AFTER CARSON’S INTERROGATION, I volunteered to meet with Pata Lora. Aengus and Jeff could hardly hide their excitement: maybe as the father I could convince Pata Lora to go to the OIJ with his story about the Guichos. Six cameras recorded our meeting at the waterfront in Puerto Jiménez. It was in front of the seafood restaurant, where Peggy and I had spoken on the phone the night we last felt that Roman was all right after all.

Pata Lora had always been a sideshow for me, someone I didn’t need to talk to—the personification of a rumor I never believed. I had discounted his stories as fabrications, a grab for attention, tales that rubbed the salt of insult—dishonoring Roman’s skill and independence—on my raw wounds of loss.

This would be the first time that we would meet. Carson and Ken had showered him with gifts, meals, hotel rooms, even cash. He arrived in their car with them.

After production wired Pata Lora for sound, he walked up in sunglasses to meet me. Lean and about my height, he wore a green camo-colored ball cap, board shorts, and an army-green shirt that Carson would wear. Other than eyebrows and a thin, well-trimmed goatee and line of beard along his jawline, he had no hair showing on his head. He walked with a determined gait and a barely perceptible limp. His left ankle bulged in deformity. It looked like a parrot’s foot.

I asked Pata Lora to tell me the truth, to make nothing up, and to take off his sunglasses. I wanted to see his dark eyes as he shared vignettes of my son’s final days. Instead, Pata Lora gave a coarse description of a hike with Cody that left me unconvinced he had ever been with Roman. There were no details, no stories, no images. Looking into Pata Lora’s gaze I saw only emptiness.

His eyes came alive when he described his own abusive father who had abandoned him to grow up on the street. Pata Lora acknowledged that he admired me as a father looking for his son. At the end of the made-for-reality-TV moment, he asked for a hug. I gave him one, feeling sorry for Pata Lora, but unable to shake the feeling he had never been with Roman.

Between takes for Missing Dial, Carson led a crusade criticizing the OIJ and the State Department for their inaction. It was hard not to admire his passion, but it got him into trouble. During one meeting with the Fiscal, Carson inadvertently wore a hidden wire. The government threatened arrest with a denuncia, a formal legal complaint or warrant. Carson fled Costa Rica, his mission to solve a murder in real-time TV unfulfilled.

With Carson gone, it was now up to me to carry on the new Pata Lora story during multiple meetings from Golfito to D.C., often with Aengus and Ken in attendance. Flipping through a folder of eight-by-ten-inch photos of a dozen witnesses from Puerto Jiménez to Carate, I told Carson’s latest version of the Pata Lora story to the Fiscal, the embassy, the director of the OIJ, and eventually, with embellishments of my own, to the assistant director of the FBI.

I had to admit—as awful as the sweaty filming and bullying by Carson had been—the heavy presence of Missing Dial accomplished what Mead Treadwell, the Fellowship, GoFundMe, scores of volunteers, and Facebook posts had not. It had put sustained pressure on everyone. By September 2015, everybody from Osa’s illegal miners to the director of the OIJ had one thing in common with Peggy and me: we all wanted the search to end.

Missing Dial had everyone’s attention and it hadn’t even been produced. The officials probably feared how their actions—or inaction—would look on TV when the show finally aired. Carson and Ken, it seemed, got more people talking in a month than OIJ or the FBI had in a year. Still, according to Costa Rican law, a body is needed for a murder conviction. Without that, Pata Lora’s recorded statement during the interrogation, while valuable to the Fiscal, was not enough. Pata Lora’s story might just be a confusion of fact and fantasy.

The day I left Costa Rica, Pata Lora took the boat to Golfito, promising to give the Fiscal his statement identifying the Guichos as having abducted Roman at gunpoint.

Chapter 46

A Backpack

Mall, San José, Costa Rica, March 2016.

Courtesy of the author

I flew home to Alaska the first week of September 2015 and went back to work teaching a full load of classes, writing papers, advising students. We had hired a lawyer who petitioned the court for guardianship of Roman and in November we successfully subpoenaed the bank for his 2014 financial records. The records showed what we’d known all along: after July 9, the day he wrote us, there had been no bank activity.

