Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

by C. J. Box

  “Do you know Coates’s defense attorney?” I asked, looking at a rotund man sitting next to Coates with an easy smile and manner.

  She nodded, and her eyes widened. “He’s got the best— Bertram Ludik. I don’t know how that little worm can afford him. I think if Charles Manson had hired Bertie Ludik, he’d be out there sticking forks into people to this day!”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “You watch,” she said. Then: “Luckily, Judge Moreland won’t allow Bertie to be Bertie.”

  “That guy I know,” I said, chinning toward Cody, who was approaching the stand.

  “Detective Hoyt,” she whispered sympathetically. “I’d like to take that man home and hug him and tell him everything will be all right.”

  “Why?” I asked, perplexed.

  “He’s a troubled soul,” she said. “Look at him. A great detective, but a troubled soul.”

  He’s just hungover, I thought.

  Cody was wearing a dark blue suit that gathered under his arms, a white shirt, and a solid but faded red tie. He looked courtroom savvy but disheveled at the same time. He shambled when he walked and raked his fingers back through his hair, messing it up. When he sat down in the witness chair, his eyes took in the room in a world-weary way that said “I’M A COP. JUST LET ME DO MY JOB.” I nodded at him, but I’m not sure he saw me.

  Judge Moreland said, “The witness is reminded he is still under oath.”

  “I understand, Your Honor.”

  “Miss Blair,” Judge Moreland said to the Assistant U.S. Attorney, an attractive redhead who had been huddled in conference with the U.S. Attorney at the prosecution table, “you may continue to question the witness.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, standing, holding the legal pad at her side as she approached the podium. “I have just a few more questions.”

  Moreland gestured impatiently for her to begin.

  “Detective Hoyt,” she said, flipping back the pages on her pad, “you said Friday before the weekend recess that when you apprehended the defendant on the morning of June 8 last summer, he was in the process of destroying evidence …”

  HERE’S WHAT I KNEW about Aubrey Coates, the Monster of Desolation Canyon.

  Every summer, children vanish. Over the last decade children had gone missing while on vacation with their families in the Mountain West.

  It happens quite a lot in the mountains. Often, the families are having picnics and reunions and suddenly someone realizes that one of the kids didn’t show up for dinner. Sometimes the children got lost, sometimes they got washed into rivers, sometimes they got mad at their siblings and “ran away,” and sometimes they climbed into the wrong car. Most are found. I remember when my dad and I volunteered to search for a missing little boy who’d wandered away from a campsite near the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness north of Helena. We took horses, and I remember it as a great and serious adventure combing the trails and riverbanks calling out “Jarrod!” for two days. Until Jarrod was found less than a mile away from where he’d vanished and confessed he’d gotten turned around in the forest and fallen asleep. He admitted hiding from volunteer rescue people as they walked and rode by because they were strangers, and he had been taught not to talk to strangers—even those calling his name.

  But in some isolated instances the children were never found. These children vanished from isolated locations in Colorado (Grand Junction, Pueblo, Trinidad), Utah (Wasatch, St. George), Wyoming (Rock Springs, Pinedale). Boys and girls, all under the age of twelve. In nearly every instance, the parents said the child was there one minute and gone the next. The places the children were last seen were playgrounds, near streams, on hiking trails. Then poof—they were gone.

  In retrospect, when one looks at the instances of these particular missing children over the years, you can see a pattern, and the authorities are blamed for not seeing what should have been in plain sight. But that’s unfair, as Cody explained to me. The children went missing in three states over ten years. The only “pattern” was that they vanished from campsites or in undeveloped areas. There were no calling cards left, no evidence of where the children were taken, and nothing left behind. All occurred in different jurisdictions, with different sets of law-enforcement personnel. The FBI was never called in because linkage wasn’t discovered until after the fact. None of the parents were ever contacted for ransom or taunted. No one confessed or implicated others. And none of the bodies was ever found.

