...And Never Let HerGo

neighbors remembered now that he had seen Kay Capano’s Suburban parked down the street late in June 1996. He had been curious enough to ask Gerry what Tom was doing down at the beach, but couldn’t remember what Gerry said.
    A NNE M ARIE ’ S brothers and sister held the almost impossible hope that her remains might still be found so that they could have a funeral and a burial. But she had been gone now for seventeen months, and if her earthly remains sank where Gerry said they did, it was where the two-hundred-feet-deep continental shelf ended abruptly and the waters plunged to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. As strong as her spirit still was in the hearts of those who loved her, her body was where the sharks swam.
    Fortunately, Matthew Pleasant, a criminal investigator for the U.S. Coast Guard who was stationed in Cape May, New Jersey, had called the Delaware State Police and offered to help in the search for Anne Marie. Pleasant told the investigators that he had worked in navigating search-and-rescue operations for the coast guard. The nineteen-year veteran had spent a dozen of those years as an electronics and sonar technician. Sonar senses underwater objects and is often used to search beneath the sea after plane crashes. There was a faint chance that it might help locate Anne Marie.
    It was worth a try. The cost of a coast guard sonar hunt was estimated at well over $250,000. That would, of course, have been far more than the investigators’ budget, but it was possible that a sonar-equipped submarine might be in the area for other tests.
    They found one. First, Pleasant interviewed Gerry Capano and wrote down what he recalled about his journey out to sea on June 28, 1996. Gerry said he had headed for Hereford’s Inlet from Stone Harbor with the sun over the bow of his boat. It had taken him and Tom two to two and a half hours to reach the spot where he cut the motor, and he was certain the water depth had been 198 feet. He wasn’t as sure of his compass headings.
    At the time, Gerry had already sold that boat,
Summer Wind.
On June 23, 1996, he had signed a sales agreement to buy a more powerful one—a twenty-nine-foot Black Fin—for $101,000. When he and Tom left Stone Harbor with their tragic cargo five days later, it had been one of his last ventures in his old boat. At the state’s instruction, Gerry arranged to buy
Summer Wind
back. Pleasant, Gerry, and Petty Officer Davis headed out to sea in the Hydra-Sport 2,500 cc craft on a day when the weather mimicked that of June 28, 1996. Davis had a GPS receiver with him (a global positioning system that pilots and seamen use to mark their locations anywhere in the world). They had the way points stored in Gerry’s LORAN (a system that indicates a boat’s location), calculations from the coastguard navigator and from Meridian Science (a company that locates lost ships), and an estimated speed of twenty-nine knots. They determined that Gerry was probably telling them the truth as he remembered his course, but that he was not very good with navigational charts and was more a seat-of-the-pants sailor.
    Anne Marie’s body could be anywhere along a ten-mile stretch. Nevertheless, the coast guard and the navy carried out a sonar search from the coast guard cutter
Hornbeam.
They were looking for the two anchors Gerry said he had given Tom to weigh down Anne Marie’s body. The floor of the sea was smooth, except for the rake marks left by commercial fishing vessels. At one point, the searchers thought they had found something, but they discovered it was only some commercial fishing gear, a chained bag used to drag the ocean bottom for scallops.
    The crew eventually located eleven objects—all of them oceanic junk.
    It was a nearly impossible mission. Currents and storms had changed the sea bottom and buried objects with churning sand. But in June 1998, a last-ditch effort was made to find Anne Marie’s remains on the floor of the Atlantic. Unlike the timing of the search for the occupants of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s downed plane—which was begun almost at once after it vanished over Atlantic waters, much closer to the shore—it had now been two years to the day since Anne Marie’s body disappeared in the water sixty miles out to sea. A miniature submarine sidled along the ocean floor near Stone Harbor, feeling for objects with its mechanized claw. The searchers did find a chain and an anchor, but they were the wrong size and in no way matched the