Arguedas and his partner went out each day to ask about our son, reporting their findings every night to Peggy, Lauren, and me at the Pearl. It was the rainy season, so guests were few. Arguedas spoke only Spanish, and I transcribed Lauren’s translation into my notebook. At the end of his investigation Arguedas gave us a written report.

Among those who had seen Pata Lora and the gringo together, the middle-aged Arnoldo of Dos Brazos had the most details because the pair had stopped by and smoked marijuana with him at his house. Arnoldo told Arguedas on September 9, 2014:

I saw “Pata de Lora” walk by with a gringo and sit at the entrance of my house. They stopped to rest for a while and asked for water. “Pata de Lora” had marijuana in a plastic cup. It was around three ounces. “Pata de Lora” told me he was going to take him for free. The gringo told me they were going to “Carate.” The gringo had money, food, a cell phone and a large camera. He was carrying a large backpack, blue. They were there for about half an hour, then packed their backpacks and left. Carate is about five hours away walking. The gringo was dressed with a blue-collar shirt. The gringo said they would return in eight days. The gringo had a good roll of money in a briefcase.

As with Arnoldo, most of the individuals interviewed by Arguedas confirmed and extended what we’d found already. Some were honest and said they didn’t remember. Others recounted bizarre stories that didn’t make sense. Pata Lora’s answers seemed to blend fiction based on fact with fantasy. Nobody disputed Pata Lora had hiked with a gringo. The fantasy was calling him Cody.

During the week that Arguedas investigated, the OIJ brought a short-legged bloodhound to the Osa. Nose down sniffing for scent, the earnest dog’s ears dragged in the jungle mud. An ad hoc group accompanied the dog and his handler into the forest as they headed for one of the tunnels where people reported the fetid smell of decay. A miner’s bones would be found there two months later.

I had hoped to join the canine-led investigative team but couldn’t, and instead ran to meet them on their return. I was overwhelmed to see Kique and Jenkins with the dog handler and Jorge Jimenez of the OIJ. Kique had convinced Brad Meiklejohn that Jenkins needed a more thorough investigation in his role in Roman’s disappearance. But here were two sworn enemies—ranger and miner—working together, looking for my son.

The PI’s report confirmed what we’d learned, leaving Peggy and me with no new direction to go. Maybe Roman had gone to Panama. Maybe he had been kidnapped, or worse. In any event, it was time to go home. We would return before Christmas to look in Panama. We said farewell to our friends, Lauren and Toby, and their sympathetic employees at the Iguana and flew back to Alaska.

ONCE HOME MID-SEPTEMBER, I felt emotionally drained, broken and empty. Peggy and I distracted ourselves with house projects and work. I had research reports due, classes to teach, graduate students to advise. Sitting in my office, my grad student Ganey came by to say that he knew that I loved Roman and that he was sorry Roman was missing. These simple words moved me, and I thanked him as he hurried, perhaps embarrassed, out of my office to work on his thesis.

Of course, I knew Roman loved me, too. I remembered the times he showed it, the moments he said it. Once, home from a two-month mountain bike trip the length of the Alaska Range, my hair wild, my beard long and thick, he said, “Dad, you look like what you are—an adventurer!” When he learned in school that the ancient Greeks espoused balance among mathematics, science, philosophy, reading, writing, and sports he complemented me in his understated way: “Hey, Pops, you would have made a good ancient Greek.” But my love for him was obviously not enough. He was still missing.

Peggy and I watched escapist shows on Netflix in which investigators solved missing persons cases in a single episode. We binged on TV series that featured middle-aged and young men working together with mutual respect and a lot of good-natured back-and-forth teasing. Each night we would fall asleep to these diversions. My friends took me packrafting down my favorite run before freeze-up, then ice skating on wild ice across frozen lakes, rivers, and marshes.

On one long-distance skate trip in November, two of us flew to arctic Alaska. With backpacks and camping gear, we skated one hundred miles between remote Inupiaq villages in two days. Moving that fast so simply was exhilarating, invigorating, even momentous. In Kotzebue, where we ended the marathon skate, cell service was poor and I texted Peggy to tell her we’d made it and that I’d only fallen fifty times.