  Aubrey Coates, who worked as a temporary replacement for campground hosts, was questioned on four different occasions because he had his trailer parked in the areas where the children went missing. In each instance, Coates answered all questions asked and was cooperative. More than once, Coates volunteered to help search for the missing children. He had no arrests, and his name didn’t exist on any sexual-predator lists. National Forest Ser vice staffing personnel in all three states knew him to be a kind of eccentric loner with his battered Airstream trailer that bristled with television and Internet satellite dishes and antennae, but he was considered experienced and reliable. Whenever a host got ill, or went on vacation, Coates was contacted to fill in. His job consisted of collecting overnight fees, keeping the campgrounds clean and neat, making sure campers didn’t overstay their limits, and providing advice and assistance to campers in states where camping is part of the common cultural fabric. In twenty years of being a campground host, only two complaints had been filed against him. The complaints—parents in one instance felt he leered at their children, and someone accused him of being rude because he angrily refused to come outside his trailer (“What was he doing in there?”) when a camping family wanted to borrow a tire pump—were minor and filed in two different states six years apart.

  Coates covered his tracks very well. Three of the missing children were taken after the regular campground hosts had returned, so his name never came up.

  Worst of all, Cody told me, was that the seven children prior to Courtney Wingate was an arbitrary number. The actual number of children Coates took could be ten, or twenty, or fifty. In the three decades across the West—years Coates has not accounted for—Cody said there were over seventy missing-children cases open from Nebraska to California. And dozens more in western Canada.

  Why just seven? Because the police found photos of seven missing children on Aubrey Coates’s laptop computer. If there had been others—and Cody thought Coates had been successful in destroying electronic records on a server located in the trailer as well as most of the laptop—Cody and the computer specialists brought in on the case couldn’t find them.

  After initially filing charges against Coates for the disappearance of all seven children in the hope Coates would bargain with them—lesser charges in exchange for a confession or the locations of the bodies—the federal prosecutor ran into a brick wall because Coates admitted nothing and proclaimed his innocence. After a few months, the charges were pared down to the disappearance of Courtney Wingate, who vanished most recently, in Desolation Canyon, where Coates had served as temporary campground host. Several digital photos of Courtney were found on Coates’s laptop, and her parents identified him as lurking around their campsite the night before she disappeared.

  As Cody and the prosecutor walked the jury through a PowerPoint pre sentation of the photos found on Coates’s computer—evidence Coates had been targeting the little girl for some time, including shots of her riding a big plastic three-wheeler and outside at an unidentifiable location with pine trees in the background—I found her parents behind the prosecutor’s table. It was painful to imagine what they were going through. Crystal Wingate, Courtney’s mother, was thin, pinched, hard, with the wizened face of a woman who’d seen tough times, none tougher than this. Donnie Wingate, who worked construction, had a big mustache and muttonchops, and he looked very uncomfortable being indoors. He was so tense as the photos were shown that I could see cords in his neck popping out. Donnie looked big enough and capable enough to step ov
er the rail barrier and snap Aubrey Coates’s neck before the bailiff could stop him. I wished he would. He glared at the back of Coates’s head as Cody explained the other photos he’d found on the laptop and the extensive—but sabotaged—array of electronics they’d discovered in Coates’s trailer.

  Cody testified for another hour and a half, much of it a summary and recap of his all-day session on Friday. I was riveted. In unambiguous language and with a manner that had been honed doing exactly this in years of courtroom appearances, Cody let himself be led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Blair. The U.S. Attorney himself—tall, bald, athletic—looked on with obvious approval.

  Cody built his case methodically from the initial missing-child call from the Wingates to his suspicion when he arrived at the scene at the request of the county sheriff and first saw the campground tender’s trailer with so much electronic capability.

