Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (36 page)

It made sense.

Cody turned from me and shoved his Glock into Henkel’s
nose. His voice was flat. “When I came to your house in New Mexico, you were packing up your car. Where were you planning to go?”

Henkel said, “We were going to do the exchange.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There was going to be an exchange. A big meeting, where everybody got what they wanted.”

Cody slapped him again, and Henkel winced. The cushions were getting dark with lost blood. I could smell it, and it was sharp and metallic and it made me want to gag.

Henkel was fading. His eyelids were starting to drop.

“
WHAT EXCHANGE
?” Cody screamed.

“The judge was going to get all the photos and the negatives from Coates and me once and for all,” Henkel said. “I was going to get my big payoff from the judge. We were going to meet at Coates’s place up in the mountains tomorrow morning.”

Cody said, “What was Coates going to get?”

Henkel coughed and nearly passed out. He said, “What he said he always wanted—his own little girl.”

And at that moment I realized who had sent the photo of Angelina to his associate Malcolm Harris in London— Aubrey Coates. I recalled Moreland taking that photo the morning they came to visit when he went upstairs with Melissa. It was the reason he was so insistent that he see her, and the reason he asked Melissa to turn her over for a better look.

The Day After

T
HERE WAS SNOW FALLING
on I-70 that night as we drove to Desolation Canyon. It had started snowing around midnight and gotten progressively worse. The only vehicles our four-car caravan encountered on the two-hour drive from Denver were snowplows with yellow wigwag lights flashing and the occasional four-wheel-drive pickup. My nerves were shot, and I had trouble keeping coffee down. Cody had made three calls after dropping Henkel in a heap outside the emergency-room doors of Denver General: Sanders, Morales, and Torkleson. Torkleson had responded with a crime scene tech and a team of four SWAT officers in heavy black clothing. Morales and Sanders showed up in Morales’s jacked-up four-wheel-drive pickup. Morales brought his wife along to watch over Melissa. Torkleson drove the lead vehicle, with Cody in the passenger seat and me in the backseat.

A panicked thought hit me. “What if they won’t do the exchange without Henkel?”
Jesus,
I thought again,
I never should have shot him.

“Good thinking,” Torkleson said, and plucked his mike from the cradle on the dashboard. “I’m switching over to a nonpublic channel,” he said as he called the state highway
patrol. Locating a trooper he knew, Torkleson persuaded the man to put out a false report about a fiery head-on collision near the New Mexico border, and to identify one of the fatalities as a man named Wyatt Henkel. When the trooper agreed, Torkleson said to Cody and me, “We know Coates listens to police scanners, and if he hears that report, I’m sure he’ll relay the info to the judge. That’ll explain why he isn’t there.”

“You’re the man,” Cody said to Torkleson. “Both Coates and the judge will be happy to hear that Henkel—and his photos—are cooked.”

I TRIED
to sort out what we’d learned as we drove. Cody seemed to be doing the same thing.

I asked, “How did Coates learn about Angelina in order to pressure the judge for her?”

“I’d wondered that myself,” Cody said. “Until I checked on the federal jail roster before the trial and found out that Coates shared a cell for two weeks with a slimeball named José Medina, who was in for trafficking. Medina is a bigshot Sur-13 gangster and a known associate of Garrett’s. Garrett probably mentioned to Medina he had this adoption agency hounding him—bragged about it, most likely—and Coates overheard Medina talking about it. That’s the kind of thing Coates would pick up on, especially since he had his deal going with the judge already. So he doubled down on his demands of the judge because Moreland had nothing to bargain with: the negatives and photos
and
a little girl of his own in exchange for an acquittal.”

“It makes me sick,” I said.

“No shit,” Cody said. “What makes me even sicker is that the judge would go along. Or appear to go along.”

“So why did Moreland and Garrett kill Dorrie?” I asked, guessing the answer.

“We’ll probably never get a confession out of either of them,” Cody said. “But I’m thinking Dorrie couldn’t live with her guilt any longer for providing an alibi for John on the night John’s parents were run off the road. The more she got to know him, the more she was
convinced
he’d done it— well, it was eating her up inside. She was going to church more, right? Pouring her heart out to God that she was married to a man who’d killed his own parents, and she’d provided the alibi. Maybe she asked John outright if he did it, or maybe he just guessed she wanted to tell somebody. Either way, John knew he had to get rid of her. Plus, he was probably already putting the hardwood to Kellie. So, if you’re John Moreland, you have a heavy guilt-ridden wallflower who can bring you down on the one hand and a blond knockout with money on the other. Easy choice for John.”

“But why did Garrett finish her off?”

“Because Garrett is a sick, twisted, evil little fuck,” Cody said. “Your instincts were right about him. Plus, by helping his dad with the crime, Garrett knew he’d always have a bargaining chip and something to hold over his dad’s head. In a way, killing Dorrie set Garrett free.”

“And John knew what Garrett was from an early age,” I said. “Imagine knowing your son is like that? And just living with it and covering up for him whenever possible. And the judge had to cover up for his son, or Garrett might confess what the both of them had done.”

I said, “Jim Doogan told me something at Brian’s funeral about men like Moreland. He said once a man like that gets his eyes on a prize—in this case the U.S. Supreme Court— every move he makes is in preparation for it. I didn’t realize
what Doogan was saying at the time, and I don’t think he did, either. But if you’re John Moreland, and you want to be a Supreme, how can you even consider the possibility if your only son is a gangster?”

“Good question,” Cody said. “How?”

“You mitigate the situation,” I said. “You take in your bad son’s illegitimate child and raise her as your own. You show the world that even though your bad-seed son has no responsibility, you do. You clean up the best you can for your son’s indiscretion. You turn a negative into a positive. You also know that it’s only a matter of time before your crazy-ass son goes down, and you don’t have to worry about him anymore. It could have easily happened at the Appaloosa Club the other night. And when it does, you breathe a sigh of relief and go on.”

