The Adventurer's Son(80)

In January 2016, the Fiscal separately informed both Aengus and me that psychological testing of Pata Lora diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a condition that explained much of his behavior. About the same time, Peggy and I finally had what we’d always hoped for: park access. Accompanied by embassy officials, Fuerza police, MINAE rangers, Cruz Roja (without Dondee), and the OIJ detectives and dog teams, we could go anywhere we wanted—just so long as TIJAT wasn’t there.

FROM JANUARY THROUGH May, Peggy and I made four trips with these Tico teams. Sadly, each trip was a search for Roman’s remains rather than his broken, living body. The search teams that worked with me now had come two years too late. This was the kind of support I had hoped for in 2014, when he had possibly been alive, when I had wanted—but was denied under threat of arrest—access to the park. The leader of these searches was a Tico lawyer named Jorge who worked at the U.S. Embassy and whose father once directed the OIJ.

On the first trip, Jorge picked up Peggy and me at the airport and drove us through the busy streets of San José, explaining the Costa Rican judicial system. “Mr. Roman,” he said, “in Costa Rica it is essentially impossible to get a murder conviction without a body. Unlike in the USA, people saying things is not enough. In fact, the murderer could even confess to a killing, but without physical evidence, like a body, there could be no conviction.”

Jorge had passed tests to become both a Fiscal and a judge and knew well what was necessary for justice. “Without a Fiscal and a judge present, OIJ investigators cannot even ask any questions, other than where a suspect lives, his name, and other nonincriminating information. All of this makes this case with Pata Lora very challenging.”

With Jorge, OIJ, its cadaver-sniffing bloodhounds, MINAE, and Fuerza we searched between Carate and Piedras Blancas. Local miners helped us look off-trail and in mining tunnels that honeycombed canyon walls. Ever since my first days in the jungle, I had made a habit of looking among the miners’ few possessions under their open black tarps. And here, on the banks of a small creek, I spotted something familiar beneath one. It was a short piece of foam sleeping pad of the type I recalled giving Roman two years before in Veracruz.

I had packed our packraft paddles with small pieces of pad like this on my flight to Veracruz, then offered it to him as a useful piece of gear. Its color, type, brand, and dimensions matched a pad I had once trimmed for an adventure race a decade before. It was the only physical evidence I had ever seen of Roman in the jungle. And there it was on the Pata Lora trail.

Questions flooded my imagination. How did it get here? Are Roman’s remains nearby? Is this miner involved? The OIJ and Fuerza swarmed over the old man who was just downstream with his gold pan. The miner explained that he had bought the pad in a community near Dos Brazos years before. Suspiciously, he also lived with the woman who’d raised Pata Lora after Pata Lora’s own parents had estranged him.

IN MARCH 2016 during Anchorage School District’s spring break, Peggy and I again headed to Costa Rica. We spent a few days in San José where I hoped to discover what Roman had purchased for the $411.91 his bank records showed he had spent there. Throughout Latin America, his total monthly expenditures had generally averaged about $1,500. This purchase was a significant outlier. Sitting at the desk of our airport hotel room, I studied two lines on the bank statement.

07-06 WITHDRAWL DEBIT CARD PURCHASE $411.91

07/05 PURCH 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 SAN JOSE CR

Googling 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 hit nothing. I puzzled over the three letters TNF. What’s TNF? The family tent that we’d used for years and pitched on Kuyuktuvuk Creek and Umnak left me thinking, TNF. . . . Could TNF stand for “The North Face”?

I Googled San Jose North Face. A store nearby in a large shopping mall popped up.

“Peggy! Maybe Roman bought a GPS at a North Face store here in San José. People who saw him with Pata Lora mentioned a GPS and a camera.”

“It’s a lot of money,” she said. “Maybe he bought a camera, too. And shoes? Raingear? For his Darién trip?”

Peggy and I jumped in our rental car and hurried to the mall, excited that this might answer some questions. Soon the store clerk was paging through cash register records for July 2014. At nearly 220,000 colónes, Roman’s purchase was easy to spot on July 5.

But he had not bought a GPS or a camera—the store didn’t sell either—it had been a backpack! Midsized and lightweight, the Conness 55 model North Face backpack was well suited to the style of wilderness trekking that Roman would do in Corcovado or the Darién.

This is the missing pack!

I photographed pictures of the pack from their catalog. We now had a new search image while walking in the jungle: an olive-gray, midsized pack with a zippered compartment on the bottom and pockets on the waist belt. Excited, I texted Aengus about this important news. He texted back with the kind of lukewarm response Dondee had shown when Thai and I had found the yellow bag at the Corners Hostel; probably, I thought, because it didn’t fit his show’s storyline.

We had also heard a new spin to the Pata Lora story. An Osa Tico told us in November 2015 that Pata Lora twice confessed to him that he—Pata Lora, not the Guichos—had killed Cody, then buried the body. The Tico suggested that we offer a six-figure reward, like $100,000 or more, to lure Pata Lora into revealing where he’d hidden Cody’s body. The local said he could facilitate. Using only the promise of the money, together with drink and mota, the Tico said he could convince Pata Lora to reveal where he’d hidden the body. We would pay nothing. As we drove the seven hours to Puerto Jiménez from San Jose, Peggy and I discussed how we might trap Pata Lora.