Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (29 page)

He chooses not to work for anyone else. He doesn’t have a Ph.D. or college degree, and his résumé (pizza delivery man, high school security guard) doesn’t exactly make him easily employable. But among the world’s brainiest astronomers, paleontologists, geologists, and physicists, Kaye is known as a problem-solving genius, a geeky renegade who can outthink the thinkers.

“I’m basically just a body that carries my head around,” he tells people.

He’s achieved some remarkable feats. In 2005, Kaye and a few
collaborators used a spectrograph, which breaks down light into rainbows, and discovered a distant planet named Tau Boötis. After a few tries, he managed to get the findings published. Tom also co-authored several scientific papers with titles such as “Mass Extinction Enigmas in Context with Gamma Ray Bursts” in journals like
Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers
. He studied rings on old trees, the finger bones of a T. Rex. With his microscopes, he peers into matter so small and so old that nobody has even seen it before, a peep show into a secret universe.

“Living on the edge,” he calls it.

Tom’s scientific interests are so varied he’s developed an eclectic collection of friends, many of whom he meets on dinosaur digs or on nerdy Internet forums. That’s where he met Jerry Warner, a.k.a. Georger, and learned of Warner’s obsession with the Cooper case. Tom was in high school when the hijacker jumped and he remembers the story in the news. Now that Jerry Warner has cut a deal with the FBI to have them look at the Cooper bills, Tom is anxious to get to work in his lab. His job is to handle the money that Brian Ingram found, analyze it, and figure out how it landed on Tena Bar.

Tom doesn’t expect to solve the case with science. Without a decent DNA sample to test, how can he? He can debunk a few myths, and write a paper about it for a science periodical. Maybe even a mainstream one like
Science
.

The car barrels down the dirt road, spitting up red dust. It passes the yucca plants and mesquite trees and cactus that dot Tom’s ranch. It passes a steel dome that is part of an astronomy lab Tom has been building for the past eight years, and one of his telescopes, which Tom made from a septic tank, oil drum, bike chain, lazy Susan, and fan belt. This makeshift contraption (all operated by computer) sits across from
the Geek Barn, a graveyard of old parts from Tom’s inventions and failed businesses. Over the years, they’ve included: a doggy-proof latch for dog cages; a machine that makes a gizmo to mix paint; an air compressor that sprays paint on objects like gumballs; several recreational objects built from fiberglass, like hang gliders, water skis, canoes.

The industrial robot age, in the early eighties, should have been his moment. To learn about advanced computer systems, Tom crashed a robot convention like an undercover agent. Pretending to be a buyer, he asked salespeople how the robots worked and recorded their answers with a hidden tape recorder. He transcribed the conversations and built his own industrial robot in his mother’s basement. But before his company went public, his investors put all their money in handheld breathalyzers.

In a way, cracking open the Cooper case, if only a smidge, would be a kind of redemption for Tom. To understand the case he would need to understand the facts and the players, and he’d been up late on his computer, reading the endless posts on the Drop Zone. The Cooper community was similar to the dinosaur diggers he works with: lots of infighting and questing for glory. One Cooper hunter, he learned, had made a name for himself in the woods in southwest Washington, searching for the hijacker’s bones and his missing cash. This hunter, a former military survival expert named Jerry Thomas, was so convinced that Cooper’s parachute came down in the woods he was searching, he’d been looking there for the last twenty-two years.

The car is a crummy brown Toyota. The agents get out.

“What, no SUV?” Tom says.

“Well, no.”

The agents hand him the envelope and some forms. Tom signs here, there. He gives the agents a tour. He walks through the living
room, past his dinosaur bone collection, down the steps and into the lab. Microscopes and machines are mounted on work benches under fluorescent lights. The cold floors are spotless. In jars and plastic jewel boxes are samples for different tests he is conducting. Soon the agents lose interest. He cuts the tour short, follows them out the door, and retreats back into the lab. He places the envelope on a workbench. He unfastens the hinge. He peers inside.

That’s weird, Tom thinks: Why is the money so black? He gazes at the dark film coating the flaking old bills. He stares and studies. He places a sample on a slide, slips it under his microscope, adjusts the focus. The money is glowing. The color is a rainbow of incandescence, a shine Tom once saw on a beetle wing. He snips off another sample of the money and places it into the chamber of his electron microscope.

This machine is bigger than a golf cart. It does not operate on magnification power, like a microscope in a science class. It uses a particle beam and magnifies the Cooper bills a million times. What Tom sees on the screen looks like a scene on the moon. The shapes are tubular and grainy. They represent the emptiness of all matter. Tom runs what he sees through a spectrograph. He hopes for an accident. That’s what will yield a clue he can work with: an abundance of an element, something strange, a question he can pick at, obsess over, then answer. He looks at the elements on a computer monitor. He sees a spike.

That’s weird, he thinks again. Why are the Cooper bills covered in silver?

