The Adventurer's Son(81)
Our third day in Costa Rica, March 2016, Peggy and I drove to Pata Lora’s house. We hung out with him and his French girlfriend, had a beer, made small talk. Pata Lora rolled a joint and shared it with the mademoiselle he lived with and who paid rent on the house.
As we were leaving, I pulled out a flyer offering a $50,000 reward—ten times what we had posted more than a year earlier for Cody Roman’s remains. I had given another to the local Tico whose idea it had been in the first place, encouraging him to follow through with his plan. We hung a third at the Dos Brazos pulperia. All were meant to flush out the killer.
Pata Lora hated his nickname, so Carson and Ken had taken to calling him “Joe,” an Americanized version of his first name, José. “Listen, Joe,” I said, handing him the flyer, “we are offering a big reward to find our son’s remains. Fifty thousand dollars.” I looked to see if he’d take the bait, but his face didn’t change. He had the same nearly blank expression he showed when I asked him to recount his days walking with Cody. “Maybe, since you saw him with the Guichos, you can find him?”
“Yeah, I can, man. Sure I can!” he enthused. “But I need some scuba diving equipment, so I can go into the ocean out by Madrigal River where his bones are. His bones are underwater, man,” he rambled on. “Can you give me some money?” He took another toke off his joint, then offered it to me. “So I can buy the equipment and go into the water and find the bones?”
I declined the smoke and finished my warm beer. “No, Joe. We’ll give you money for the body when you find it. Maybe you can get someone else to loan you the equipment and you can split the reward with them.”
THE NEXT DAY, Peggy and I headed to Piedras Blancas in a black SUV with an embassy driver. Jorge, two OIJ detectives, and a pair of cadaver dogs and their handlers drove in their own vehicles. We would stay at Roy Arias’s place, then hike on and off-trail to the ocean by way of the Carate and Madrigal Rivers inside Corcovado. The SUV climbed a greasy jeep trail through deep ruts and along narrow ridgelines leading to Piedras Blancas.
Peggy was nervous with the driving conditions. At one point, a stick jammed in the undercarriage. The driver stopped and Peggy jumped out to remove it. The SUV was perched at the edge of a steep cliff with a few trees near its top and an erosion ditch that cut into the jeep track. After Peggy hopped in, the driver pulled forward. The ditch grabbed the front wheel, pulled the vehicle off the road, and rolled us down the hill.
In the roll, Peggy, who hadn’t had time to buckle her seat belt, was thrown forward from the back seat behind the driver to the front seat’s passenger-side window. When the SUV came to rest, held in place by trees on the brink of a precipice, she peered, terrified, down the cliff below her. Unhurt but shaken, we climbed out the windows and scrambled back to the road. Squeezing in with Jorge, we tried not to look out the window at the roadside cliffs for the rest of the drive.
We slept on Roy Arias’s hardwood floors, leaving at dawn for the Madrigal. Following a thin trail along a canyon rim, Peggy was stung by a six-inch caterpillar with long poisonous hairs. Later, bushwhacking a route we suspected the Guichos used to access the Madrigal River inside the park, we nearly stepped on a coiled fer-de-lance. Slowed by steep climbs, slippery descents, and sketchy traverses, we didn’t make it to the main branch of the Madrigal until dusk.
Among the seven of us, we carried only two flashlights. Walking down the Madrigal in the dark, Jorge instructed us to walk through the creek’s waters “to avoid stepping on snakes attracted to the stream by frogs.” The warning seemed silly and walking in the creek was difficult, so Peggy and I climbed up to walk on a gravel bar. Not ten feet later, she stepped on the rubbery cordage of a snake. We didn’t look down to see what kind it was or what it did. We just rushed for the creek and splashed along with the Ticos.
We reached Carate near midnight, finding nothing but bad luck and near misses between Dos Brazos and the Madrigal on the Pata Lora trail.
Chapter 47
Discovery
El Doctor Creek, Corcovado National Park, May 21, 2016.
Courtesy of the author
By the first week of May 2016, it was clear that the series Missing Dial had been produced for the National Geographic Channel as reality TV. The trailers were ghastly. Their reenactments of the Pata Lora story focused on blood dripping from a machete. The machete was held by a man in board shorts and knee-high rubber boots standing over a body facedown in a creek. The show’s executive producer, Aengus, even cautioned Peggy and me not to watch. He said he didn’t want these re-creations, “but the network asked for them.” He had produced them to create “buzz.”
At the time I believed him, and I believed Pata Lora, and I accepted that the overdramatizations—which included a young man who looked remarkably like Roman in the photo from Bhutan but running from miners with machetes—would keep the investigation alive. After Aengus’s warning, we watched the six episodes of Missing Dial that TIJAT had so far produced. I emailed him:
Peggy and I watched all the episodes.
It documents the investigation well.
It’s not overproduced in general although as you warned the machete scenes are a bit overused. My mother and sister would be disturbed by those. Probably Jazz too.
It doesn’t make the Embassy look bad at all, so if you gave them the episodes then they’d have little incentive to do any more than they’ve been doing—which has been very little really.