Skyjack Read online

  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.

  Jerry is curious if the feds know how to contact Himmelsbach.

  The phonebook, the clerk says. Himmelsbach is listed.

  Jerry looks up the number and calls. He tells Himmelsbach about the canvas bag he found.

  Where did he find the bag, Himmelsbach asks.

  Near the Washougal river, Jerry tells him. Lying on the floor of the Last Chance Mine.

  Describe the bag.

  Well, it’s canvas, has a leather strap and a metal eyelet.

  Nope, can’t be. The canvas bag of money Cooper was given was all white—no leather straps, no eyelets. But Jerry was looking in the right place, Himmelsbach says, and shares his opinion that after studying the case longer than any agent he has come to believe Cooper parachuted into the Washougal area, and his bones were probably locate
d at the river’s edge.

  The Washougal. Jerry knew he was onto something. He goes back in the woods. He follows Himmelsbach’s directions, searching up and down the Washougal river bed. He does this every season, checking caves, old mines, under ferns. He rigs a six-foot stick with a hook so he can poke around in the bush and prod up into tree branches. Jerry does this for so many years he becomes part of the Cooper legend himself. When reporters call looking for information on the woods, Himmelsbach refers them to Jerry. He’s the Woods Guy.

  “I know there is something out here,” Jerry tells one reporter. “There has to be.”

  Date Unknown, 1978

  Thun Airport Field, Puyallup, Washington

  She has blond hair, shoulder length. She is wearing shorts and sandals. Her toenails are painted red. She has a wrench in her hands and she is working on her plane and a ’62 Dodge at the same time, transferring parts from each.

  Her Cessna is the ugliest plane Ron Foreman has ever seen. The color scheme goes together like gruel: the engine cowler is brown, the wings are blue and yellow striped. Entire patches of paint are missing. Parked next to the plane, her ’62 Dodge looks even worse. Foreman peers under the hood. He sees a block of wood where the oil dipstick was. He looks at the dashboard: It’s been retrofitted with aviation-like turn signals.

  She has created a kind of car-plane. She siphons high-octane jet fuel from the Cessna to fill the gas tank in the Dodge. Drives faster that way, she says.

  Ron Foreman introduces himself. He’s an airplane mechanic.

  She’s Barbara Dayton, and the plane is for sale.

  “You interested?” she says.

  He is. Not in her plane, but in her abilities as a mechanic. Later, Ron watches her remove a propeller with a ten-inch Crescent wrench. How can she be so strong? And when they finally fly together, he can’t understand why her crummy Cessna flies five miles faster than his and all the other taildragger pilots at Thun?

  As a pilot, Barb is reckless. She flies with her radio off. She buzzes so many treetops the branches get stuck in her wheels. She says strange and ominous things about flying and death. He’s never met a pilot so emotionally connected to the experience of being in the air. She tells Pat Foreman, Ron’s wife, “Sometimes I feel like getting into the plane and flying out over the water until I run out of fuel.”

  She is a loner. When the Foremans arrive at the airfield, they can see her under the wing of her Cessna and, later, her Aeronca Champ. When they leave, Barb is still there. Even on holidays. Even in the rain. Come have lunch? Come over for dinner?

  No thanks, Barb says.

  The Foremans are relentless in their friendliness. They push. Come on. One meal.

  Barb has no choice. One Sunday night, after flying, she comes to their house and eats with them. Next Sunday, she returns. She tells them about her life.

  She prospected for gold near the family ranch in the Mother Lode; nearly died of starvation in the Yukon with the Crazy Indian; rode with the Hells Angels; was nearly shot to death as a deserter in the Merchant Marines for abandoning ships and living with the Māori warriors. She’s now a librarian, in the palatial Suzzallo Library in Seattle, on the University of Washington campus. She knows karate. She’s a black belt.

  The Foremans don’t believe her.

  To prove it, she gets into a crouch and leaps around the living room performing her martial arts moves. Then she hits the ground and starts to do one-armed push-ups.

  One weekend, the Foremans visit Barb in Seattle. Her building is a rooming house of sorts. The stairs are narrow and rickety. Barb’s room is number thirteen.

  Thirteen is her lucky number, she says.

  She opens the door and shows them around.

  “I furnished the place for less than twenty dollars,” she says.

  They sit on orange plastic chairs. Her television is tiny, with a six-inch screen. Inside her fridge is a half a head of cabbage and a bottle of grape juice. Along her windowsill is an old coil that was plucked from a Model-A car. Ron sees wires running from it.

  An alarm system, Barb says. The wires running are attached to a 6-volt. Anybody who comes through her window will get zapped.

  “Where’s your bedroom?” Ron asks.

  “You’re in it,” Barb says.

  Another night, Barb is over again for Sunday night dinner.

  “I have something to tell you about my past,” she says. “You’ll probably never want to see me in your house again. The last person I told about this tried to kill me.”