  He said, “Coates’s trailer reminded me of one of those communications units our military uses overseas. You know, the ones that can transmit audio and visual data to some commander all the way in Florida or Nevada, so they can give orders on the battlefield in real time. There were dishes and antennae all over the trailer, and a generator outside if his campground power source wasn’t enough. So I asked myself why a man who wanted to be so connected to the Internet in such an immediate way would choose to be in an isolated campground when he could be in Denver, or any city. It started with that.”

  Without consulting his notes, Cody told the jury how, with that question in mind, he started his investigation of Aubrey Coates. The more he learned about Coates’s habits and travels and the missing children that corresponded with his locations, the more he suspected Coates of taking Courtney. The records of Coates’s satellite Internet provider showed patterns of massive activity, sometimes thousands of megabytes of data being uploaded and downloaded. Most of the activity took place from 2:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M.

  “The Internet activity fit the profile of someone involved in child pornography,” Cody said. “And he was not only receiving streaming-video files and other high-density material, but he was transmitting it—uploading it—as well.”

  Aubrey Coates himself sat stock-still during Cody’s damaging testimony. He didn’t shake his head or roll his eyes but seemed to watch and listen carefully. It wasn’t Coates who bothered me, though. Bertram Ludik seemed to behold Cody with amusement and barely disguised scorn. And as Cody built his case—convincingly, I thought, and so did Olive—the more agitated Ludik became. Once, when he sighed loudly, Judge Moreland shot a look in his direction that shut him up.

  Blair read from her pad. “So when you entered the defendant’s trailer on June 8 with the federal search warrant, what did you observe?”

  Cody said, “We found the defendant in the process of destroying his electronic files. The video camera had been wiped clean, and the memory sticks for his still cameras were missing. He’d already burned a bunch of magazines in a trash barrel next to the trailer, material which through analysis was later identified as photos and magazines containing graphic child pornography. Obviously, he had somehow learned of the raid in advance, but we were still able to find enough evidence to arrest him.”

  Blair introduced the exhibits—charred photos and magazine pages in plastic envelopes. Members of the jury passed the evidence from one to the other. Several jurors looked visibly sickened by what they saw, and one lowered her glasses to the tip of her nose and glared at Coates with undisguised contempt.

  “And the computers?” she asked, returning to her podium. “What did you find?”

  “The photos of Courtney Wingate we showed to the jury,” Cody said, “and photos of six other missing children.”

  When Cody said it, there were audible gasps in the courtroom. Heads of jurors swiveled toward Coates, who still sat impassively. It was a defining moment. How Donnie Wingate restrained himself is a mystery to me.

  Blair concluded her questions but asked the judge for the right to follow up with Cody later, which the judge granted. As she walked to her table, there was a noticeable spring in her step. I think at that moment if the courtroom were polled—jury included—the vote would have been unanimous to find a rope and hang Aubrey Coates right there and then.

  That is, until Bertram Ludik stood up, cleared his throat, shook his head sadly at Cody as if admonishing a child, and walked to the podium stiff-armed and stiff-legged, like a bear.

  AT FIRST, I couldn’t understand where Ludik was headed, and I didn’t listen closely. Cody’s testimony had taken everyone in the room up a roller coaster and plunged them down, me included. My mind wandered. Ludik’s questions were procedural. When the search warrant was applied for, when it was granted. The exact time of the raid. How the items found inside Coates’s trailer were cataloged. How many officers were present and the duties of each. Several times, Ludik messed up names of officers, and Cody had to correct him. Cody’s patience with Ludik was impressive, I thought. He was gentle and professional, and I could see that the jurors liked him. Ludik seemed confused and disorganized. His questions bounced all over the place, and he paused after Cody’s answers as if searching on his note pad for what to ask next to fill the time. When I looked to Olive with amusement, wondering what she had seen in the past of Bertram Ludik that so impressed her, she looked back and shrugged.

  I looked at my watch, wondering how long it would go before Judge Moreland concluded the session for the day. I reconstructed my meeting with Julie Perala and the black ball of dread returned. My mind drifted back to yesterday.

