The Last Run (3 page)

It was unlikely that skin tissue would last six years in a survival suit on a bear-inhabited island. Hanson ran the names through the computer anyway. Of the fifteen names on the list, the prints of six were still on file. He asked Walter MacFarlane to see if any of them matched
Tomboy’s
print. They had all taken to calling their mystery man
Tomboy.

That was the last new lead Hanson would get for eight days. By the afternoon of August 24, the investigation had stalled again.

According to the Coast Guard, no
Tomboy
vessels had ever sunk in Alaska. According to forensics, there was no chance of a DNA analysis on the hair, skin and bone fragments. The skin and hair were —how did they put
it? — unsuitable
for testing. Too decomposed. The bones could be ground into a powder, tested in a beaker, but without a family donor to offer a comparative sample, what good could it do?

The state’s Fishing Entry Commission had issued fishing permits to the
Tomboy
vessels but had no other information. The fingerprint lab could not match the
Tomboy
print to any of the six people who had gone missing on Kodiak between 1980 and 1992. And calls to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Washington State Department of Vessel Licensing and the Coast Guard’s National Documentation Center in West Virginia got Hanson nowhere.

For eight days he left phone messages for the men who owned
Tomboy
vessels in Alaska. He got only one callback, on August 24, when George A. Shapley Jr. phoned to say that his
Tomboy
was still afloat, and all crew and survival suits accounted for. “That’s great news,” Hanson had told him. “Thanks so much for calling.”

The following afternoon, however, a phone call from the Kodiak state troopers perked him up.

A team of investigators had gone back to Shuyak Island and found more human remains. The discovery was not two hundred yards from the bear den. Everything was being dispatched to Anchorage in the morning.

It was the talk of the crime lab until two the following afternoon. Everyone assigned to the case gathered in the medical examiner’s lab. But when Dr. Propst opened the sealed carton, their jaws dropped. There was no more than the sole of a shoe, a pair of tattered, gray sweatpants, the sleeve of a sweatshirt, two socks, long johns and a few bone chips.

The next morning, Hanson found a message on his telephone answering machine left by someone named Geraldine Dodge in Kodiak. She’d also left a return phone number. He dialed it not knowing quite what to expect, and heard a woman’s voice.

“Ms. Dodge, this is David Hanson from the state crime lab in Anchorage. You called me?”

“I did,” she said. “I’ve got something that might help you solve that missing persons case on Shuyak.”

“Be my guest.”

Dodge told him that in 1997, a fisherman by the name of Thomas A. Banks had disappeared in the Gulf of Alaska, eighty miles south of Cordova. He was on the
Cape Chacon,
working the deck, when a wave swept him overboard. The Coast Guard had never found him.

“What makes you think he washed up on Shuyak?” Hanson asked.

“I don’t know—maybe his nickname?” Dodge said. “Tomboy.”

For some reason, Banks had never been registered as a missing person. The Coast Guard did have a case file on the mission, however, at the Marine Safety Office in Juneau. Dodge provided a telephone number.

The ensign was almost apologetic. He could not recall any search-and-rescue missions involving a Thomas A. Banks or a fishing vessel
Cape Chacon.
The only boat to go down in the Gulf in recent memory, he said, was an old trap tender called the
La Conte.
It had sunk on the Fairweather Grounds, seventy-five miles southwest of Yakutat, in January.

“Yakutat?”

“Yes, sir.”

Yakutat was a village on the eastern rim of the Gulf of Alaska, north of Glacier Bay. That had to be more than seven hundred miles away from Shuyak, Hanson thought. There was no way a body would float that far without a fishing boat spotting it or pulling it up.

“Ensign?”

“Sir?”

“Any chance you could run a check anyway on that
Cape Chacon
vessel?”

As it turned out, the
Cape Chacon
did lose a crewman once, only not in 1997. The fisherman, Thomas A. Banks, had gone overboard near Cordova in 1987—two years before the
Tomboy
suit was manufactured.

Hanson ran the name through the state computer anyway. Banks had prints on file, so Hanson asked the fingerprint lab to compare them against the
Tomboy
print. The results came back after lunch.

Negative.

