The Adventurer's Son(77)
A week went by with me skulking around, scowling at Carson. Yet slowly but surely, Carson, Ken, and the production company and their ex-FBI-turned-consultants wore me down. Carson seemed hurt that I didn’t accept his story as fact. Eventually, it dawned on me that you don’t hire a consultant to argue. Carson had been hired for me. He was there to help.
Like me, Roman could be stubborn—glaringly, frustratingly, and passionately stubborn. I saw this in Carson, too, as if he channeled Roman’s spirit, even his mannerisms: stiff hand gestures, a level gaze in distracted thought, a crooked finger. I empathized in Carson’s frustration with me for neither accepting nor respecting his role. His inability to articulate his convictions, choosing forcefulness of expression over clarity of logic, felt familiar. Together, and perhaps ironically, these elements of Carson made me more favorable to his thinking.
Carson wanted the end game of an arrest. He was a cop, after all. But an arrest wasn’t enough for me. Nor, at this point, was justice, even if Carson’s story were true. And I certainly wasn’t after revenge. Guicho or Pata Lora could be taken out, apparently, with a phone call. More than anything, Carson and production wanted to solve a murder on TV, but I needed all the pieces to fit without contradiction, without ignoring facts.
CURIOUS, I WENT back to Do?a Berta and tested her memory of my visit from the year before. She remembered well Thai and me. She offered the same story: Roman had been there, left his things, paid to reserve a bed for his return, but never came back. She’d told Dondee something different, and Carson something else still.
For over a year, I had pondered each story a local told me in the context of directions given to strangers: even when locals have no idea which way to go, they give directions. It felt as if the locals on the Osa told us stories about our son the same way, but with a twist: they told us what they thought we wanted to hear. As if when asked, “This way?,” they answered, “Yes,” not knowing if it was the right way or not. No wonder Carson kept hearing Pata Lora stories. He paid his informants to tell them.
While many people feared Pata Lora, others simply disliked him. Some said that he had been imprisoned for murder. Pata Lora himself told Carson and Ken that he had killed a man over, of all things, a bicycle and gone to prison because of the crime. If that were true, then why did the OIJ and the Fiscal—the Costa Rican prosecutor involved in criminal investigations—both say Pata Lora had never been charged with murder?
It seemed to me that Pata Lora had psychological issues, not criminally violent ones. Firsthand complaints I had heard centered on his thieving and lying.
I certainly didn’t have all the answers. I’d learned early on to get used to being wrong. But something was clearly missing.
If Jenkins had seen him cooking, how did the Jetboil stove get back to the Corners Hostel? Was there a second stove? And what was Roman carrying when he left the hostel? Was there a second backpack? The blue one that Cody carried with Pata Lora to Arnoldo’s place in Dos Brazos and Roy Arias’s house in Piedras Blancas? Or the green one that Jenkins had seen Roman with on Zeledón?
Carson had no place in his narrative for Jenkins and Roman meeting in the jungle and no use for days or dates, other than one Sunday in July when Pata Lora and Cody got in an alcoholic cabby’s taxi (the colectivo doesn’t run on Sunday). Carson completely ignored the previous year’s account of the friendly guide with his distinctive ears who had seen Pata Lora with a gringo in Carate within a day of when Roman said he’d get out. Anything I offered Carson about Roman’s character or experience was summarily dismissed as immaterial. Scientists call this kind of analysis “cherry-picking the data.” Even Aengus, who’d hired Carson, observed: “Doesn’t give you much faith in law enforcement, does it?”
Still, like Carson kept reminding me, a dozen people saw Pata Lora and Cody together. To bend the facts and fit Carson’s story, I sketched out in my notebook the two jungle trips necessary during those weeks in July 2014 after Roman wrote his last emails and before Thai and I arrived.
On the first trip, leaving Puerto Jiménez soon after emailing us, Roman encounters Jenkins’s brother hurrying downstream on July 9 or 10 for a court date July 10. Then Roman climbs Negritos’s canyon walls, camps above Zeledón, and meets Jenkins the next morning, July 10 or 11. To fit Pata Lora’s story with Jenkins’s required that Roman walk out on July 11 or 12, leave the Jetboil and backpack at the hostel, hop in the drunk cabby’s taxi with Pata Lora on Sunday, July 13, and walk to Carate by July 15, when Roger Mun?z, the friendly guide, sees the pair. Then, sometime afterward, they meet Guicho, who kills, dismembers, and feeds Roman to the sharks. This way, all the dates would fit with people, places, and events. Now, I simply needed to change our son to someone we didn’t raise.
Peggy reacted to my doubts with her own in an email:
The women at the hostel need to be interrogated. They know something and need to talk. They are key. Nothing else makes sense. We, our friends, and his friends know our son, and know that he wouldn’t even think of getting his hands on drugs—especially in another country. DON’T let anyone even try to sway you to join their uninformed opinion. WE know our boy, Roman. He would never be so stupid.
By the end of August, I’d been forcefed a narrative I believed. My journal recorded my feelings.
We are closer than we’ve ever been to solving this and it’s thanks to Ken and Carson. Carson says “they” want good TV. He says he wants a conviction, justice. He’s in it for that. He also says this is for real and no TV show has ever done this for real in real time.