“That interview,” Constance said after a brief pause, “was probably the final exchange I will ever have with Felicity Frost.”
“You mean Alicia Rime,” said Coldmoon. “Alias D. B. Cooper.”
Pendergast nodded. “That was the first question I had Constance ask Frost: Are you D. B. Cooper? As I’d hoped, it threw her so off guard that it was easier to get answers to the other three questions. Constance?”
She spoke quietly but quickly, as if dealing with something she wished to be rid of as fast as possible. “Miss Frost—Alicia—knew a great deal about avionics. She knew that the hijacking would precipitate a massive manhunt. The time of her jump and the location of the plane would not be known for certain, in the days before GPS. She jumped out into a moonless, stormy night, landing somewhere in the vast forests of southern Washington and northern Oregon, a huge and almost impossible area to search. The air force jets that had been scrambled to follow the 727 didn’t see her jump.
“She told me she opened the main chute and began to dump the money, but the money got caught in the canopy, deflating it. She cut that chute free and deployed the reserve. And this was her one mistake: she hadn’t noticed that the reserve was a training chute, not meant for actual use. Normally, such chutes are loosely stitched closed. This was something she’d never thought to check on. And now, she was rapidly approaching the ground without a deployed parachute.
“She had the presence of mind to slash the stitching away and free the training chute. Luckily, she carried a knife and the chute had a functioning ripcord. The chute opened successfully, but she was still moving at a high speed when she hit the water.”
“Water?” Coldmoon asked.
“Yes. She landed just upriver of Walupt Creek falls. The current carried her over the falls and into Walupt Lake—near Berry Patch. Roused by the cold water, she managed to swim to shore, despite the fractured leg. She passed out on the pebble beach. And that’s where she was discovered in the morning by a young farmer. The briefcase she had stolen was still strapped to her body with parachute line.”
“And that young farmer was Zephraim Quincy,” Coldmoon said.
Constance nodded. “That morning, he hadn’t yet heard about the skyjacking. He was living alone in the house. His father was in an assisted-care facility with a serious head injury, from which he would eventually die. Quincy was struggling to keep the farm going. Alicia didn’t tell him anything at first, except she categorically refused to be taken to the hospital. He carried her back to his clinic and was able to reduce her fracture, splint and plaster her leg. The paper that morning didn’t carry the news of the hijacking—it had happened too late the prior evening. So he cared for her that day, evening, and night. That, by the way, is why he never showed up at the traditional Berry Patch Thanksgiving dinner. The next morning, when the paper landed on his porch, he saw the headline and the sketch of D. B. Cooper above the fold. He realized that the woman he rescued, oddly wearing male clothing, must be Cooper.
“Five minutes later, when he walked into his clinic, he was carrying the newspaper. As he began to dress her wounds, he mentioned that he had alerted the sheriff and asked if there was anything she wanted to tell him before he arrived. She then told him everything—or almost everything. She especially emphasized that she hadn’t hurt anyone and that the bomb was a fake. She begged and pleaded with him not to turn her in, to call off the sheriff.
“By this time, I suspect the young farmer was already in love—a case of love at first sight. He was moved by her plea. He hadn’t really called the sheriff—that was just a test to see her reaction. So he kept her there in the farmhouse, caring for her and nursing her back to health. She, in turn, fell in love with him. For a few months they were happy, in their farm tucked away in the wilderness, like Tristan and Isolde in the forest of Morrois. No one knew she was there. But, of course, it was too good to be true, and for obvious reasons it couldn’t last. The searches were getting closer and FBI agents visited Quincy’s farm several times. D. B. Cooper was now on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and over two hundred agents were working the case. She couldn’t hide forever.
“By spring, Alicia was well enough to travel. She knew that if she didn’t leave Quincy then, she never would. So she wrote him a note of thanks, planning to place it on the kitchen table early one morning and avoid a difficult scene. To her surprise, however, Quincy already suspected her plans: he’d awoken before sunrise and prepared her not only breakfast but a backpack full of supplies—enough to get her out of the state and beyond any danger of being apprehended. He gave her what little cash he had. He also tucked into that backpack their favorite book, inscribed to her. She had already researched a way to get a new identity and she knew exactly what to do. After leaving the farm, she headed for a large cemetery not far away—in Puyallup—and found a grave of a girl with her approximate birthdate. She assumed that identity.”