario that may be a line of investigation here?”
“Yes, we’re aware of that possibility also and understand they are examining every potential aspect, but primarily the thinking is Paige wandered from us and became lost. Thank you, I think that is all we can...”
Is that what the thinking is, Doug? Why don’t you wave that hand for the cameras? Zander thought coolly.
“Sir, sir, just what happened?” Tom Reed asked.
“As I said, we were camping along the remote Grizzly Tooth Trail and Paige wandered from our campsite--”
“Can’t you please elaborate a little?” Reed persisted.
I like that guy, Zander mused. Yes, Doug, please elaborate a little.
“We have a meeting with officials, thank you--”
The Bakers turned but were stopped by one last reporter. It was an older woman from a local newspaper.
“Mr. and Mrs. Baker, do you have any other children?”
“No,” Emily wept, her face crumpling. “She is all we have in this world.”
Doug comforted her and they headed to the command center.
Nearly a fifth of the nation had witnessed the event.
Zander switched off the set.
“I’ll tell you guys something right now,” Ropa said to Zander and the others on his way out after watching the Bakers’ press conference. “That guy on the tube was acting totally different when we came upon him the day before his daughter disappeared. To me, it’s like they’re two different guys.”
Ropa left a motel card on the table.
“Call me if you need more. We’re here for a few more days.”
Zander thanked him, waiting until the door was closed, before polling the others. “Walt, what’s your read on the press conference? What do you think Doug’s up to?”
“Hard to say at this point. Could be totally innocent.”
“Pike?”
“Curious that he went to the press before talking to us. Like maybe he felt he had to do something preemptive.”
Zander nodded.
“Emily tell you anything, Bowman?”
She hesitated, reflecting on Emily’s pretty, pain-filled face on the TV screen. Her heart breaking for her as she deliberated on how much of their conversation she should reveal.
“Bowman?” Zander reminded her she was an FBI agent assisting in an investigation. “Did Emily tell you anything when you were alone with her?”
“She said she came here to bury the past.”
The others exchanged glances.
“What past?” Zander demanded. “She offer any more on that?”
“No,” Bowman said.
“Well, what do we have on her background? Walt, the SFPD was chasing her aunt, right? We need to nail this quickly. What past?”
“I have a strong feeling she wants to tell me about it,” Bowman said.
“Fly back with her, work on her.” Zander told Bowman to make notes on everything that Emily told her.
The task force had a few minutes before they interviewed Doug Baker.
Zander studie
d his watch, how long did their daughter have? If she had any time left at all?
“Frank, what’s your take on the news conference?” Sydowski said.
“I think it’s a cunning, calculated move, if they committed a crime.”
“How so?”
“If they’re culpable, Doug knows where they are vulnerable, maybe with Emily talking to us. So he moves, preemptively as you say, to put his face and Emily’s face out there through the press. Let America see the image he wants them to see, built up huge credit in the bank of public opinion. That is vital strategy because it puts us among the forces of evil, should we go after them. We all know that often cases are not won in courts based upon evidence but in the press based upon perception.”
“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 it 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 e
ight-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.
