Last Run

It was the catch of a lifetime. In late January 1998, after a miserable stretch of fishing that hadn't paid for even their groceries, the five-man crew of a seventy-nine-year-old Alaska schooner called the La Conte risked one last run to the Fairweather Grounds, despite the approach of bad weather. The young skipper, a father-to-be, was convinced fish could be found on the shoals, and his instincts were right: they hit the mother lode. For eighteen hours their lines had a fish on every hook: yellow eye, lingcod, calico, halibut, even the occasional sand shark; it was an incredible haul, one that would bring huge profits -- and respect -- back in port. But they stayed out too long, and a hurricane-force Arctic storm caught them. Though in need of repair herself, the La Conte had weathered bad seas before -- and might have again. But in the cruelest of ironies, the additional burden of its magnificent catch sank the ship, and set the five men -- Bob Doyle, Mike DeCapua, Gig Mork, David Hanlon, and Mark Morley -- afloat in frigid seventy-foot seas. Their radio beacon was sending distress signals to the Coast Guard, but the chances of rescue under such conditions seemed remote. Eight months later, on a deserted island nearly 800 miles away, two boys found a mutilated corpse that had washed ashore and been mauled by brown bears. A forensics investigator, haunted by the thought that this man's family might never know what had become of him, and with only a single partial fingerprint and scraps of a survival suit for clues, set out to identify the body.