The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

  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. Jo
hnson 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.

  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.

  THREE

  David 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 listenin
g, “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.