D
avid Hanson got up the next day feeling rested but sluggish. He showered, shaved, put on slacks, a clean white shirt, his black shoes and a bright tie and looked in the mirror. He undid the tie and walked down to the kitchen. He cleared a spot on the table, sat down, had a few handfuls of his kids’ cold cereal, a shot of cranberry juice and thought about
Tomboy.
The kids were loud and his wife said something to him but he did not hear it. He felt drugged, sort of. He put his coat on and went out to his car.

Driving, he kept thinking about the survival suit. The windshield wipers squeaked back and forth. What had he missed? He felt as though he had overlooked something. There was always something. Life was a series of clues overlooked. Who had said that? He pulled into the parking lot.

Three o’clock found him at his desk, typing. He had kept a running account of the
Tomboy
case and did not want to stop just because the investigation had flamed out. As he wrote, it occurred to him how many concrete leads had gone up like a puff of dust in a draft, and he kept on writing. He made a note that he never had contacted two of the men listed as owners of
Tomboy
vessels in Alaska. He’d called several times and left voice messages. Perhaps he ought to try them one more time. He reached into his drawer, took out his notebook and was flipping through the pages to find the numbers when the telephone rang.

It rang a second time.

He put his hand on the receiver, lifted it and said, “Hanson.”

“Yeah,” a voice on the line said. It had a thick edge to it. A three, double-Scotch edge. “This here’s Eels, from Port Alexander.”

“Eels?”

“Yeah, some guy named Hanson called me and I’m returning the favor.”

“Arthur Eels?”

“Yeah.”

I was just going to call you, Hanson thought. What he said was, “Arthur, I’m glad you called.”

Silence.

“Now, Mr. Eels-”

“Arthur.”

“Arthur,” Hanson said. “Listen; the reason I called was because you’re listed in Fish and Game records as being the owner of a boat called the
Tomboy
—”

“I sold that boat.”

“When?”

“A couple months ago.”

“I see. Well, who did you sell it to?”

Eels gave him a name, then said, “I got myself a new one. The
Emily Ann.”

“So you no longer own a
Tomboy
fishing boat?”

“Not anymore.”

Well, Hanson said to himself. Another strikeout. “Okay, well, Arthur, I, uh —I appreciate you calling back. You told me all I need to know. That is, unless you think there’s something else you can tell me.”

“I don’t think —”

“Right. Well, thanks again.”

“I mean,” Eels went on, as if he had not been listening, “you probably already knew that one of the guys who died on the
La Conte
was wearing one of my
Tomboy
survival suits.”

Hanson sat back in his chair.

“Oh,
really?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

Eels, who fished commercially during the summer months, told him he had taken a vacation to Oregon in December 1997, and had left his boat, the
Tomboy,
in his brother’s care. His brother, however, had gotten arrested and asked one of his buddies to keep an eye on it, a friend by the name of Mike DeCapua. Shortly thereafter, the friend —Hanson was scribbling down the name—had taken a deckhand’s job on an old schooner, the
La Conte,
which was short one survival suit.

“And wouldn’t you know it?” Eels said. “But that old boat went down in a storm last January on the Fairweather Grounds. And get this: the guy who died in that storm was wearing my suit.”

“Imagine that,” Hanson said.

That conversation David Hanson recorded carefully in his ledger. He noted the time and date it took place: 3:37 P.M., Friday, August 28, 1998.

The following Monday, the Coast Guard’s District 17 headquarters in Juneau confirmed that two of five crewmen on an old schooner named the
La Conte
had died in a violent storm on the Fairweather Grounds on January 30, 1998. One of the dead fishermen had never been found.

Hanson jotted down the name of the missing fisherman. He ran it through the state’s personal information database and found that the dead fisherman had fingerprints rolled on May 11, 1968. Those prints remained on file at the Alaska state crime lab in Anchorage.

Walter MacFarlane pulled those prints. He put the right forefinger on the lab’s FX8B Forensic Optical Comparator, side by side with the negative of the
Tomboy
fingerprint.

He and two other experts found them to be identical.

David Hanson was at his desk, typing, when a knock came at the door of the investigator’s office. His fingers stopped and he looked up. The door was open. Walter MacFarlane was standing in it.

