Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (34 page)

McCoy and Walker press on to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They hole up at a Howard Johnson’s motel. One afternoon, they watch
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
as they count their score from another robbery. Thirty thousand … fifty thousand … seventy-six thousand. At night, they go out for dinner and steal license plates from cars and look for people who look like them, so they can steal their identification. But what is the point?

The Howard Johnson’s is its own prison. What have they done it all for? They decide to live big, splurge. Fuck it. McCoy buys his daughter an Arabian horse for her birthday and rents a horse farm in Tuskegee, Alabama. He and Walker rent an apartment in Virginia Beach, furnish it lavishly, and stockpile it with a small cache of weapons.

McCoy plans another airplane hijacking, to make an even bigger score. He and Walker start running to get in shape.

One fall night, making the drive from Tuskegee back to Virginia Beach, McCoy gets a strange feeling. He is talking about God, the Mormon church, the stillness of the ocean.

“Tell me again,” McCoy says, “what’s the name of those evergreens along the front of the house?”

“Arborvitae,” Walker says. Means “tree of life.”

“Arborvitae. Arborvitae,” McCoy says, forcing himself to remember the name.

McCoy pulls onto Great Neck Road. He does not want to enter the house. What if somebody has given them up?

“It’s your turn,” Walker says.

McCoy pulls over the car. He places a pistol in his waistband. He jogs toward the house, strolls up the front walk. He turns the key.

The orange glow of streetlights floods the window in the front room.

He hears the crackle of a radio in the other room. It is blaring voices.

He reaches for his gun. He hears a scream.

“FBI! … Close the door. Be quiet.”

Gun sparks fly in the dark. It sounds like cannonballs have gone off.

“I’m killed,” McCoy says.

He stumbles. He falls back through the front door, onto the porch, into the Arborvitae bushes.

“Somebody run!” an agent says. “Get some bath towels! Before this man bleeds to death.”

“Fuck him,” another agent says. “That son of a bitch just tried to kill me.”

The agents hover over McCoy’s body. It is too late for a D.B. Cooper confession. The coroner is called.

February 28, 2009
Battleground, Washington

I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western in southern Washington. It’s my fifth trip to the state—no, my sixth. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what I am looking for. The ghost of a closeted airline purser who lived with young boys and looked exactly like an FBI sketch that may not have looked like the hijacker at all? Or a gold-obsessed trans-gender librarian-pilot who had a grudge against the airlines? Or am I after a fanatic of Dan Cooper the comic book hero? Or should I stop looking and wait for scientist Tom Kaye to break open the case with his microscopic scientific thinking?

I am here to document Kaye’s fieldwork. I am not alone. Tom has assembled a team that has traveled across the country to help him analyze the money. The technical brain will be Alan Stone, a metallurgist from Chicago whom Tom knows from the dinosaur world. Another dinosaur buddy is Carol Abraczinskas. She is a scientific illustrator from the University of Chicago. She’s here to help in the field and draw pictures for Tom’s planned scientific paper. Also with us is the little boy who found the money, Brian Ingram, who is not so little anymore. Tom flew Brian in from Mena, Arkansas, and offered to pay for his trip. Brian knew the area; after all, he found the money there. He is also press bait. The story of the boy-turned-man who returns to the spot that changed his life, Tom hopes, will entice reporters to cover his fieldwork.

The last member of the team is a last-minute addition: Jerry Thomas. For help navigating the woods in the Washougal area, Jerry is a natural choice. He’s been looking in the area for Cooper’s body and ransom for the past twenty-two years.

Tom is ready to get started. Tall and lanky, he wears simple blue jeans, a blue sweatshirt, and black sneakers that are worn out from walking across Montana hunting for T. rex teeth. He is hungry because he gets hungry when he is anxious. Tom buries his head in the rear of a rental minivan. It’s stuffed with science equipment: test tubes, notebooks, sample jars, and a fishing rod to which he’s affixed a bundle
of cash to test its buoyancy. The equipment and tests, he hopes, will confirm his “explosive” hypothesis—which he revealed to me, under the provision that I not reveal it until now. So, here it is.

Think of the plaque on your teeth. It forms, over time, from bacteria that grow and collect. Well, the silver on the Cooper bills that he saw under his microscope formed in a similar way, Tom hypothesizes.

His first step was to call Alan Stone (“my metal guy”), who looks exactly how you would imagine a metallurgist to look: spectacles, mustache, fanny pack. He runs Aston Labs, a metals research firm in Chicago. When Tom discovered silver on the bills in his lab in Arizona, he sent the images to Stone for his opinion.

Yes, definitely silver, Stone confirmed. But how did it get there?

Together, the scientists gazed at Tena Bar on Google Earth. The sand on the beach where Brian Ingram found the Cooper bills, they saw, was not white and powdery. It was black.

After studying the properties of silver, Tom and Alan learned that microscopic traces of silver can seep out of sand. And when silver comes into contact with a porous and natural element—like the linen that money is made from—a chemical event takes place. “Bacterial ooze,” as Tom puts it, would seep out of the sand and form on the bills and protect them from the elements. This ooze, like a plaque, would explain all that black stuff he first saw.

