Cold Fear (14 page)

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
eight-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.

The clinking of chains and keys signaled Hood’s arrival,
the guards delivering him to Cohen, who stood and positioned a chair for Hood.
Once they were alone, Cohen said, “How are you doing, Isaiah?”

Hood’s brown hair was flecked with white strands. His
tiny black eyes pushed into a ruddy face creased, pitted and scarred, as if a
glacier had passed over it. It held the pallor of skin deprived of natural
sunlight.

Hood’s eyes searched Cohen’s.

“Any word from the court?”

“Nothing. I am sorry.”

Hood’s chains clinked and knocked as he flattened his
hands on the table.

“Lane have her kid yet?”

“Not yet.” Cohen opened a file folder. “Let’s go over a
few points. I’ve spoken today with the governor’s office and the office of the
attorney general in Helena about seeking relief. Their response is to wait for
the outcome with the Supreme Court but they have not closed the door….”

Hood gave part of his attention to the TV news as Cohen
began summarizing the strengths of their appeal to the Supreme Court, most of
which Hood knew by heart. The sound was off but it was clear from the pictures
it was something significant about that big story the guards were talking
about, that little girl lost in Glacier National Park.

“…that the Petitioner’s conviction was derived from a
constitutionally invalid confession and from the testimony before the Court of
a sole witness, being a 13-year-old child…counsel failed in effective
cross-examination at trial...mitigating and circumstantial evidence….”

Hood could locate anyone lost in Glacier
National Park. It is sunny and warm the last day he sets foot in it,
twenty-two years ago. He can hear the girls and smell the fragrance of
freshly-laundered clothing before they near the spot where he is sitting. It is
at a forest edge near a goat ledge deep in northern Glacier, not far from an
abandoned turn-of-the-century trapper’s trail. They are laughing, chasing
butterflies.

He is just there.

They stop dead in their tracks and swallow. He has
startled them and it makes them laugh nervously.

“Hello,” he says.

The older one glances over her shoulder, as if
knowing they should return. Sensing danger. They just stood there. Frozen.

“How about a game?” he says.

The little one giggles.

The older one recognizes him. He sees it in her face:
You’re one of the Hoods. Trash. Keep away from us. That look broke his heart.
The others in town would never know how much they had hurt him. He was nineteen
and never had a friend in his life.

“We’re not supposed to play with you. We should go
back,” she says.

“Don’t say that. It hurts. Don’t go. Please. How
about a little game?”