I Googled San Jose North Face. A store nearby in a large shopping mall popped up.

“Peggy! Maybe Roman bought a GPS at a North Face store here in San José. People who saw him with Pata Lora mentioned a GPS and a camera.”

“It’s a lot of money,” she said. “Maybe he bought a camera, too. And shoes? Raingear? For his Darién trip?”

Peggy and I jumped in our rental car and hurried to the mall, excited that this might answer some questions. Soon the store clerk was paging through cash register records for July 2014. At nearly 220,000 colónes, Roman’s purchase was easy to spot on July 5.

But he had not bought a GPS or a camera—the store didn’t sell either—it had been a backpack! Midsized and lightweight, the Conness 55 model North Face backpack was well suited to the style of wilderness trekking that Roman would do in Corcovado or the Darién.

This is the missing pack!

I photographed pictures of the pack from their catalog. We now had a new search image while walking in the jungle: an olive-gray, midsized pack with a zippered compartment on the bottom and pockets on the waist belt. Excited, I texted Aengus about this important news. He texted back with the kind of lukewarm response Dondee had shown when Thai and I had found the yellow bag at the Corners Hostel; probably, I thought, because it didn’t fit his show’s storyline.

We had also heard a new spin to the Pata Lora story. An Osa Tico told us in November 2015 that Pata Lora twice confessed to him that he—Pata Lora, not the Guichos—had killed Cody, then buried the body. The Tico suggested that we offer a six-figure reward, like $100,000 or more, to lure Pata Lora into revealing where he’d hidden Cody’s body. The local said he could facilitate. Using only the promise of the money, together with drink and mota, the Tico said he could convince Pata Lora to reveal where he’d hidden the body. We would pay nothing. As we drove the seven hours to Puerto Jiménez from San Jose, Peggy and I discussed how we might trap Pata Lora.

Our third day in Costa Rica, March 2016, Peggy and I drove to Pata Lora’s house. We hung out with him and his French girlfriend, had a beer, made small talk. Pata Lora rolled a joint and shared it with the mademoiselle he lived with and who paid rent on the house.

As we were leaving, I pulled out a flyer offering a $50,000 reward—ten times what we had posted more than a year earlier for Cody Roman’s remains. I had given another to the local Tico whose idea it had been in the first place, encouraging him to follow through with his plan. We hung a third at the Dos Brazos pulperia. All were meant to flush out the killer.

Pata Lora hated his nickname, so Carson and Ken had taken to calling him “Joe,” an Americanized version of his first name, José. “Listen, Joe,” I said, handing him the flyer, “we are offering a big reward to find our son’s remains. Fifty thousand dollars.” I looked to see if he’d take the bait, but his face didn’t change. He had the same nearly blank expression he showed when I asked him to recount his days walking with Cody. “Maybe, since you saw him with the Guichos, you can find him?”

“Yeah, I can, man. Sure I can!” he enthused. “But I need some scuba diving equipment, so I can go into the ocean out by Madrigal River where his bones are. His bones are underwater, man,” he rambled on. “Can you give me some money?” He took another toke off his joint, then offered it to me. “So I can buy the equipment and go into the water and find the bones?”

I declined the smoke and finished my warm beer. “No, Joe. We’ll give you money for the body when you find it. Maybe you can get someone else to loan you the equipment and you can split the reward with them.”

THE NEXT DAY, Peggy and I headed to Piedras Blancas in a black SUV with an embassy driver. Jorge, two OIJ detectives, and a pair of cadaver dogs and their handlers drove in their own vehicles. We would stay at Roy Arias’s place, then hike on and off-trail to the ocean by way of the Carate and Madrigal Rivers inside Corcovado. The SUV climbed a greasy jeep trail through deep ruts and along narrow ridgelines leading to Piedras Blancas.

Peggy was nervous with the driving conditions. At one point, a stick jammed in the undercarriage. The driver stopped and Peggy jumped out to remove it. The SUV was perched at the edge of a steep cliff with a few trees near its top and an erosion ditch that cut into the jeep track. After Peggy hopped in, the driver pulled forward. The ditch grabbed the front wheel, pulled the vehicle off the road, and rolled us down the hill.