August 1988
Washougal, Washington

Jerry Thomas, retired drill sergeant, first class, Vietnam vet, wakes up in his pup tent. It is dawn. He peers out the flaps of the tent. The spears of the imperial trees—hemlock, silver fir, Sitka spruce—tower high above him. On the trunks are chanterelles, and in the bushes are berries, his food out here. In the military, Jerry was an instructor in survival training at Fort Greely, Alaska, and he led troops out into the frozen darkness and slept in ice caves. So, it’s no great challenge to spend a month or so in the forests around the Washougal River, in southern Washington state. There are Hill people, though, so he carries his gun and keeps it loaded.

The certificates he keeps confirm where he has been, what he has learned. At Fort Greely:
“WINTER OPERATIONS IN NORTHERN AREA, INSTRUCTOR QUALIFICATION COURSE.”
At Fort Benning, Georgia:
“TACTICS COMMITTEE, COMPANY A, INSTRUCTOR TRAINING.”
At Fort Jackson, South Carolina:
“LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT COURSE.”
As a first class sergeant, Jerry took the Instructor’s Creed:
“I AM A PROFESSIONAL SOLDIER. PRIDE IN MY COUNTRY, MY FLAG AND THE UNIFORM I WEAR.”

Time to get a fire going. Once the logs have taken, he puts a grate on top of the embers. The grate was once a shelf in an old refrigerator Jerry found on a hike. Which was not unusual. Jerry wanders through the forest every day, and he always finds the darnedest things: car seats, Indian arrows, rusted-out cars, wagon wheels, even a golf ball once. He can’t figure that one out—maybe a bird dropped it. The wagon wheels, he knows, are from the old settlers who came here to mine gold.

Time for breakfast. Hippie glop again. Hippie glop is canned corned beef hash from the food bank, and anything else edible that Jerry can cook in his skillet.

He eats out of the pan alone, then gets his feet moving through the woods. The brambles and mossy vines are so thick it’s easier to wade
through the river. It is lined with slippery rocks and boulders. Often his feet catch in the crevices and he falls.

Jerry does not get cold. A combat injury from Vietnam ruined his nervous system. He lost sensation in many areas.

“I don’t have a heart,” Jerry tells people. “I got what you call a thumpin’ gizzard.”

He is in the woods because he needs to be. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He is drinking. He can’t be around other people.

He has flashbacks. He can see himself as a private, in training, a year too young to enroll. He remembers the locker rooms and group showers and the shame of being naked in front of the other men in training. Now he is in Vietnam, up near the DMZ, creeping through the jungle. He hears the voices of Vietcong in the trees. The enemy is close. Too close. Retreat! Jerry tries to move. He can’t. His feet are stuck, frozen with fear. He bends over. He pukes.

Switch. He is in his bed in the trailer outside of Wilsonville, Oregon, where he grew up. He is fifteen. There’s a hand on his shoulder, the grip so firm it hurts. He opens his eyes and there’s his father, whiskey on his breath.

“Come on out to the truck, son.” Jerry follows his dad out to the pickup. It’s dark, but he can see what’s in the back of the truck: an elk doe. His father has shot it.

His father holds out a piece of flesh.

“Run your finger across that.”

Jerry does as his father says.

“See how slick and smooth that is?”

Jerry nods.

“That’s elk pussy,” his father says. “That’s what pussy is like, son.”

Switch. Jerry is back in Vietnam. He is inching through the jungle canopy, careful not to step on any mines and BOOM! He opens his eyes and he’s on a stretcher and other soldiers are scurrying him through the jungle. He opens his eyes again and he’s in the medic
tent. He looks at his body and he knows he is dead because he can’t feel anything and he can see what is on his chest and when he sees the doctor he is screaming, “Doc, there are fucking body parts all over my fucking body,” and the doctor tells him not to worry because the body parts aren’t his. They’re from his buddy who was next to him when the mine went off.

Switch. He is in the barracks at Fort Polk, Louisiana. He is the drill sergeant. He wakes up. Another gunshot is fired in the latrine, another suicide.

Switch. He is between marriages, trying to take care of his daughter. She is thirteen and embarrassed. “Dad,” she says, “we need to talk.” Okay, he says. Let’s talk. “You know that thing, you know, that girls do? That thing that’s supposed to happen …?” She’s doubled over with cramps, her eyes pleading, but he isn’t getting it.

Switch. He is in the hospital and the detective wants to ask him questions about how the gun went off and the bullet struck his son in the face. How dare the detective suggest he tried to kill his own son?

Switch. Jerry is back in the woods in Washougal. Through the trees, he sees a dark hole in a rock. It is the Last Chance Mine.

He crawls inside. On the walls around him he can see inscriptions.

1906. Kilroy was here
.

He moves down, deeper into the chasm. On the ground are pools of water. And there it is, by his wet feet.

The bag is old. The bag is made from canvas.

Could it be? Could Jerry have found D.B. Cooper’s lost money bag?

Jerry calls the FBI. If anyone could confirm the bag he found had belonged to Cooper, it is the feds.

The lead agent in the case, Ralph Himmelsbach, has retired, but lives in the area, Jerry is told by the clerk who takes his call.