Well, I only fell once, she texted back, but I broke my wrist in three places!

Oh NO! I texted. Let me call you. I felt a familiar pang. Once again, I was guilty of being gone when a loved one suffered. I called Peggy on the hotel phone. Out at a friend’s lakeside cabin, she’d caught an edge on her skates and gone down, reflexively catching herself with an outstretched arm but snapping her wrist instead. Lying there, she set her own broken limb, got in her car, then drove—alone and with one hand—an hour and a half to the hospital. She would require a surgeon to screw a plate to her arm bone, then a second surgery to have it removed once her wrist had healed.

HER ARM WAS still in a splint when we went to Costa Rica before Christmas. We drove around looking for green Salomon shoes on the wrong feet, familiar gear in a second-hand store, recognizable clothes hanging in a backyard. A Catholic priest took us to the small chapels that he served around the Osa. We posted flyers offering a $5,000 reward. Lauren suggested the amount as a believable figure and enough to motivate locals to look. It listed her and Jorge Jimenez’s numbers.

Nobody called. Unlike David Gimelfarb, Roman was nowhere to be seen. Either no one was talking, nobody knew anything, or five grand wasn’t enough to attract scam artists. Maybe he just wasn’t there.

We drove to the Panamanian border a couple of hours south of the Osa. We met with the police, thinking maybe Roman had tried to sneak into Panama on his way to the Darién Gap, the last jungle on his checklist. We asked what happened to illegal entrants and learned that the police detain them until they have collected a sufficient number to send en masse back to their country of origin.

The embassy had inquired early on, but found no indication Roman ever crossed into neighboring Nicaragua or Panama or ended up in either country’s hospitals or jails. Afterward, Peggy headed home and I flew to Panama City to rent a car and drive to the end of the Pan-American Highway at the Darién Gap. The half-dozen police checkpoints along the way question every driver and passenger in every vehicle. Could Roman have possibly passed through all these without a passport stamp, like he had the Nicaraguan border?

Yaviza, the village at the end of the road, felt hostile and dangerous with its grim-faced creoles, armed soldiers, bored Emberá natives, and end-of-the-roaders. After walking around the village on both sides of the river, hanging posters with the $5,000 reward, I spent the night in a guesthouse, shutting the louvers to keep out Anopheles mosquitoes from crawling into my room through the tattered screen windows. The room had no air-conditioning, no ceiling fan. Belly-up, sweaty, naked on a thin sheet over a soiled mattress alone in the dark, I reviewed the last five months. Our efforts, assumptions, and fears had crystallized in verse:

Trial and error,

Failure and terror,

The truth of the matter at hand.

Death in a whisper

Is so much to weather

For the life of a wife

And her man.

Chapter 42

TIJAT

Carson Ulrich, Ken Fornier, Jeff Sells, Roman, and Peggy, Dos Brazos, July 2015.

Courtesy of the author

The next day I drove back to Panama City, relieved to escape the Gap unscathed. My gut said Roman had never made it that far, but if he had decided to slip into Panama unannounced and undetected, he had succeeded.

By February 2015, we had run out of options. We decided it had to be foul play because no one had found any sign of him in Corcovado beyond Zeledón. This didn’t mean that I wouldn’t go back into the jungle to look, but it did mean we needed expertise that we simply didn’t have: criminal investigative skills by an American, rather than—or together with—a Costa Rican. Ideally, it would be someone bilingual who knew how to get people to talk but who would also listen to us and learn what we knew of our son. It was a tall order.

For most parents of missing children, there is no point—until they are able to lay their hands on the remains of their offspring—when they will concede: My missing child is dead. Six weeks after he’d disappeared, the odds of finding Roman alive seemed even. But after six months, I knew enough biology and human survival to realize that the odds were nearly zero. Still, we had faith that he was alive somewhere, somehow.