In the roll, Peggy, who hadn’t had time to buckle her seat belt, was thrown forward from the back seat behind the driver to the front seat’s passenger-side window. When the SUV came to rest, held in place by trees on the brink of a precipice, she peered, terrified, down the cliff below her. Unhurt but shaken, we climbed out the windows and scrambled back to the road. Squeezing in with Jorge, we tried not to look out the window at the roadside cliffs for the rest of the drive.

We slept on Roy Arias’s hardwood floors, leaving at dawn for the Madrigal. Following a thin trail along a canyon rim, Peggy was stung by a six-inch caterpillar with long poisonous hairs. Later, bushwhacking a route we suspected the Guichos used to access the Madrigal River inside the park, we nearly stepped on a coiled fer-de-lance. Slowed by steep climbs, slippery descents, and sketchy traverses, we didn’t make it to the main branch of the Madrigal until dusk.

Among the seven of us, we carried only two flashlights. Walking down the Madrigal in the dark, Jorge instructed us to walk through the creek’s waters “to avoid stepping on snakes attracted to the stream by frogs.” The warning seemed silly and walking in the creek was difficult, so Peggy and I climbed up to walk on a gravel bar. Not ten feet later, she stepped on the rubbery cordage of a snake. We didn’t look down to see what kind it was or what it did. We just rushed for the creek and splashed along with the Ticos.

We reached Carate near midnight, finding nothing but bad luck and near misses between Dos Brazos and the Madrigal on the Pata Lora trail.

Chapter 47

Discovery

El Doctor Creek, Corcovado National Park, May 21, 2016.

Courtesy of the author

By the first week of May 2016, it was clear that the series Missing Dial had been produced for the National Geographic Channel as reality TV. The trailers were ghastly. Their reenactments of the Pata Lora story focused on blood dripping from a machete. The machete was held by a man in board shorts and knee-high rubber boots standing over a body facedown in a creek. The show’s executive producer, Aengus, even cautioned Peggy and me not to watch. He said he didn’t want these re-creations, “but the network asked for them.” He had produced them to create “buzz.”

At the time I believed him, and I believed Pata Lora, and I accepted that the overdramatizations—which included a young man who looked remarkably like Roman in the photo from Bhutan but running from miners with machetes—would keep the investigation alive. After Aengus’s warning, we watched the six episodes of Missing Dial that TIJAT had so far produced. I emailed him:

Peggy and I watched all the episodes.

It documents the investigation well.

It’s not overproduced in general although as you warned the machete scenes are a bit overused. My mother and sister would be disturbed by those. Probably Jazz too.

It doesn’t make the Embassy look bad at all, so if you gave them the episodes then they’d have little incentive to do any more than they’ve been doing—which has been very little really.

I like the idea of using this show to leverage some action from the Embassy and OIJ.

As promotion for the show, a TV camera followed Peggy, Ken, and me as we headed to the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Ken had arranged a meeting. It was Thursday, May 19, and the next day we were scheduled to fly to New York for another promotional spot. The first episode would air on Sunday.

We left our cell phones at security. Two friendly FBI agents in dark suits led us to a small conference room on the seventh floor. The room quickly filled with seven or eight more agents, including the deputy director. I told the story I had come to believe, the one carved from Pata Lora’s schizophrenic psyche, embellished with the Guichos and a new guy named Poquito, who seemed to be the Guichos’ boss. I also told the agents how I had tracked down Roman’s backpack purchase to the North Face store in San José.

“That’s real investigative work,” an agent said about the pack. “It’s the kind of thing that we do. But what do you guys want?”

I answered his question literally because I’d learned over the years that the FBI couldn’t really do much in Costa Rica. “For a long time, I just wanted to know what happened. Now we know. Now I want justice.”

“A body,” Peggy blurted. “We want a body. We want to bring him home.”