The Last Run (2 page)

“Say, Dale,” MacFarlane said, “why don’t you take a look at some real old, real dried-out, real decomposed skin?” He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes with his palm and took a step back.

“David,” he said, “you’re asking me to ID a guy who’s got enough skin left over to fill half a matchbox. Normally, that might be tricky. In this case, it’d be like winning the lottery. Look at this skin. As soon as we touch it, it’s going to crumble like a cheap cookie.”

Propst said, “Walter?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you see this fragment?”

“Which one?”

“This one.”

MacFarlane put his glasses back on and squinted at the specimen on the table. “I did.”

“Could you work with it?”

MacFarlane paused. He was trying to figure out if Propst was kidding. No, obviously not. MacFarlane shook his head.

“All right,” he said. “Send it on over. I’ll give it a shot. But this one here’s a million-to-one horse.”

Hanson nodded.

“No promises, now,” MacFarlane said.

“No promises,” said Hanson.

A
s David Hanson saw it, identifying his mystery man hinged on two leads: the survival suit and the skin. The suit was the more promising. All he had to do was track down the original owner and work forward. True, the suit was nine years old. It could have changed hands a few times. But someone had to know who’d been using it before it washed up on Shuyak.

It occurred to him that there ought to be a registry of survival suits somewhere. The Coast Guard kept records on almost every piece of equipment on commercial fishing vessels, even something as obscure as an emergency satellite beacon. So why not a registry of survival suits?

As far as the skin, he thought, Walter MacFarlane was probably right. It was a lot to expect a clean print to be made from so tatty a fragment. Even if the lab could do it, what were the chances of getting one print to exactly match another in the FBI’s national database? There had to be more than 35 million sets of fingerprints in that database.

All right, Hanson thought, it’s a long shot. So what? This poor guy had a life and family and right now, somewhere, that family is probably still leaving the front door open for him.

Maybe I can do something for those people, he said to himself. Help them close that door.

His first call was to the Coast Guard air station in Kodiak. He asked for the Marine Safety Office. That was the clearinghouse of maritime records. A clerk answered. Hanson told him who he was and that he wanted a serial number from a survival suit.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hanson. That won’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t keep those records.”

“Well, who does?”

The Imperial Company was headquartered in Philadelphia but had an office in Bremmerton, Washington. It took Hanson close to a half hour to get a correct number out of directory assistance, and when he did get one and dial it, the call ricocheted around a half-dozen departments. Finally he heard a woman say, “Carey Guddal!” in a bright, chipper voice.

He went through his introduction.

“I’ve even got a suit number,” Hanson said. “It’s 109153 —”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Hanson?”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.” The voice had not lost its cheerfulness. “Our parent company made that suit, and it’s no longer in business.”

“Right.”

Next he tried the Kodiak state troopers. He asked for a list of people who had gone missing on or around the Kodiak archipelago for the past decade. He also remembered to ask the sergeant to put an ad in the local paper asking the public for tips on overboard boaters.

Afterward, he visited the forensics lab and requested a DNA analysis on the hair, skin and bones collected on Shuyak. And then he went to lunch.

Just before five that afternoon his telephone rang. It was Carey Guddal again, with her chipper voice. The more he listened to her the more he slumped in his chair, until, finally, he just thanked her and hung up. He sat there, thinking, and then straightened up and clicked on his desktop computer. He typed the date and time at the top of a blank page and wrote:

Hanson read the words over, saved the file and cleared the screen. He turned off the monitor, leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. Then he went to the coatrack and picked off his jacket. Not bad, he thought. You killed your best lead on the very first day of investigating. Maybe Walter MacFarlane will be luckier with the fingertip skin.

Four of the tissue specimens were useless. They were too small, too split, too dried out, too curly.

The fifth tissue sample, which had come from a right forefinger, wasn’t bad. It had the circumference of a dime and the ridgelines on it were decent. But it was extremely fragile. Stretching the skin even a fraction of a millimeter would cause the ridgelines to distort. That would make any print reproduced from the fragment useless.

So they let it stew.

More precisely, they left it in a petri dish filled with a solution of liquid formaldehyde and fabric softener. The softener was supposed to loosen up the edges that were brittle. The formaldehyde, with luck, would dehydrate the soggy middle and firm it up.

After lunch, a lab assistant plucked the tissue out of the solution, sandwiched it between two glass slides and delivered it to the fingerprint lab. Walter MacFarlane studied the skin under a high-powered lens.

“It’s still okay,” he said. He stuck a cigarette between his lips but did not light it. “How about I dip this tissue in ink, pick it up with my forefinger here and roll a print out on the tracing paper?”

“That won’t work,” Dale Bivins, his apprentice, said. “It will smudge. It will come out blurry. The tissue is too fragile, besides. We should not press it.”

“Well,” MacFarlane said, with a thin sigh, “I’m fresh out of bright ideas.”

Bivins sat up.

“How about a clay finger?”

“A what?”

“A clay finger.”

MacFarlane gave Bivins a blank stare.

“We make a clay hand,” the apprentice said. “With a forefinger. The forefinger points up and out, see, and then we drape the skin on the tip of the finger and then shoot a photo of the ridge detail with the bellows camera.”

MacFarlane’s eyebrows went up as he listened.

“Then we enlarge the photo.”

“That,” MacFarlane said, “is one of the craziest damned things I ever heard.” He smiled. “I love it.”

From a lump of clay Bivins sculpted a fist. Then he added a forefinger. Then, with padded microtweezers, he gently hung the skin fragment from the tip of the finger. He took the clay hand to the camera room and positioned it in front of the Crown Graphic, an inch from the lens.

“You know,” Bivins said, “the tissue is split in two places. I’m not sure about this.”

“Hell with the splits,” MacFarlane said.

