by Rick Mofina
Bowman struggled to hold Emily. Her entire exhausted body was writhing in torment. Others rushed to her aid as her echoing screams were soon drowned out by the approaching thunder of an FBI helicopter, forcing the command post staff to struggle to hold down the flapping maps, as Emily rocked in Bowman’s arms.
What the hell is this family hiding?
TWENTY-FIVE
In San Francisco, a few days before Paige Baker vanished in the Rocky Mountains, Sheila Walton was having trouble sleeping.
It arose from a call Walton had received from Henrietta Umara, principal of Beecher Lowe, requesting a meeting. A day or so before school break, Walton’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Cammi, confided something that had alarmed Umara
“She told me one of her teachers had”--Umara searched for the precise word--“allegedly struck her.”
“Hit her? Who was it? What happened?”
Walton’s body numbed, her ears rang, as she sat there in Umara’s office, absorbing the words. Not believing them.
“Ms. Walton, has Cammi told you anything of this?”
Walton shook her head, eyes stinging with tears. “Not a word. I can’t believe she did not come to me. What did she say happened? When?”
Umara passed her a tissue.
“She was vague about it. She provided no details. Did not even identify the teacher, until this morning. She called me.”
“She called you?”
“It could be a misunderstanding. A misinterpretation. Or, it could be serious. She alleged to me that something happened a few days ago. I had to attend a conference in Sacramento. I could not reach you. Cammi told me the incident took place five days prior to the start of the school break.”
“What happened?”
“Her words: ‘My teacher slapped me.’”
“Slapped her?” Walton blinked back tears. “Who is this teacher? Have they been suspended? I want to know more.”
“I will deal with the teacher first.”
“You mean before I press charges?”
“Ms. Walton, I know this is difficult, but we’re moving a little fast here.”
“You don’t want me to press charges?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Nothing like that yet.”
“Well, what then? You call me down here and --”
“Please, I’d like you to try to learn more from Cammi about what is alleged to have happened. So far I only have her allegation.”
Walton’s gaze went beyond Umara to the office walls, the U.S. flag, the framed certificates, a photo of her with the first lady, and the plaques of the school’s achievements. She now understood why Cammi had seemed so withdrawn, so sad recently.
Why didn’t you tell Mom first?
“What do we do now, Ms. Umara?”
“Proceed cautiously. I’ll speak to the teacher. He does not know yet. No one else knows yet. This is extremely confidential. As I said, Cammi was vague. I am hoping you will be able to clarify what she believes took place. Although school is recessed, I have the safety of other students to consider. Please get back to me as soon as possible.
“I will. Thank you.”
After walking Walton to her car, Umara returned to her office and the personnel file folder on her desk. She flipped through it again and sighed. Doug Baker’s reputation, his accomplishments were exemplary. Stellar.
What is it, Doug. Drinking? Drugs? Stress at home? You need some time off? If we could have talked first. I hope you check your machine at home for messages. Doug, I have to go by the book. No protection. She looked at his school I.D. photograph. Into his eyes. It can’t be. I thought I knew you. But if it is true. Cammi Walton! The daughter of Sheila Walton, the junior partner in Pitman Rosser and Cook, specializing in criminal trials. Sheila Walton, the San Francisco police commissioner, pegged by some as the next mayor or U.S. Senator.
For several days at their uphill home straddling the Richmond District and Presidio Heights, Walton struggled to get Cammi discuss the incident.
“It was Doug Baker, my English teacher. I don’t know why he hates me. He got mad at me and just slapped me. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Besides Ms. Umara and me, have you told anyone else?”
“No.”
“No friends? Not even Lilly or Beth? Be straight.”
“Nobody.”
Cammi distanced herself from her mother at the far end of the sofa. Her knees pulled together under her chin as she gripped the remote and flipped between muted music-video channels. Tears rolled down her daughter’s cheeks. Walton felt helpless.
She had met this guy once at some school function. They talked about football and city politics. Good-looking and virile. Beautiful wife. Daughter.
None of this made sense.
“Cammi, tell me exactly what happened. Everything.”
Tears continued welling in her daughters eyes.
“It was after class. I went up to ask him a question about Lord of the Flies and he pushed me against the wall. He got so angry with me. I was so scared. He called me stupid for not understanding the book, He said people who have problems should talk about them, not keep them to themselves. Then he slapped me, telling me not to be so stupid.”
Walton was stunned.
It did not make sense. The image of that man hurting her child appeared in her mind like a scene from a nightmare. Such a violation. Walton reached for the phone to call this guy right now. Stop. No, not yet. It just did not make sense.
Could this be more complicated? Could it be fallout from her divorce with Greg? From three years ago? Lord, would she have to tell him? She anticipated his reaction from his cell phone in Santa Monica: “Why aren’t you taking care of her, Sheila? What is more important to you than Cammi?”
The bastard was getting married next month. Cammi seemed to be handling it well.
Maybe Walton could resolve it without calling Greg. But Cammi had been on a path of defiance for the past year--over clothes, friends, curfew, phone time, make-up, the unicorn tattoo she threatened to get on her ankle. Her grades had slipped drastically.