  I was jolted back to the courtroom when Blair bolted to her feet, saying, “Objection, Your Honor! Mr. Ludik’s line of questioning is without foundation.”

  I looked to Olive. She had heard his question and was straining to hear more.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Bertram asked Cody something about the laptop.”

  “Approach the bench,” Judge Moreland said, clearly irritated with Ludik.

  The discussion between the attorneys and the judge was heated. Judge Moreland covered his microphone with his hand while they argued. The U.S. Attorney heard enough from the table that he joined in the discussion. I had no idea, of course, what was being said.

  Because Cody was in the witness box, he could obviously hear snippets of the argument. Although his face didn’t change expression, it drained of color, and he seemed to be staring at something over our heads as if watching his life pass by. I recognized the look, and it scared me because I’d seen it before. When we were in high school together, Brian’s father gathered the three of us, sat us down in his den, and asked which one of us had broken into his wet bar and taken two bottles of bourbon. I knew it wasn’t me, and I guessed it wasn’t Brian. Cody was the guilty party and looked it and finally confessed.

  What, I wondered, was he guilty of now?

  JUDGE MORELAND SENT the attorneys away. The U.S. Attorney looked furious and sat back down in a huff. Assistant U.S. Attorney Blair seemed tight as a bowstring, and she glared at Cody, her jaws clenched. Ludik, meanwhile, smiled at the jury as he walked back to the podium. I realized now Ludik’s opening act of stumbling and disorganization had been a ruse, a way of getting Cody off his guard. His questions were now crisp, and his tone contemptuous.

  “Detective Hoyt, I need you to clarify something for me.”

  Cody nodded. Then, before he could be reminded by the judge to speak so the reporter could hear him, said, “Yes.”

  “During the raid on my client’s trailer, your report indicates 108 items of so-called evidence were taken.”

  “I believe that’s correct,” Cody said.

  “I need better than your belief, Detective. You can check your notes or read the file. Don’t worry, I can wait.”

  I knew Cody well enough to know he was angry, but he internalized it. It was the face and attitude he used to adopt when he played middle linebacker in high school, just before he fired through the offensive line and crushed somebody. He f
lipped through the pages of the case file until he found what he was looking for.

  “Yes. There were 108 items of evidence.”

  “And these items of evidence were logged in at the Denver Police Department facility, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “But this was a joint federal and local task force. Why weren’t the items taken to the federal facility, as per normal procedure in this kind of investigation?”

  Cody cleared his throat and glared at Ludik. “Because the feds are nine-to-fivers. I knew our building would be open.”

  “So you not only arrested my client without informing or involving your federal partners, you took the so-called evidence to your friends downtown as well?”

  “Yes I did,” Cody said.

  “Interesting. Now back to the evidence itself. At the DPD, each item is given a description and assigned a specific number, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Each and every item. Each piece of charred paper from the trash barrel, everything.”

  “Correct.”

  “I’ve looked this list over many times, Detective, and I can’t seem to find the description or number for the hard drive of the server in my client’s trailer.”

  Cody looked up at Ludik.

  “Did I miss something?” Ludik asked.

  “No. There was no hard drive.”

  “What?”

  “I said there was no hard drive. Coates destroyed it or hid it before we could have it analyzed.”

  Ludik rubbed his face. “Detective, I’m a Luddite when it comes to computers. My wife calls me ‘Luddite Ludik’ ”— this caused some titters from the jury—“so please forgive me if I have to ask you to explain obvious things.”

  Judge Moreland, bless him, cut Ludik off at the pass. “Mr. Ludik, please get to the point or drop it,” he said sternly.

  “Yes, Your Honor. Sorry. Detective Hoyt, correct me if I’m wrong, but a hard drive is like the brains of a computer, correct? Where all of the files, all of the memories, are kept?”