Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (10 page)

“
What?
”

Cody wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Yeah—the result of a little drunken tryst up in Fort Collins when I was working undercover. A barmaid name of Rae Ann. She’s married now to her second husband, but I send her money for little Justin every month. On my salary it’s a hit, but what ever.”

“You never told us,” I said.

He shrugged. “It happens. But that’s not my point. My point is Justin and I are getting close now that he’s turned six. Those first five years he was just a baby. He could have been any baby, to be honest. Now he’s a real person, you know? He likes baseball and rocks. But for those first five years, he was just kind of a little fat …
thing
. Babies aren’t people until they grow up, is what I’ve learned.”

I shook my head. “I don’t follow.”

He killed the beer. “I guess I’m saying for a man, babies are babies. You could get another one, and she’d grow up to be a person. Hell, maybe you’d love her more than you love Angelina now. You just don’t know. If you have the chance to get another baby, you and Melissa will raise a winner, is what I’m saying.”

I saw a flash of red in front of my eyes. “Cody, I think it’s late, and you’re drunk. So shut up. Now.”

He raised his hand, “I’m just saying …”

“I know what you’re saying. Stop it. It’s not an option.”

“You might want to give it some thought, Jack.”

“It’s not an option.”

He started to argue more when Melissa and Brian appeared on the stairs.

“Enough,” I cautioned Cody.

“Okay,” he said. “So, will I see you tomorrow?”

At that moment I didn’t care if I ever saw Cody again.

“Call me,” Brian said to Melissa as he hugged her goodbye.

“I will,” she said. She was as exhausted as me, and showing it. Tears welled again in her eyes.

“Too bad we can’t just call Uncle Jeter to take care of things.” Cody laughed. “He’d love to drive down here and kick some ass.”

I smiled at the thought. Jeter Hoyt was a legend when we
were growing up in Helena. One of the reasons no one ever touched Cody, Brian, or me was because Jeter Hoyt was Cody’s uncle, and stories about him were the kind told only in furtive whispers after the storyteller had glanced over his shoulder to see who was in the room.

When they were gone, Melissa said, “You have some good friends.”

I said, “
We
have some good friends.” I didn’t tell her what Cody had said.

WE’D BEEN IN BED AN HOUR
. Melissa had tucked the covers around Angelina and whispered something to her that didn’t come over the monitor. Our daughter’s sleeping breath provided the sound track in our room. I was sleeping fitfully.

AT
4:00
A.M.
I heard the burbling sound of a motor cruising by on the street. I recognized it as Garrett’s car.

I imagined him out there with Luis, looking at our house as they crawled by, the photo between them on the seat.

Twenty Days to Go

A
NGELINA WOKE US UP
very early Monday morning, but in the most pleasant way possible.

“Listen to her,” I said. “She’s singing.”

“It’s not really a song,” Melissa said. “She’s just happy.”

We listened to Angelina coo and say nonsense words over the monitor. Melissa’s face, as she listened, was a picture of momentary serenity.

“Did you get any sleep?” I asked Melissa.

“Not much,” she said.

“Me either.”

THE COURTROOM OF JUDGE
John Moreland in the Alfred A. Arraj United States Court house on 19th Street was spacious and blond– wood paneled and lit with recessed lighting that created an atmosphere of serious decorum. I got to the crowded courtroom and found a seat in the second-to-last row, just in time to see Detective Cody Hoyt take the stand. Large faded murals done in the Depression era depicting Colorado history—silver and gold miners, railroaders, Pikes Peak—lined the walls. The scenes reminded me that Colorado had a go-go, get-rich-quick beginning that
was being replicated by the most recent wave of newcomers—like me—who came here not because of family ties or culture but because there was opportunity.