Walton looked in on her one night, while she slept, marveling at how her child was changing before her eyes. From diapers to body piercing. Her baby was gone. A confused, headstrong young woman in a fourteen-year-old’s body had replaced her. She stroked her hair and kissed her forehead.
She called Umara at home to tell her she needed a little more time to try to get her daughter to talk about the incident.
A few mornings later, Walton reached the peak of her crisis. As usual, Lupe, Walton’s housekeeper, placed that morning’s San Francisco Star next to the ceramic coffeepot on the table, in the nook, overlooking the huge shade trees of the backyard.
The article and pictures on the search for Doug Baker’s daughter, Paige, awaited her. What is this? Walton devoured it before touching her coffee.
“Cammi!”
They went over the article several times with Cammi repeating, “Oh my God! That poor little girl!” Walton’s fears increased looking at Paige Baker’s picture in the newspaper, then at Cammi. She looked hard at the picture of Doug Baker.
Walton sent Lupe out to buy all the newspapers. She and Cammi read every story on the case while flipping through the TV news. Cammi sat before the set, a hand covering her mouth. Watching the helicopters, the tense faces of the reporters in Glacier National Park, Walton struggled to think clearly. Her instincts as a criminal-trial lawyer, a seasoned police commissioner, a guilt-ridden single mother, all churned in her stomach as she watched her daughter’s reaction to the story. Cammi turned to her, eyes filled with worry. “Mom, what do you think happened?”
Walton searched the TV news for her answer, concentrating the same way she did when she studied confidential police reports.
“I may want you to talk to somebody, honey.”
“Talk to somebody?”
“Let me make a few calls first.”
Walt
on went to her study and sat at her desk. She shuddered, placing her face in her hands to collect herself. A moment later, her hands were shaking as she dialed the first number. The cellular phone for the chief of the SFPD.
TWENTY-SIX
Time was Brady Brook’s enemy.
Second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, it was defeating him.
Despite all that Brook, the searchers and the dog teams had tried, they could not locate a trace of Paige Baker or her beagle.
The hope of using a helicopter equipped with an infrared heat-sensing camera was abandoned because the region was too perilous to fly night searches. Paige had been in the wilderness for more than fifty hours. If they did not find her within the next two days, three at the most, it was not good. Dread grew for the awful moment he would have to look into the faces of Emily and Doug Baker to tell them their daughter was gone forever.
Or would he face something worse?
Brook glanced from the map table at the Bakers, huddled at the edge of the site, looking so small against the mountains, hanging on to each other under the eyes of the FBI agents.
Was he in the presence of a pair of cold-blooded murderers?
It hinged on what his people turned up. He went back to concentrating on the search, quietly talking on the radio, studying maps and the terrain data on the laptop computers.
He went over everything. Areas of probability according to Paige’s weight, height, speed of travel, weather conditions, her clothing, her food supply, her experience. Outlining new sectors, searching others again. He had the very best people out there who knew every ledge and loose rock zone. They had out-of-state SAR people, volunteers from surrounding counties and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, all experienced in the backcountry, searching outer sections; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Waterton Park wardens were scouring the Canadian side that borders Grizzly Tooth Trail. Several helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft helped from the sky.
Yet, so much was working against them. The first night it rained, washing out a scent for the dogs. She was in bear territory. And having her dog was like ringing the dinner bell. Why had they not discovered a single shred of this kid? It was disturbing. The park superintendent, the planning and operation chiefs, all agreed when they flew out earlier for an on-site status briefing. It was puzzling. By this point, they usually found something, a footprint, a candy wrapper. Something.
Brook was a God-fearing, churchgoing father of two daughters aged seven and nine. It was as if he was searching for one of his own children. He never counted on it taking such a private emotional toll. As district ranger at Glacier for six years, he had been Incident Commander in scores of major searches. He knew each one had its own circumstances. In this one, Paige could be hiding. She could be surviving. She could have fallen. Injured. Slipped into a crevasse. Slipped into a river, drowned, her body carried downstream. She could have been taken by a bear. Abducted by a stranger. He glanced at the Bakers. Or worse.
He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his face, remembering the Bakers’ first reaction when certain questions about Paige’s demeanor were raised. They were so obviously evasive, guarded, not forthcoming.
He also remembered the sobering section of the SAR Plan that advised in major cases to consider criminal intent no matter how remote the possibility. Brook’s radio on the map table received a static-filled transmission. A distant one broken up badly, until the signal bounced off of a repeater in a passing helicopter and came through clearly.
Ranger Tim Holloway was one of the Park’s best SAR people. He was in outstanding physical condition. He could move his lean, firm surfer’s body over the roughest territory faster than anyone else in the park. “Only an eagle could cover more ground faster than Holloway,” other rangers joked.
Last year, when he turned twenty-five, Holloway climbed Mount Everest with friends from England and New Zealand. He reached the summit. It had been a dream since he was a kid growing up in Santa Ana, California. So Holloway was Brook’s natural choice to backtrack on Grizzly Tooth to scour the treacherous shoulders of the trail.
