Cold Fear (20 page)

THIRTY-TWO

Stay focused,
Dolores. Focused.
Fidelity Bravery Integrity. I cannot let the team down. Got to find the lost
little girl.
But right now, FBI Special Agent Dolores Harding had to sit
down to catch her breath.

She and Orin Mills had been scouring their assigned
patch of Grizzly Tooth ever since daybreak. Coming up on fourteen hours.

“Over here, Mills!”

Twenty yards off, he raised his walking stick, signaling
he would join her on the rock ledge in the shade of a stand of pine.

The sun was high. Harding’s calves and thighs ached as
she reached for her water bottle, scanning the mountain’s majesty from behind
her sunglasses. She was a marathoner, a twenty-nine-year-old hard-driving agent
assigned to the OCPD at the Salt Lake City Division. It seemed only yesterday
she was surveilling two case targets who were to arrive at Salt
Lake City International Airport from Mexico City via LAX. They were no-shows.
Could have been bad information. Or they were tipped.

It was two days ago, wasn’t it? She was exhausted out
here. For after that job, Harding suddenly found herself partnered in Glacier
National Park with Special Agent Orin Mills with White Collar at the Division.
Cerebral guys. Harding and Mills were part of the horde of agents dispatched
from Utah. Even for some case-hardened agents, it was a gut-wrenching
assignment. Harding saw how some of the agents who were fathers were quite
pensive about this one, while the young jerks were quietly tabulating
availability pay.

Mills was a big, friendly, soft-spoken,
fifty-two-year-old Mormon with three grandchildren. Took this emergency
assignment personally. Harding, a blue-collar girl who left Pennsylvania’s Rust
Belt to study criminology at John Jay in New York, and Mills, a church-goer who
was raised in Provo, had scoured Sector 21 three times. Heartache written in
Orin’s face as he joined her on the ledge, inhaling the air as it cooled in the
sunset.

“Not much time left for looking today, Dolores. Can you
imagine the horror this child is enduring?”

Harding regarded the mountains, the glacier valleys, and
felt bad for quietly complaining about her body aches and discomfort. She was
an adult FBI agent in jeans and a T-shirt, equipped with heavy socks, boots,
water, food, a semi-automatic .40-caliber Glock, bear repellant, bug spray, first-aid
kit, radio, training, physical conditioning. If a few hours searching a
mountain slope had exacted this much from her, what would it do to a lost,
frightened child from the city? Harding became angry at the mountains, as if
they were an informant refusing to disclose life-and-death information. Come
on, give her up. You do not need her. Give her up. This has gone on long
enough.

Harding reached for her well-thumbed sector map.
Precision-folded and marked.

“We’ve got some time, Orin. Any areas you want to
re-visit--
darn!”

Harding dropped her water bottle; it tumbled and swished
for a few yards. She climbed from the ledge carefully to retrieve it. It had
rolled into a small surface fissure. As she reached for it, a metallic glint
seized her attention. Harding shone her penlight into the crack, which was
about two feet. She removed her sunglasses, eyes adjusting to the light on a
small ax.

“Mills! We got something here!” Concentrating, Harding
was certain she saw a lace pattern of browned blood on the head reaching to the
handle. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. “Mills! It’s not good! Stay where you are
and get ERT on the radio. We need them here now!”

The FBI’s Evidence Response Team descended upon the
scene. Yellow crime scene tape sealed the area. Radios crackled; helicopters
landed nearby by or hovered; photographs were taken. Harding was instructed to
remain at the scene, to maintain the evidence chain.

Suddenly, she found Frank Zander next to her.

“You’re Harding? You made the find?”

Even dreamier up close.

“Yes, I found it. Just dumb-ass luck.”

“Good work.”

It was a camping ax. A one-and-a-half pound Titan
Striker with a drop-forged steel head and a sixteen-inch curved handle with a
rubberized cushion grip. It was placed in a plastic evidence bag and flown from
the area on Harding’s lap under the last vestiges of daylight.

It fit the description of Doug Baker’s ax given earlier
by the New York detective, thought Zander. They could check the serial number
for distribution points, run credit cards. He was standing off by himself at
the scene, staring at the Rockies. A blood-stained T-shirt, a bloodied hatchet,
a public argument, a domestic dispute at home, a mother undergoing counseling.
The pieces were falling into place. A noose was being fashioned. Zander’s jaw
clenched.

It was time to talk to Doug Baker again.

Time to learn the truth.

THIRTY-THREE

Concern flowed
through the phone
line from John Jackson, the chief lawyer for Montana’s attorney general in Helena.

“David, are you all right?”

Since David Cohen had taken on Isaiah Hood’s case three
years ago, the two lawyers had developed a strong professional kinship.

“John, there’s been a development.”

“A development?
What sort
of development?”

Standing alone in his disheveled motel room in Deer
Lodge, Cohen sniffed and ran a shaking hand through his hair.

“A grave, urgent development.”

“David the Governor will not intervene. The sentence
will be--”

“John, I believe he is innocent.”

