Journal of the Dead (12 page)

After Coughlin stopped lurching, the silence came. Of all the kinds of silences—the stillness of snowfields, the hollow quiet of an empty house—none is as total as that of the desert. It is the
hush of antiquity, an inverse echo that seems to embrace the countless millions of years it takes for a desert to form. It was broken briefly while he laid the stones on Coughlin’s grave, and then it caved on him again from every direction, lasting another seven hours, until it was at last broken by another sound.

Lance Mattson’s footsteps.

T
he morning after he was arrested for the murder of David Coughlin, Raffi emerged from the Eddy County jail’s swinging glass door, his hands cuffed in front of him, his ankles shackled. He wore a tangerine jail jumpsuit that was almost eye-blistering in the morning sunlight. Along with a deputy, he was escorted by Chief Detective McCandless, whom he had met in the hospital the day before, and another man in a white Stetson, who was starting to take a great interest in him: M. A. “Chunky” Click, the sheriff of Eddy County himself. Although Raffi didn’t know it, the two men—McCandless and Click—were cousins.

It was a short walk across the street to Eddy County’s magistrate court, but there was plenty of time for a photographer from the
Carlsbad Current-Argus
to capture the moment in a photo that would wind up in dozens of major newspapers: Raffi, bright as a bull’s eye, being led by the cops.

Magistrate court was held in an unimpressive, one-story brick
building, half of which belonged to a small church. The courtroom itself was spare and functional, with two desks for counsels, a wood panel podium for the judge, and a few dozen metal chairs for the audience. The only adornments were two flags, one for New Mexico, one for the republic. Its two judges spend most of their time hearing relatively small-time cases: traffic violations, landlord-tenant disputes, drunk-driving tickets. Since magistrate judges have no jurisdiction beyond the county, when it comes to felonies, their job is to preside over the preliminaries—warrants, preliminary hearings, establishing bail. If they find probable cause that a felony has indeed been committed, they bind the case over to the district court.

Judge Monte Lyons was already waiting when the four men entered the courtroom. He had a welcoming, mellow face, round and lightly bronzed, but when he read the criminal complaint, his eyebrows popped to attention. Before becoming a judge, he had served on the local police force for twenty-eight years, and had never heard of anything even remotely like this.

When the deputy brought Kodikian to stand before him, he studied the young man intently, curious at the human shape an admitted mercy killer of the desert took. What struck him most, he would later say, was Kodikian’s complete lack of expression.

“Mr. Kodikian, you are charged with a criminal offense, an open count of murder…,” Lyons said, and led Raffi through the opening phase of what was now the
State of New Mexico v. Raffi Kodikian.

When someone is charged with an “open count” of murder, it means that the degree of murder will be decided later, either during a preliminary examination, or in the district court. Murder has only two degrees in New Mexico, first or second, and depending
on which one the court eventually settled on, the judge explained, Raffi was now looking at eighteen months to life.

There was also another possibility.

“If there are any aggravating factors indicating a unique and malevolent nature to the crime…,” the judge explained, looking directly at Raffi, “the maximum sentence is death.”

Lyons had seen men break into tears at the mention of the death sentence. Often their knees shook, or their faces chilled white. He never saw Kodikian again after this brief appearance, but he would distinctly remember the young man’s particular reaction. “He showed no emotion whatsoever,” he later said. “He reminded me of somebody who came in for a traffic ticket.”

Lyons set bail at $50,000 cash.

The sheriff of Eddy County had phone calls to return when he got back from magistrate court. The story of the killing in Rattlesnake Canyon had gone out on the Associated Press newswire on Sunday evening, and now some of the regional papers were starting to pick it up. If there was one thing that Sheriff Click didn’t mind, it was basking in the spotlight. Taking the stage during a high-profile case was not only a necessary political act, but one that came quite naturally to him. When he wasn’t the sheriff of Eddy County, he was known as the Singing Sheriff of Eddy County, the front man in a local country-western band that played every Friday night at the Quality Inn.

“What did you say your name was?” the reporters asked him on the phone.

“Chunky,” he’d respond. “M. A. Chunky Click.”

The sheriff was a man blessed with an eternal shell of baby fat, from the raspberry pads of his cheeks down to his gunny-sack belly. The “M. A.” stood for Mark Anthony, but in high school his friends had dubbed him Chunky, and for obvious reasons the nickname stuck. More accurately, he had embraced it.

In a state where the office of sheriff has a rich and colorful history, Carlsbad has a few tales of its own, beginning with the very first sheriff, Dave Kemp, who in 1897 gunned down his successor and bitter rival, Les Dow, in front of the Argus newspaper building on Fox Street. (Kemp, who was later referred to in a newspaper story as a “Texas killer, range rustler, and gambler” allegedly paid off a witness to say Dow had drawn first.) By the time Chunky Click took office in 1996, the days of flamboyant lawmen had long passed, consigned to history and Hollywood, but he had brought some drama back to the office when he wound up in what was hailed as a twentieth-century showdown between sheriffs.