But Holloway had found zero since he started, and it was upsetting him. Determined to find the missing girl, he pushed himself, moving swiftly, scanning thoroughly every inch of the trail’s shoulder. If there was anything to be found, he would find it. He had passed along a hair-raisingly narrow ledge about twenty yards beneath the trail, a mile or so south of the campsite, when he saw it. Holloway grunted as he made his way to a stand of spruce, on a steep incline below the trail.
“Bingo, dude.”
A small pink T-shirt entangled in the branches. It looked so out of place, creepy, like a primitive offering. Did a griz do that? Holloway swallowed. It looked blood-stained. Holloway reached for his radio.
Within a half hour, the FBI had its evidence people at the scene, sealing the area, photographing it from the ground, from the trail above, even from the helicopter pounding overhead and the airplane from a higher altitude. They were also videotaping the entire procedure.
“Like I keep telling you, nobody has touched it since I found it,” Holloway told the FBI people.
They put on blue coveralls, pulled on surgical gloves, sifted the area, took more pictures and then up-close video before plucking the shirt from the tree. One produced a kit with test strips, dipped in a small bottle of distilled water and touched it against the stain. It turned dark green confirming the stain was blood. The T-shirt was placed in a bag and sealed; more pictures were taken.
One of the agents with a small suitcase told Holloway to sit down.
“Take off your boots and give them to me. Need an impression of them.”
“Sure thing.” Holloway began unlacing them. “You know, a bear or animal could have put the shirt up there.”
“Also looks like it could have been tossed up there from the trail. Like someone was trying to get rid of it in a hurry.”
Holloway turned to gauge the height and angle. FBI dude could have a solid theory there.
The T-shirt was choppered to the command center. Inside the FBI’s large white evidence van, the T-shirt was subjected to a special reagent test; its stained fibers were examined under a microscope. Conclusion: the blood was human. Urgent calls and arrangements were made to fly the T-shirt immediately to the crime lab used by King County in Seattle, to undergo further analysis.
In keeping with chain of evidence procedure, an agent who helped recover the shirt was rushed to Kalispell Airport. The FBI and the Justice Department delayed departure of a Seattle-bound Northwest DC-9 in time for the agent to board it. The shirt was in his briefcase.
In the task force office of the command center, Agent Frank Zander and the other investigators watched the video recording of the scene where the shirt was discovered. They studied the images in silence. The T-shirt looked so small when one of the evidence team members displayed it for the camera. It was horribly stained with blood. Zander stared at it coldly.
After the video ended, agents at the table transferred the digital still color photographs of the shirt into their computer with the enlarged monitor. They selected an image of the shirt unfurled to its full size, emblazoned with the browned blood. They froze the image, split the screen, clicked on the mouse until the faces of Doug, Emily and Paige Baker and Kobee appeared. They were the pictures Emily had taken at the outset of their trip to Glacier.
Smiling. Happy. Breathtaking scenery. All-American bliss.
The agents stopped on one photo of Doug and Paige. His arm around her; both were grinning. Paige was wearing a pink T-shirt. The agents sized the two photos, unifying their scale. Paige, happy and bright in her pink shirt; next to it, the shirt found in the trees. Bloodied.
Zander looked into Doug’s eyes. Into Paige’s eyes.
In most child homicides, a parent or guardian was the perpetrator. The “nearest and dearest” rule. Zander knew that. In crimes of passion, frenzied rage, involving the use of knives or bladed instrume
nts, it was common for the attacker to cut or injure himself. Zander knew that. What he did not know--his eyes boring into those of Paige, Doug and Emily--was the truth about this family. Something happened and he was going to find out.
“I think I’d like to get Doug and Emily Baker back in here and put them on the box.
Lloyd Turner, FBI Special Agent in Charge of Salt Lake City Division, nodded. “It’s already on its way, Frank.”
The tapping of a pen on yellow legal pad distracted Zander and the others to Nora Lam, legal counsel from the U.S. Justice Department.
“You’re intending to polygraph the parents, which you know cannot be used as evidence.”
“I am aware of that,” Zander said.
“You are walking a fine legal line here. Depending on how you proceed and when, or if, you Mirandize these parents, you could cross it. You understand what is at stake?”
Zander turned back to the picture of Paige Baker.
Remembering the fragrance of magnolias and peaches, the red mud of a country road to rural Georgia and the graves of little two boys, one of whom he failed to save.
“I understand what is at stake. Believe me. I understand.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Molly Wilson’s bracelets tinkled as she typed at her computer terminal in the San Francisco Star newsroom.
She had been on the story for several hours today and had nothing fresh on the Bakers despite all of her legwork in their neighborhood. Huck and Willa Meyers, Emily’s relatives, were definitely on the road. Seniors don’t sit at home in their rockers anymore.
But Wilson was counting on a lead she got from a neighbor girl who baby-sat for Doug and Emily: the Meyer’s home address in Lake Merced. Wilson drove down there, did some door-knocking and found out that Huck and Willa were members of the Wander the World RV club. At her terminal, she called up the club’s Web site. It had messenger service linked to all affiliated RV parks. She fired off an urgent one, then worked on her story.