Within an hour, Bivins had a negative. He produced a large print from it, dried the print under a heat lamp and then placed a sheet of tracing paper over the photograph and traced the ridge patterns onto the paper. Then he took a picture of the patterns he had traced. And then he developed the negative to a one-inch-by-one-inch size.

On the fluorescent viewing panel the print looked all right. The loops looped, the swirls swirled and the ridgelines were sharp and true.

“That,” MacFarlane said, “is damned nice.”

They scanned the image into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System and waited. Twenty-four minutes later, the printer spit out a list. There were eight names on it. They pulled all eight sets of fingerprints from the archives and brought them back to the lab.

MacFarlane examined the first card and set it aside.

“Forget him,” he said.

“How come?”

“This nice fellow is still in jail.”

The next five sets of prints came from people who were still living. The last two ten-finger cards had prints that were close, but not exact matches.

Bivins shook his head.

“What now?”

“Now I go out for a smoke,” MacFarlane said.

The weekend slid by. The first thing David Hanson did when he arrived at work the following Monday was to head straight to the medical examiner’s lab. No one had come in yet. The door was open, so he entered, walked to the back and stopped before a door. He tried the knob. Unlocked.

He found the switch and a bulb flickered and then lit up a ceiling fixture full of dead flies. The tatters of the survival suit were still hanging from a line. They smelled like boiling alcohol under a blanket.

Reaching out, he touched one of the strips, probably once part of the suit leg. It felt dry, scaly. He removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves. He tore a sheet of butcher paper from a wall dispenser, spread it out over an examining table, took down the chest portion of the suit and laid it on the paper. It smelled. He looked askance at it. Then he wiped his hands on his slacks.

Dark in here, he thought.

He went to the window and pulled a cord. The blinds went up and sunlight burst into the room, powerful and perfect, like a flash of lightning at noon.

Again he considered the suit.

His eyes combed the material. The gouges meant nothing to him now. He turned it over. Across the back was a strap. On it were three, faint letters, scrawled crookedly in black marker:

BOY

He stiffened.

Why, he wondered, didn’t I notice that before? Wait a minute. The material was damp. It was damp and the orange color you’re seeing now was
maroon.
That’s right. Those black letters must have blended in with the maroon color. That’s why you didn’t notice them.

Leaning closer, he picked out another letter:

M BOY

His pulse jumped in his arms.

He thought: Is this a code? A nickname? What? A ship name? He stood there, gazing at the strap. As he did, a fifth letter appeared on the fabric, as though he were seeing it take shape through a fog.

And then, a sixth letter.

TOM BOY

The room was long and narrow with gray walls, no windows and a door that opened to a basement hall. The linoleum floor glared under the fluorescent light. There was an unreal, bluish-white quality to it, like light filtered through an aquarium tank. Black file cabinets stood in a row in the middle of the room. These were the John and Jane Doe cabinets. They were stuffed with files of missing, forgotten people, and rarely ever opened, except to add new folders.

On one wall hung a map of Alaska stuck full of colored pins. The red pins designated where people had gone missing aboard ships. The blue pins showed where passenger planes had vanished. Green pins marked where mountain hikers had disappeared and the yellow ones indicated where folks with a good reason to vanish had vanished. There were many black pins, too. These marked places where unidentified bodies or body parts had turned up.

David Hanson sat counting the pins. Across from him sat a short man with a potbelly, oily hair and a nose with veins that glistened in the harsh light. He had tight, watery eyes behind bug-eyed glasses and the slow, deliberate movements of a night watchman.

“So you got yourself another lead?”

“I think so.”

Sergeant David Johnson, director of missing persons, leaned back in his chair and clucked his tongue. He said, between clucks:
“Tomboy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You think it’s a nickname?”

“Could be.”

“A boat, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Fish and Game,” said Johnson. He yawned, turned ponderously in his swivel chair, pulled a computer keyboard out from under his desk and started pecking at the keys with two fat, neat forefingers.

“What are you doing?”

“Searching the Fish and Game database,” Johnson said. “You want to find out who this
Tomboy
fellow is, right?”

“Yeah?”

Johnson kept pecking at the keyboard and drawing air through his crimped, whistling nose. “Let’s see. Fishing vessels… Alaska… registries… Okay. Right. Here we go.” He peck-peck-pecked, moved the mouse, clicked, peck-pecked, and finally, with a satisfied cock of his double chin, said:

“Three.”

“Three what?”

“Three
Tomboy
vessels.”

“Alaska registry?”

“Yep.”

The first vessel, registered in 1989, had been sold the following year to a Fred Tomkoff Jr., the current owner. The second vessel had been bought and registered in 1989 by a George A. Shapley Jr. The third boat had been purchased eight months earlier, in January of 1998. It was co-owned by an Arthur Eels and a Daniel W. Minor, both of Port Alexander.

“How about a printed copy?” Hanson said.

“Of course.” Johnson handed him a sheet of paper. “Here. This ought to narrow your search.”

“Hopefully.”

“Well” —Johnson offered his hand —“if there’s anything else you need.”

“Thanks.”

Hanson stood and looked once more at the big map. He noticed a black pin on the northern tip of the Kodiak archipelago. Johnson stood beside him and raised his eyebrows, as if raising them was an effort.

“I hope you find out who this
Tomboy
guy is,” Johnson said. “We could do without the extra work around here.”

There was no record of any fishermen with a first, last or middle name of Tomboy in the Alaska Personal Information Network database. So Hanson went through his mail pile. There were some letters, an official one and some others. The official one came from the chief of the state troopers in Kodiak. It was the missing persons list Hanson had requested. He opened the manila envelope. Between 1980 and 1992, fifteen people had gone missing in Kodiak. After 1992, the troopers had stopped keeping a tally, but the report did not explain why.