Journal of the Dead Read Free Page B

raped, then shot five times and left for dead in a riverbed. She’d crawled out of the riverbed, hung on until help arrived, then gone on to recall so many details about her attacker that he was easily identified and put away. Coughlin had been just twenty-six, and his friend had walked out of the hospital in just over an hour.
    After exhuming Coughlin’s body, the plan was to airlift it out on a U.S. Customs Service helicopter, which was due to arrive anytime. The one consolation to this grim task, however distasteful the context, was that the chopper would also be bringing lunch, and by now the team was hungry. Whether or not anyone actually said it, the phrase “Where’s that damn chopper?” was not far from their minds.
    The customs chopper finally showed up around two P.M. Once again it was a Blackhawk, but this pilot approached much lower than the fellow from Fort Bliss had. By the time Eddie Carrasco saw the danger, it was too late. He and his entire CSI team watched helplessly as the pilot, angling for a landing spot, cruised less than fifty feet directly over the campsite.
    “They came in there and boy, when they went over that campsite, it just scattered stuff all over the place,” recalled Carrasco. “Some of the stuff remained intact, but we saw shoes, knapsacks—I mean they just took off. As a matter of fact a piece of gray tarp, I believe, just utterly went up in the air and followed the helicopter to where he landed about thirty yards from where the actual campsite was. I mean, the suction from the actual helicopter blade just picked it up.”
    It was a detective’s nightmare. To say that the crime scene had been contaminated would be a gross understatement: it had more orless been destroyed. The items, now spread out across twice the area of the original scene, no longer had any relational value. Any suggestive patterns within their overall placement were gone forever. If their disposition had hinted at a struggle, a cover-up, or the truth exactly as Raffi had said it, no one would ever know. And if the case were to go to trial, a defense attorney could use the incident as a powerful tool to cast doubt on how the scene was processed.
    Another detective might have gone into a rage, but Carrasco was known for his poise and reserve. Recovering from the shock, he did the best he could to minimize the impact by ordering Jim Ballard to videotape the evidence once again, post-customs helicopter. Since they already had video of the intact scene, they could use the second tape to assess exactly what had been moved and where. The tapes wouldn’t be a substitute for studying an intact scene, but together they’d have a significant degree of preservative value. So Jim Ballard sighed, got back behind the camera’s eyepiece, and the two men started sifting through the new, rotor-washed evidence field.
    And that was how they found the journal.
    It was lying on the weatherworn rocks of the canyon floor, a few feet from the campsite, its pages blown open by the same metal wind that had lifted it from wherever it had been hiding. It was a student’s notebook, made by Mead, the kind of 8 × 7 spiral pad that millions of American college students carry to class every day. Carrasco knelt over it, his curiosity vanquishing the dejection he had felt moments before.
    Twenty-four pages in all had been written on, and at first glance there appeared to be two distinct styles of handwriting. Most of it was written in a masculine chicken scratch; the otherstyle—more rounded, vertical, and feminine—appeared on only two pages, both of which were signed “David Andrew” at the bottom. Many of the entries were dated. It appeared that both boys wrote in it over the course of their road trip and ordeal in Rattlesnake Canyon, right up to the day that Coughlin was killed.
    Combined with statements Kodikian would later make in court, it was either the gripping account of a road trip gone horribly wrong or one of the greatest