Cody turned and smiled. I could see his teeth in the dark. “You might make a good detective after all, Jack. But there’s something wrong with your theory.”

“What?”

“Why would John hand over the child to a known pedophile? Aren’t people going to find out?”

I thought about that for a while. Then it hit me hard. “Moreland is clever,” I said. “Clever enough to figure out a way for Angelina to
disappear
after a short while, maybe even to stage a disappearance or a kidnapping. I could see him making a tearful plea on television to the kidnappers, turning Angelina into a new Lindbergh baby
who is never found.
He’d be a hell of a sympathetic figure. And someday, if a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has the gall to question him about taking the child from our home all those years ago, he says he felt horrible about it and did all he could to help the young couple adopt another child, but not nearly as horrible as he feels about her fate at the hand of
kidnappers and what an outrageous thing to ask! He comes off looking like a tragic saint.”

Torkleson whistled, and said, “For the love of Pete.”

“Now you’re thinking like a Moreland, Jack,” Cody said. “Ten steps ahead.”

CODY KNEW THE LAYOUT
and geography of the canyon because he had planned the raid on Coates months before, but he complained that it looked different in the dark and covered by snow. There was plenty of bitching when he said the only way to move in on the trailer was from behind it on foot because there was only one road into the campground, and we didn’t want Coates to see us coming. So we parked on the shoulder of a gravel road on the other side of the mountain from the campground and plunged into the forest to climb. The snow was fluffy and knee deep. There was no wind at all, so the pine boughs sported three or four inches of snow looking like foam on the top of a beer mug. It was impossible to climb through the thick trees without hitting boughs and dumping snow down our necks. We all wore high-topped winter boots. The beams from our headlamps flew around in the trees as we climbed, and it was hallucinogenic, so I tried to keep my head down and concentrate on the trail in front of me. The SWAT guys carried automatic weapons with scopes, and Morales and Sanders had brought their hunting rifles. The .45 was in my parka pocket.

I was sweating hard by the time we reached the top, but my thoughts of Angelina and Melissa and Coates and Moreland propelled me. I finally stopped throwing up when there was nothing left in my stomach.

As we grunted and cursed our way down the other side
of the mountain toward Desolation Canyon Campground, the eastern sky started to lighten into a dull, creamy gray. I doubted we would see the sun itself.

CODY GATHERED EVERYONE
when it got light enough to see without headlamps. From where I stood, I could see a big opening below me and ahead of me: the empty campground. There were picnic tables stacked high with snow, and steel cooking grates mounted on metal posts. The roads to and from the individual campsites were untracked except from mule deer, as was the access road from the highway. Sheer canyon walls rose on either side, which made it darker than it should be at seven in the morning.

We all stood in the trees breathing hard, flushed from the climb and the descent. Billows of condensation rose from our labored breathing. One good thing about the falling snow was it muffled sounds.

Cody bent over and pointed out Coates’s trailer. We could barely see the top of it through the trees a quarter of a mile away. As I’d heard about in the courtroom that day, the aluminum roof bristled with antennae and both satellite television and Internet-access dishes.

Cody and Torkleson debated the approach, and they decided to flank the park with two SWAT officers on each side of the trailer. Torkleson told his men to stay in the trees with clear shooting lanes. Cody reminded them the trailer had a back door as well.

Sanders and Morales agreed to split up, each going with two SWAT officers. Torkleson, Cody, the tech guy with his video camera, and I would move straight down the middle of the trees toward the back of the trailer, where Torkleson would establish a command post to direct traffic.

“Turn your radios down and put your earpieces in,” Torkleson told his men. “
Communicate.
Report what you see so we all know. This exchange is supposed to happen at nine, so we have an hour and a half to wait.”

“To freeze to death,” one of the officers said sourly.

“To save a little girl and put three monsters away,” Cody said.

As the men checked their weapons and equipment before splitting off into teams, I thanked each one of them for coming and I shook their hands. I hugged Morales and Sanders, and they hugged me back.

“We’re glad we could make it,” Sanders said. “We’ve got to square this thing.”

“We’ll get her back,” Morales said, fire in his eyes.

WE FOUND
a small clearing 150 yards from Coates’s trailer and stamped the snow down with our boots. It gave us something to do, and the work kept me warm. We were on a steep hillside and could see out over the top of the trailer and the park and the access road. There was a thick U of four-foot-high juniper between us and the trailer to hide behind. Every few minutes Cody would raise his binoculars and study the trailer, watching for movement.

To me, Cody whispered, “I wish we could just go down there and cap the guy, believe me. But we have to do it this way, Jack.” He looked up to make sure Torkleson was far enough away that he couldn’t hear, and said, “You and I are dirty. We’ve got to get all these guys involved and let them make the arrest and the case. My name’s got to be out of it, and so does yours. Henkel will make the case for them when he testifies. I wish you hadn’t have shot him.”

“Me too,” I whispered back. “Something snapped inside.”

“It happens.” Cody grinned. I noted the frost on his eyebrows and three-day length of beard.

AT
8:45 we saw headlights coming down the access road into the park.

I couldn’t hear what the SWAT team was saying to Torkleson through his earpiece, but Torkleson said, “Yes, we see it. Can anyone get the make?”

He listened, nodded, and turned to us. “A yellow H3 Hummer.”

“Garrett’s car,” I said.

“Showtime,” said Cody.

THE H3 WAS MOVING
very slowly. It wasn’t the snow that was holding it up but caution by the driver. I borrowed Cody’s binoculars and tried to see who was inside. The smoked glass made it difficult, but I thought I saw the silhouettes of two heads.