The acoustics inside the courtroom were amazing. Despite the size of the room and the number of spectators, I could hear the muffled clicking of the court reporter’s fingers on her keyboard from her desk near the bench, the shuffle of paper as the Assistant U.S. Attorney reviewed her notes on a yellow legal pad, and the labored breathing of the defendant, Aubrey Coates, forty-three, accused of the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of Courtney Wingate, age five, who went missing from a playground area at the Desolation Canyon Campground where Coates was employed as a campground host. Because the campground was located within a national forest, the trial was taking place in federal court.

Although I’d spent some time in courtrooms in Billings as a journalist—I covered the infamous trial where the two Crow Indian brothers and their meth-addict girlfriends went on the weeklong crime spree across southern Montana and northern Wyoming and murdered a ranch couple along the way— Judge Moreland’s courtroom had a slick sense of process about it that probably came from the no-nonsense, clipped way he moved things along. He didn’t shout, or gesticulate, but when he spoke, everyone listened. He was charismatic and in total command. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him in the way one can’t keep one’s eyes off a great actor—Denzel Washington, say—even when he isn’t speaking or the focus of attention. I wasn’t the only one so afflicted. If Moreland raised an eyebrow while a lawyer asked a question, that lawyer got the vapors, and the opposing attorneys acted smug. Of course, I observed him to see if I could learn anything about him, to size him up, to find a weakness. If he saw me enter the room,
he showed no sign of recognition. I was still buzzing from the events of the night before. There was a black ball of dread in my belly that seemed to be pushing upward into my lungs, leaving me short of breath.

I was seated next to a large and well-dressed black woman in a floral-print dress and with a fleshy wide face who seemed unrelated to the players. I continued to survey the courtroom. Cops, reporters I recognized from local television and cable news, plenty of observers attracted by the lurid nature of the case itself, including, I assumed, my new companion next to me. Then I found myself staring at the back of the head of Aubrey Coates himself, sitting at a table facing the judge.

“That there’s the Monster,” the woman next to me said, leaning my way. Her bare chocolate arm radiated heat as she pressed into me, and her breath smelled of mint and cigarettes. “He turns around and looks back every once in a while, seeing who is here,” she whispered. “I think he likes the attention because he is a sick, sick man. When he looked at me I gave him one of these …” She instantly sat back with attitude and gave me a wicked dead-eye glare. “That look usually freezes folks where they walk. But he just kind of smiled at me.”

I’d seen photos of Aubrey Coates in the newspaper. Of course, the photos were prior to his haircut and shave. Now he sat slumped, small, in an ill-fitting suit jacket. He had tufts of gray hair over large ears, and when he turned his head to whisper something to his lawyer, I saw a hawkish and heavily veined nose, protruding lips, and a pointy chin. When he turned back, his bald dome reflected the light from the walls in a checkerboard pattern on the side of his head. I thought of the nature of evil, how sometimes you could just see it and sense it.

“He did it,” she said, nodding. “No doubt in my mind. And he did a lot more, too.”

I held out my hand. “Jack.”

“Olive,” she said, her large hands enveloping mine. “Ask me anything. I know everybody in this room. This is what I do—observe trials.”

“Do you know Coates’s defense attorney?” I asked, looking at a rotund man sitting next to Coates with an easy smile and manner.

She nodded, and her eyes widened. “He’s got the best— Bertram Ludik. I don’t know how that little worm can afford him. I think if Charles Manson had hired Bertie Ludik, he’d be out there sticking forks into people to this day!”

“Come on,” I said.

“You watch,” she said. Then: “Luckily, Judge Moreland won’t allow Bertie to be Bertie.”

“That guy I know,” I said, chinning toward Cody, who was approaching the stand.

“Detective Hoyt,” she whispered sympathetically. “I’d like to take that man home and hug him and tell him everything will be all right.”

“Why?” I asked, perplexed.

“He’s a troubled soul,” she said. “Look at him. A great detective, but a troubled soul.”

He’s just hungover,
I thought.