“Well?”

MacFarlane grinned.

“It’s him all right,” he said.

“That’s great,” Hanson said. “That’s really great, Walter.”

“I can’t believe it,” MacFarlane said. He held out a fingerprint card with a big circle around one of the rolled ink impressions. Hanson took it. “I’ll put it all in the report and get it to you by tomorrow afternoon. It’s pretty amazing.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Congratulations, David.”

“No,” Hanson said. “You did a great job.”

“It’s a million-to-one come in,” MacFarlane said. “Never happen again, by God.”

“You did a great job, Walter.”

“No, no, David. You did.”

After MacFarlane left, Hanson leaned back in his chair and looked blankly at the fingerprint card. Walter was right. It
had
been pretty amazing when you thought about it. It was as though they had been
meant
to identify this guy. How many pins are there on that big map in Missing Persons? Must be hundreds. Hundreds. So why is it that we got this one?

He straightened his tie. There were in-house notifications to make. He would start with his sergeant. I can’t wait to see Sergeant Marrs’s face when I give him the news, he thought. I’ll bet he’s already written this case off. Hanson stood up. He studied the fingerprint card again. It is sort of weird, though. All we had was a dime-size bit of skin and a strap on a suit that read
Tomboy.
Well, forget it, he said to himself. Just leave it be. It’ll just tie you up in knots. That’s what happens when you ask too many questions. You got to know when to stop.

A
year earlier, in November of 1997, the first very cold nights came early, then the afternoons were cold and the lamps along the docks began to come on early and Bob Doyle knew the fall was really gone. The salmon were no longer running up Indian River and the black bears that had been a nuisance in town all summer had gone back up into the mountains. The mountains had changed, too. All summer they had been a golden, spruce green except for the very tops that were always white, but now the snowline was coming down a little each day. One day in the middle of the fall, as Bob Doyle walked near the Old Russian Cemetery, he noticed the line was markedly lower on the mountains and he knew that winter would soon be upon all of them.

More boats were coming in now than going out and many were going south for the winter. The fishing along the outer coast was over and by the middle of the month the shrimping season was about over, too. The last of the cruise ships had shoved off to Seattle and the souvenir shops with the not-so-cheap ornaments around the cathedral and on Lincoln Street across from the harbor had sales signs in their display windows. In the harbors there were a few big trollers. But their gear had been stowed and their galleys and cabins stripped and the boats rocked sadly in their slips, the tide licking their hulls and making the bowlines creak, the wind moving their wire stays with a hollow tinkle. All of the noises of the docks now blended in a single note, a hollow note, as though a piano player had hit his last key but had kept a foot on the floor pedal.

That fall the rains came almost every day. The clouds would brood over the mountaintops and then the sky would descend, heavily, and then everything was gray and the mountains gone and the rain black and lisping along the pier. Some days a fog covered the town and Bob Doyle would put down the shrimp pots he was repairing along the wharf and watch the O’Connell Bridge dissolve in it. He knew the bridge was still there but sometimes he liked to pretend that the fog had wiped it away, erased it, and that later, during the night, it had somehow been rebuilt from scratch. Other days the wind blew very hard and the silvery sky would lift and brighten and, pulling apart, allow tilted shafts of sunlight to fall through, lighting a rainbow. The rainbow would not last long. The sky would anger to black and soon the rain was coming again in gray, sweeping nets, lifting the channel in white, spurting jets and dripping from the tails of the ravens perched on the pilings.

All of the sadness of the town came with the cold rains and there were days when he could not see the snowline, only the dripping streetlamps and the slick grayness of the sidewalks and the moldering roofs and shutters of the older cabins. It was not the most pleasant weather for walking but it was easier for Bob Doyle to think clearly when he was out roaming. He also found it more economical to walk than to drink and he had no other means of getting around. So he walked. Only sometimes as he walked would he feel as though someone was behind him, stepping in his footsteps. He would hear rustlings and voices worn away by the years. And sobbing. He would hear it for a time, mixed with the sound of the rain. When he heard the sobbing he had to tell himself not to turn around. Maybe a day would come when the echoes would die.