Before Click was sheriff, he was a deputy, and in 1995 he decided to run against his boss, sitting sheriff Jack Childress. Everything was calm until four months before the Democratic primary, when Click found himself facing allegations of evidence theft in what he said was a smear campaign cooked up by Childress. Three years earlier, he had confiscated a .380-caliber Lorcin pistol from a Carlsbad youth and never returned it. Click claimed the boy’s mother had asked him to hold on to it until his eighteenth birthday and that, in the meantime, he’d lent it to a friend. Despite the mudslinging, Click won the primary by a narrow 199 votes. But four months after he took office, a grand jury went ahead and indicted him on nine counts, including two for evidence tampering.

The legal shootout made state headlines. If Click was convicted, Childress would undoubtedly win back the star. Click hired Gary Mitchell, a well-known criminal defense attorney up in Ruidoso. Mitchell spent most of his time crusading against capital punishment, arguing death penalty cases, appealing sentences, and racking up a record of legal victories that at the time was approaching 100-0. Click figured if Mitchell’s courtroom wizardry had saved all those men from lethal injection, he would have no problem keeping a sheriff facing politically inspired charges out of jail. He was right. After a weeklong trial, the jury found him not guilty of evidence theft, deadlocked on the remaining eight counts, and the case was dropped. Chunky Click got to keep his star, and he won a new role for himself—the underdog. At the time of the Rattlesnake Canyon killing, he had a year left on his term and was planning to run for reelection.

Click hadn’t been able to tell the reporters much about the Kodikian case. But with all the attention, he was eager for new information, so when Carrasco and Ballard returned from the canyon with the evidence bags, he let his phone ring and joined them in Carrasco’s office to get an update.

In addition to the journal, and the trove of items they had listed on the warrant, Carrasco and Ballard had found several other curious pieces of evidence. They had noticed that next to the campsite were the ashen remains of two fires. One was much larger than the other, and in it they found scorched pieces of green cloth and zipper teeth—apparently the remnants of a sleeping bag. Among the scattered items lying around the site they had also found food, including a plastic bag with hot-dog buns and, even more surprising, a family-size can of beans sitting unopened on a
nearby rock. Inside one of the backpacks were also numerous cactus fruits, apparently cut from the plants in the canyon. They had found no water at the campsite, only four empty containers; three pint bottles of White Rock water, and an empty thirty-two-ounce container of Gatorade.

Traces of blood had been visible on a surprising number of items. There were drops on over a dozen rocks, and streaks on both blue foam sleeping pads and several items of clothing. All those items, and many more, would be sent to the crime lab in Albuquerque to be examined for DNA and trace evidence.

Jim Ballard made copies of the journal, and the four men sat down to read and discuss it together, like members of a book club.

“Well, what do you think?” Click asked when they were all finished.

“It sounds like these boys had it pretty rough,” Carrasco offered. No water, circling buzzards, treks to nowhere, final farewells, a mercy killing. Jim Ballard agreed; it sounded as if they had been through a hell of a time.

Gary McCandless thought it sounded bad, too, but was it enough to stab your best friend in the heart? It struck him as a particularly violent and aggressive way to usher a man to his death. Most people wouldn’t have had the will to do that to an enemy, much less a friend. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. He turned to Sheriff Click.

“What do you think?”

Click’s eyes narrowed.

“Bullshit.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, for starters, his friend never writes that he’s asking
Kodikian to kill him,” said the sheriff. “I mean, wouldn’t he have at least done
that?”

The other men were intrigued. It seemed like a reasonable question, given the gravity of Coughlin’s alleged request. After all the explaining and good-byes he had written, why not a last note to absolve Kodikian of blame? Coughlin had to have known that even if they both died, people would figure everything out and still be uncomfortable with the image of Raffi as the merciful executioner. It was a hell of a burden to leave on a friend’s shoulders without an indemnifying word. One obvious answer was that he had been too weak, or in too much pain to write or even care by then. The other obvious answer was that Coughlin hadn’t written anything because he had never asked to be killed.

Either way, it quickly dawned on the four men that “he turned to me & begged that I put my knife through his chest” were the only the words indicating Coughlin’s death had actually been a mercy killing, and they had been written by the killer himself, a survivor who had been able to walk out of the hospital just a little more than an hour after being admitted.

There was no way they were going to take Kodikian’s story at face value.

D
avid Coughlin was gone. But his body, well preserved by the dry desert air and Raffi’s improvised burial cairn, still had a story to tell.