Cody was wearing a dark blue suit that gathered under his arms, a white shirt, and a solid but faded red tie. He looked courtroom savvy but disheveled at the same time. He shambled when he walked and raked his fingers back through his hair, messing it up. When he sat down in the witness chair, his eyes took in the room in a world-weary way that said “I’M A COP. JUST LET ME DO MY JOB.” I nodded at him, but I’m not sure he saw me.

Judge Moreland said, “The witness is reminded he is still under oath.”

“I understand, Your Honor.”

“Miss Blair,” Judge Moreland said to the Assistant U.S. Attorney, an attractive redhead who had been huddled in conference with the U.S. Attorney at the prosecution table, “you may continue to question the witness.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, standing, holding the legal pad at her side as she approached the podium. “I have just a few more questions.”

Moreland gestured impatiently for her to begin.

“Detective Hoyt,” she said, flipping back the pages on her pad, “you said Friday before the weekend recess that when you apprehended the defendant on the morning of June 8 last summer, he was in the process of destroying evidence …”

HERE’S WHAT I KNEW
about Aubrey Coates, the Monster of Desolation Canyon.

Every summer, children vanish. Over the last decade children had gone missing while on vacation with their families in the Mountain West.

It happens quite a lot in the mountains. Often, the families are having picnics and reunions and suddenly someone realizes that one of the kids didn’t show up for dinner. Sometimes the children got lost, sometimes they got washed into rivers, sometimes they got mad at their siblings and “ran away,” and sometimes they climbed into the wrong car. Most are found. I remember when my dad and I volunteered to search for a missing little boy who’d wandered away from a campsite near the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness north of Helena. We took horses, and I remember it as a great and
serious adventure combing the trails and riverbanks calling out “Jarrod!” for two days. Until Jarrod was found less than a mile away from where he’d vanished and confessed he’d gotten turned around in the forest and fallen asleep. He admitted hiding from volunteer rescue people as they walked and rode by because they were strangers, and he had been taught not to talk to strangers—even those calling his name.

But in some isolated instances the children were never found. These children vanished from isolated locations in Colorado (Grand Junction, Pueblo, Trinidad), Utah (Wasatch, St. George), Wyoming (Rock Springs, Pinedale). Boys and girls, all under the age of twelve. In nearly every instance, the parents said the child was there one minute and gone the next. The places the children were last seen were playgrounds, near streams, on hiking trails. Then poof—they were gone.

In retrospect, when one looks at the instances of these particular missing children over the years, you can see a pattern, and the authorities are blamed for not seeing what should have been in plain sight. But that’s unfair, as Cody explained to me. The children went missing in three states over ten years. The only “pattern” was that they vanished from campsites or in undeveloped areas. There were no calling cards left, no evidence of where the children were taken, and nothing left behind. All occurred in different jurisdictions, with different sets of law-enforcement personnel. The FBI was never called in because linkage wasn’t discovered until after the fact. None of the parents were ever contacted for ransom or taunted. No one confessed or implicated others. And none of the bodies was ever found.

Aubrey Coates, who worked as a temporary replacement for campground hosts, was questioned on four different occasions because he had his trailer parked in the areas where
the children went missing. In each instance, Coates answered all questions asked and was cooperative. More than once, Coates volunteered to help search for the missing children. He had no arrests, and his name didn’t exist on any sexual-predator lists. National Forest Ser vice staffing personnel in all three states knew him to be a kind of eccentric loner with his battered Airstream trailer that bristled with television and Internet satellite dishes and antennae, but he was considered experienced and reliable. Whenever a host got ill, or went on vacation, Coates was contacted to fill in. His job consisted of collecting overnight fees, keeping the campgrounds clean and neat, making sure campers didn’t overstay their limits, and providing advice and assistance to campers in states where camping is part of the common cultural fabric. In twenty years of being a campground host, only two complaints had been filed against him. The complaints—parents in one instance felt he leered at their children, and someone accused him of being rude because he angrily refused to come outside his trailer (“What was he
doing
in there?”) when a camping family wanted to borrow a tire pump—were minor and filed in two different states six years apart.