The Last Run Read Online Free Page 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.
     

 
BOOK TWO
     

FOUR
    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