Journal of the Dead Read Free

doubts began to take hold.
    “Where’re you from?” the older ranger asked Kodikian.
    “Pennsylvania,” replied Raffi.
    “Oh yeah? What part of the state?” Maciha asked.
    “Town called Doylestown. Near Philadelphia.”
    “The weather out there sure is different. It’s so green.”
    “Yeah,” Kodikian said. “How long before that chopper gets here?”
    “Not too long.”
    “Man,” Kodikian said, irritated. “My grandmother can fly a Blackhawk faster than those army boys can.”
    “Hey, they’re en route,” Maciha said. “Let’s just hang tight with me a little bit here.”
    Maciha fell silent. The conversation would later haunt him. Victims of heat and dehydration were often delusional and incoherent, but Kodikian’s level of awareness seemed, if anything,high. He was nowhere close to the worst case the ranger had seen, and the comment about the Blackhawk was unsettling.
Nice sense of humor for a guy who had just stabbed his best friend,
he thought.
    The Blackhawk finally flew in at about four-thirty and touched down a few hundred yards south of the campsite. Raffi Kodikian was airlifted to the Carlsbad Medical Center, thirty miles away, where the questions would only mount. Waiting at the hospital was Gary McCandless, chief of detectives for the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office, along with Roswell FBI agent John Andrews, who was called in because the killing took place on federal land.
    “They brought Raffi in,” recounted McCandless, the surprise still in his voice, “and I noticed right away when he came off the aircraft that he was in pretty good condition. Not what I was expecting when they talk about dehydration and stuff like that. He was very sharp, he was coherent. He talked well. He talked a lot about how hungry he was. He talked about how glad he was to be out of that canyon.”
    McCandless and Andrews had high hopes that Kodikian would tell them what had happened in Rattlesnake Canyon. How had he and Coughlin become so lost in a landscape where a climb to the highest peak would have revealed signs of civilization in almost every direction? Why hadn’t he shaken his buddy by the shoulders, told him to hang in there and tough it out? And, if they had tried so hard to slash their wrists, how come the cuts were so superficial?
    But moments later when the investigators approached him for an interview, Raffi Kodikian would no longer be talking. He invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. It would take him only an hour later to recover and be released from the hospital, and as hewalked toward the door to leave, an officer from the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office would arrest him for the murder of David Coughlin. It would turn out that Kodikian was an aspiring writer and journalist. He loved travel and adventure, and hoped to one day pen tales of his own, perhaps in the vagabond vein of his idol, Jack Kerouac. Some would wonder if a story he wrote while lost in the desert was too perfect to be true.

2
    S hade comes small in Rattlesnake Canyon. The tallest thing that casts a shadow near the spot where Lance Mattson found Raffi Kodikian is an island of brush that sits in the creek bed about fifteen feet from the campsite. Since the bed is almost always dry, calling the brush stand an island is a stretch, but it’s the only place where you can study Dave and Raffi’s final campsite relatively free from the harassing desert sun.
    The day after Kodikian was rescued and arrested, there were nearly a dozen crime scene investigators perched on the edge of the island. Leading the group was Capt. Eddie Carrasco from the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office, and John Andrews from the FBI, who had met Kodikian the day before at the hospital. With them was Jim Ballard, Carrasco’s second in command, two examiners from the state office of the medical investigator, a ranger from the National Park Service, two agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, and two anthropologists from the University of New Mexico,who’d been called