But the Silver-in-the-Sand theory, if true, is limited. Other questions remain. How long had the money been at Tena Bar to develop the microscopic plaque? And perhaps more important, how did the money get there in the first place?

Tom thinks the feds goofed. Tom is not the first Cooper hunter to suspect that the real drop zone was not where the feds were looking.

After reviewing data about the flight path, amateur sleuth Wayne Walker (Sluggo_Monster) found the error on a timeline that charted
Northwest 305’s position. A licensed pilot, Walker found minutes 8:01, 8:02, 8:03, and 8:05 all accounted for. So where was minute 8:04?

The Missing Minute, as Walker’s catch came to be called, suggests that Cooper had to have landed, at the very least, three miles farther south than what agents first thought. Using the Bureau’s old data and modern mapping techniques, Walker composed a digitally enhanced drop zone. Walker now believes Cooper landed thirty miles south of Ariel, around the town of Orchards, roughly fifteen miles from the Columbia River.

Tom envisions a different scenario. Teetering over the night sky on the aftstairs of Flight 305, the hijacker sees the glow of city lights from Portland. He jumps. Not being able to steer the NB6 a great deal, he floats down toward the Columbia River and lands in it. He floats downriver toward Tena Bar and loses the money. Or loses some of the money. Tom does not know how. Perhaps the hijacker died of hypothermia in the Columbia and got washed out into the Pacific as the wakes of freighter boats pushed the ransom money to shore. Or perhaps the hijacker sank to the bottom of the Columbia and then got shredded in the giant blade of a passing cargo freighter, which cut up the money bag and sent two hundred packets of ransom bills floating through the water.

Tom is not the first to arrive at this conclusion. A number of Cooper hunters spent years analyzing the case and came to believe the hijacker landed in the Columbia. One retired federal agent even went through the hassle of having the riverbed raked. But until now, nobody has been able to prove it. Tom feels he is on the verge.

“Hey, Tom?”

“Yes, Jerry.”

Jerry Thomas has stepped out of his massive pickup truck. He drove
five hours over the Cascades from Baker City, where he now lives, to be with us. He clutches a vintage-looking suitcase that is powder blue.

Jerry looks different than I thought he would. I expected a hiker type with a long beard, a ponytail, dressed in microfleece made from tennis balls and late-edition hiking boots. But Jerry’s cheeks are clean shaven. He wears dark trousers, an untucked button-up that drapes over his belly. On his feet are Wal-Mart sneakers that Velcro shut; they are the only shoes Jerry can wear because of his swollen feet, one of many postcombat ailments. Jerry is a few years older than Tom, and there is silver hair under a baseball cap that says
THE WALL
, a memento from one of his many trips to the Vietnam War memorial. His eyes are his most noticeable feature: dark, unyielding. Drill-sergeant eyes.

“I know you’re an archaeologist, Tom,” Jerry says, “so I brought back a coin for you I found up in the woods.”

Jerry hands Tom the coin. It is sheathed in plastic.

The coin is a test. Jerry is skeptical of Tom. He wants to find out how serious a scientist Tom is. Jerry knows there is no conceivable way in the universe a coin like this one could be found in the Washougal area. It’s an Asian piece, hundreds of years old and from Jerry’s coin collection. So how will Tom react? Will he respond in a glib way, look at the coin briefly and say, Oh, wow, Jerry, that’s really neat? Or will he see the markings on the coin and, in a sincere and astute way, call Jerry’s bluff?

Tom inspects the coin. He hands the coin back.

“I appreciate that, Jerry,” he says, “but I’m a paleontologist. The difference is that archaeologists deal with uncovering the history of people that goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and paleontologists study everything before that. We like to say, ‘We don’t have to deal with people’s problems.’ ”

Jerry moves on. He scans Carol Abraczinskas with the drill-sergeant eyes. Carol: late thirties, bookish glasses, North Face jacket.

Jerry moves on to Brian Ingram, scans the little boy who found the Cooper treasure. Brian is thirty-eight now. It’s hard to imagine—in
Cooper lore, Brian is forever a young boy in the newspaper pictures. Photographers captured him on his knees in the sand on Tena Bar, showing agents where he found the money. He had bowl-cut hair, a toothy grin. He’s achieved what all boys dream of: finding buried treasure.

As a grown man, Brian remains strangely youthful, as if his life peaked when he was eight and he has been trapped in that moment ever since. The toothy grin is the same, only now Brian is a bit overweight, has a goatee, and wears a jockey cap that covers thinning hair.

Brian has been in the news recently, having auctioned off several Cooper bills.

“Shame you had to sell those bills,” Jerry says. Alimony can be a bitch and he knows all about it.

Brian has to think. Did Jerry use the word “alimony”? How does Jerry know the real reason Brian auctioned off those bills?

In the lobby of the Best Western the front-desk girl peers into the screen of her phone, the silver shine of her nose ring illuminated by its glow, waiting for the next text message to appear. The guests who rent rooms here are truckers hauling freight, high school kids on prom night.