  “Don’t tell me you were a prostitute!” Ron says.

  “No. I wish it were as simple as that.”

  “Give me a hint. Does it have anything to do with money?”

  “In a way. At one time I had all the money I could want, but I just blew it.”

  “I know. You killed someone.”

  “No, that’s not it, though I could have if things kept going the way they were.”

  “Did you do something illegal?”

  “Well, no, what I’m about to tell you about wasn’t illegal.”

  “You were in a mental hospital.”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  Barb looks at Pat.

  “I think your wife knows now,” Barb says.

  It takes a few minutes for Pat to figure it out. Ron and Pat retreat into their bedroom. Pat tells Ron that Barb was once a man. Ron feels angry, betrayed. He befriended Barb because he was so impressed that a woman could possess such extraordinary mechanical skills. The sting lingers for a few days, but he likes Barb and likes to fly with her so much. Eventually, he gets over it.

  D.B. Cooper comes up for the first time one afternoon at Sanderson, a small airport near Thun. It’s close to Thanksgiving, Cooper anniversary stories are in the papers, and every pilot at the lunch table has a theory about the missing hijacker.

  Ron thinks Cooper is an idiot. Why jump over Ariel? No way to make it out alive.

  Barb defends Cooper’s intelligence. She sounds angry, offended almost.

  Ron jokes with her.

  “I know,” he says. “Barb is the real D.B. Cooper!”

  Later that day, Barb pulls Ron aside.

  “Don’t ever say that in public again,” she says, about calling her Cooper. “Not even as a joke.”

  A few months later, over Sunday night dinner, the topic of the hijacker returns.

  “The FBI doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” Barb says, and goes on to discuss the case in detail. Cooper’s actual drop zone, she says, is nowhere near where the FBI was searching.

  The Foremans are skeptical. How does Barb know so much about the case?

  “Okay,” Barb says. “Ron guessed it at Sanderson. I am D.B. Cooper.”

  They don’t believe her. How could they?

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Barb says. “I get claustrophobic. I couldn’t survive in prison.”

  August 2000

  Pace, Florida

  McNeil. Ohio State. San Quentin. Soledad. Canon City. What convict did Jo marry? She flips through the Soldier of Fortune that Duane left in his safety deposit box. Was he trying to tell her something by leaving this magazine for her? Are the clues in here? She scans the personal ads again. NIGHT VISION BINOCULARS, one reads. GORGEOUS ASIAN WOMEN. More listings. WHO KILLED KENNEDY?

  She remembers a few names of the friends Duane had, people he introduced her to in Atlanta and New Orleans where they went for parties. She met Tommy Gunn once in Mobile, Alabama. She looks up his name, finds it in the directory. After the call, she trembles when she remembers what he told her.

  “If you want to see your grandchildren, burn everything. Duane knew people in high places.”

  What people? What places? How high?

  Jo calls the FBI again. They don’t call back.

  She is hysterical. What has the FBI found in Duane’s past? Why aren’t they calling back? What are they hiding?

  With a dial-up connection on her computer, she painstakingly pu
nches out more e-mails.

  “Please help me,” she writes to the Missouri Department of Corrections. “I am a 64 yr old widow who just wants to piece together her husbands life.… My husband told me his name was Dan Cooper … so be assured the FBI thinks I’m a loo loo.”

  She studies the commutation paper she found in the ostrich-skin wallet again. She looks at the date. March 1968. She realizes that March 1968 is one month before Duane’s prison mate James Earl Ray was suspected of assassinating Martin Luther King.

  What was going on inside Jefferson City when Duane and James Earl Ray were there? Had James Earl accepted some kind of deal to escape from Jefferson City? If he did, would Duane’s ex-wife Mary Jane know about it? Did Duane have some part in the killing of Martin Luther King? Or did John C. Collins?

  Jo scans her mind for the names and faces of the men Duane introduced her to. How else can she figure out who Duane was and who John C. Collins is?

  She remembers the one-legged man, who drove them to dinner in Denver and said he once worked for Howard Hughes. She remembers the man with cupid lips and a diamond horseshoe finger ring at the Red Rooster, a bar in southern Colorado. They met at the bar so early in the morning. Why?

  More memories. Why did Duane’s boss Ed Hurran—or was it Hurrand? Or Horan?—not want Jo to take his picture? Or founder of American Life Insurance Bernie Rapoport—“Kissy Kissy,” as they called him? Did these men think she was annoying? Or were they hiding another piece of her dead husband’s secret life?

  She sees a photograph of “Macho,” or Bernard Barker, who was involved in Watergate. The Nixon Plumber looks familiar. Did she meet Macho at a private party in New Orleans? She thinks so. Can she be sure the photo is of him? No. And what about the man wearing the blue jacket in Salt Lake City? Duane asked her to take his picture. Why?