Through the fall and into the winter, Peggy and I clung to Carson’s embellished story. It was all that Missing Dial could give us. The price I had paid for drinking Carson’s Kool-Aid and telling an enriched Pata Lora story was high: denying the life I’d known as a father to my son, as if our lives together had never happened. But the benefit was that Costa Rican and American officials believed the story.

All that OIJ needed was a body between Piedras Blancas and the Pacific Ocean for corroboration, conviction, and justice. And if that happened, we’d have closure, albeit incomplete. We’d know what happened physically—who killed him and how, perhaps—but we would never know why Roman became someone who would walk with Pata Lora in the first place. And that question nagged me.

In January 2016, the Fiscal separately informed both Aengus and me that psychological testing of Pata Lora diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a condition that explained much of his behavior. About the same time, Peggy and I finally had what we’d always hoped for: park access. Accompanied by embassy officials, Fuerza police, MINAE rangers, Cruz Roja (without Dondee), and the OIJ detectives and dog teams, we could go anywhere we wanted—just so long as TIJAT wasn’t there.

FROM JANUARY THROUGH May, Peggy and I made four trips with these Tico teams. Sadly, each trip was a search for Roman’s remains rather than his broken, living body. The search teams that worked with me now had come two years too late. This was the kind of support I had hoped for in 2014, when he had possibly been alive, when I had wanted—but was denied under threat of arrest—access to the park. The leader of these searches was a Tico lawyer named Jorge who worked at the U.S. Embassy and whose father once directed the OIJ.

On the first trip, Jorge picked up Peggy and me at the airport and drove us through the busy streets of San José, explaining the Costa Rican judicial system. “Mr. Roman,” he said, “in Costa Rica it is essentially impossible to get a murder conviction without a body. Unlike in the USA, people saying things is not enough. In fact, the murderer could even confess to a killing, but without physical evidence, like a body, there could be no conviction.”

Jorge had passed tests to become both a Fiscal and a judge and knew well what was necessary for justice. “Without a Fiscal and a judge present, OIJ investigators cannot even ask any questions, other than where a suspect lives, his name, and other nonincriminating information. All of this makes this case with Pata Lora very challenging.”

With Jorge, OIJ, its cadaver-sniffing bloodhounds, MINAE, and Fuerza we searched between Carate and Piedras Blancas. Local miners helped us look off-trail and in mining tunnels that honeycombed canyon walls. Ever since my first days in the jungle, I had made a habit of looking among the miners’ few possessions under their open black tarps. And here, on the banks of a small creek, I spotted something familiar beneath one. It was a short piece of foam sleeping pad of the type I recalled giving Roman two years before in Veracruz.

I had packed our packraft paddles with small pieces of pad like this on my flight to Veracruz, then offered it to him as a useful piece of gear. Its color, type, brand, and dimensions matched a pad I had once trimmed for an adventure race a decade before. It was the only physical evidence I had ever seen of Roman in the jungle. And there it was on the Pata Lora trail.

Questions flooded my imagination. How did it get here? Are Roman’s remains nearby? Is this miner involved? The OIJ and Fuerza swarmed over the old man who was just downstream with his gold pan. The miner explained that he had bought the pad in a community near Dos Brazos years before. Suspiciously, he also lived with the woman who’d raised Pata Lora after Pata Lora’s own parents had estranged him.

IN MARCH 2016 during Anchorage School District’s spring break, Peggy and I again headed to Costa Rica. We spent a few days in San José where I hoped to discover what Roman had purchased for the $411.91 his bank records showed he had spent there. Throughout Latin America, his total monthly expenditures had generally averaged about $1,500. This purchase was a significant outlier. Sitting at the desk of our airport hotel room, I studied two lines on the bank statement.

07-06 WITHDRAWL DEBIT CARD PURCHASE $411.91

07/05 PURCH 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 SAN JOSE CR

Googling 2438921418641877318698 TNF 04 hit nothing. I puzzled over the three letters TNF. What’s TNF? The family tent that we’d used for years and pitched on Kuyuktuvuk Creek and Umnak left me thinking, TNF. . . . Could TNF stand for “The North Face”?