Jackson
knew losing a death
sentence appeal was a punishing blow for death penalty lawyers to absorb. Jackson had lawyer friends in Florida and Texas. Few people know of the horror they often
endure. One committed suicide. Jackson gave the eulogy.

“I absolutely believe that the state will be executing
an innocent man.”

Cohen’s eyes burned into the TV news.

“David, the Supreme Court has rejected you. There is no
basis of law--”

“To hell with the law.”

“David, have you been drinking?”

“No. John. Just hold off on your press release and give
me some time--”

“I can’t I--”

“John, I swear, if you go ahead with this, Montana will never recover. You will have your place in history for having sealed its fate
as the judicial pariah of the nation. I swear--”

“David, I know this is a difficult time--”

Cohen sniffed and checked his watch.

“Listen. Hear me out. All I am asking, John, is for two
hours to talk to my client. Then let me talk to the governor. I guarantee he
will want to hear this before you kill Hood.”

“I don’t know….”

“Just hold off on anything for that long. Christ, John
we’re still two days away. Please just hold off. No press releases yet. Not a
word.”

Jackson
sighed. Cohen heard his
chair squeak.

“John, please. You have a man’s life in your hands.”

Jackson
’s concern was for Cohen,
not for Hood, the child killer. No one in the entire state was concerned for
him, except the candle-holding protesters, but they were not abundant in Montana. Still, Jackson could not see what harm two hours would do. The state had all the
power. He could stall the release for that long without much difficulty. Most
people were distracted by the search for the little girl in Glacier. Seemed to
have eclipsed Hood’s case.

“I will see what I can do. You’ve got two hours.”

Now with the sun setting, everything became clearer to
Cohen as he sped his Neon along Lake Conley Road to the prison, going through
the security ritual, the razor wire, the clanging doors, icy stares from the
guards, to see Hood on death row.

Hood’s reaction to the TV news reports on the search now
made sense.

He had a seizure. He recovered shortly after, but his
nervous system short-circuited, sending him into a trance when he saw her.

He knew right then it was her.

Cohen was admitted to death row and was taken into the
visitor’s room. The TV there was switched off.

“Could you please turn that on, to one of the
twenty-four news channels and leave the sound on low so we can hear it?”

“You want to watch TV?” the guard said.

“Yes.”

“Suit yourself.”

Above the TV’s sound, he heard Hood’s chains
approaching. Suddenly Cohen was drowning in anguish and doubt. What the hell
was he doing? He could not pull this off. This is unethical. He had to face the
truth. He lost.

“…the ashes will be distributed…”

The door handle turned. Oh God. Cohen swallowed.

Hood stood before him, shackled in his orange prison coveralls.
He sat down, his eyes shooting up to the TV, then to Cohen.

“Supreme Court turned me down, right, David?”

Cohen peered into Hood’s eyes, believing for the first
time he was seeing into the soul of an innocent man. He could not find the
words to tell him he was going to be lawfully executed.

“I--I am so sorry, Isaiah.”

Hood flattened his hands on the table.

“Well, I guess that’s all she wrote, huh?” Hood
attempted a smile. Then Hood stood, shuffled over, extended his handcuffed
hands to shake Cohen’s, his chains chinking.

“David, you did your best. You’re a fine man. Thank
you.”

Hood returned to his seat.

Cohen sniffed. “Um, we still have an option.”

“You don’t mean the Board? There’s no chance there.”

“No.” Cohen sniffed again, unsnapping the locks of his
briefcase to produce some files. “Your claim of innocence.”

Hood unleashed a chilling con stare, his voice was damn
near cold-blooded. “This some sort of fucking joke?”

“No joke.” Cohen opened the file to the photograph of
the girl whose testimony secured his death sentence. “Who is that in the old
picture?”

Hood stared at it. All those years ago. He did not think
he ever saw that particular picture of the older one.

“That’s the sister of the dead girl. The one who
testified.”

“Uh-huh.” Cohen turned, indicating the TV. “And who did
you see up there earlier in the report of the missing child? It will come up
again.”

Hood looked at Cohen unsure if he was nuts…or his
salvation.

“It was her. Same one, only older and now her kid is
lost in the mountains.”

“That’s right but nobody knows it’s her, Isaiah. Her
name is different. She changed it. Which is curious.”

“So what. David, I know almost as much about the law as
you. So her daughter is missing. So what?”

“Look at it this way. Admittedly we presented nothing
new in your Supreme Court petition, which was an attempt to create reasonable
doubt, which I believe should have been a factor.”

“Your point?

“You told me you did not kill Rachel Ross. Her death was
not murder and her sister is the only living person who knows the truth.”

“That is right.”

Cohen cleared his throat, swallowed anxiously, then
dropped his voice.

“Suppose it got out through the news in a story as big
as the search story itself that your claim of innocence is directly linked to
the disappearance of Paige Baker, daughter of the only witness in your case?”

Hood stared long and hard at his young Chicago lawyer.