...And Never Let HerGo

registered 198 feet when he cut the motor and told Tom he was on his own. The sea was choppy and he heard Tom throwing up repeatedly as he wrestled with the cooler.
    “How did the cooler get into the water?” Connolly asked.
    “I’m unclear on whether or not I helped him pick it up and put it in the water and then walked to the front of the boat—or if he did it himself.”
    “Did the cooler sink?”
    “No.”
    “How do you know?”
    Gerry looked sweaty and queasy as he recalled shooting into the white Styrofoam and seeing something reddish pink flow from the bullet hole. (The dead don’t bleed, but melting ice inside would have been tinged by the blood that had trickled from whatever wounds Anne Marie had sustained. The longer she had lived, the greater the quantity of blood. But this had been far too pale to be fresh blood.) Gerry gulped as he described the gush of pinkish fluid he had seen.
    “When the cooler didn’t sink,” Connolly asked, “what did you do?”
    “We pulled the boat up next to it,” Gerry said, “and then I shut the boat off and went back up to the front.”
    “So, now,” Connolly pressed, “the first time you helped him [lift the cooler over the side of the boat]; the second time you [only] pulled alongside the cooler?”
    “Right. That’s when I told him he was on his own—and I went to the front of the boat.”
    “Why did your boat have two anchors?”
    “I always carry two anchors,” Gerry said. “If you anchor up the front of the boat and the back of the boat, it stays still.”
    Gerry testified he had leaned against the bow rails and looked straight ahead, with his back to Tom. “I was telling him,” he testified, “this was not right—this was wrong.”
    He had heard Tom rustling around with the chains and anchors, gagging from his grisly task. “I asked him,” Gerry said, “‘Are you done?Are you done?’ and he finally answered yes, and I turned around.” Gerry’s face was pale green with the memory of it as he answered Connolly’s questions. “I saw a foot going down.”
    “A human foot?” Connolly asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Were you able to determine what gender this human foot was?”
    “No,” Gerry answered with agitation. “No . . . No.” He had seen enough to know that there had been a human body in the cooler, but he had had no idea who it was or if it was male or female.
    “Where was the cooler?” Connolly asked.
    “The cooler was floating. I believe we jockeyed the boat around again to pick the cooler up, and then we dipped it in the water to clear out everything that was in there—ice or whatever—and then we pulled it into the boat and we headed for home.”
    “What happened to the bag with the chain and the lock in it?”
    “It got thrown in. I didn’t see the lock and the chain get thrown in,” Gerry said. “I saw the keys to the lock get thrown in.”
    As for the cooler, Gerry said he’d used a Phillips head screwdriver to unscrew the hinges that held the top on. “Tom was driving slowly when I did that,” he testified. “And then about five minutes later, we just threw the cooler in too, and we just kept heading home.”
    “Now, when you headed back to the shore, did you pursue a certain course?”
    “Yeah. I turned around and headed 310—310 degrees.” He said he used only the compass to get his bearings.
    “On the way back to Stone Harbor,” Connolly asked, “what did your brother say to you?”
    Gerry had kept his eyes down for most of his testimony, staring at his hands or the floor, and he continually grabbed tissues from a box as if to stanch the tears that welled up in his eyes. He looked for all the world like a naughty schoolboy confessing that he had done something bad. Now he looked up and Tom caught his eyes. Gerry appeared desperately apologetic.
    “We didn’t talk very much,” Gerry said. “He just said it was going to be all right—that he would never let anything happen to me. Because I was telling him, ‘This is wrong!’ and I was scared.”
    In his panic, Gerry had almost missed the New Jersey coast. They were south of Cape May. He turned the wheel hard right and headed up along the coastline.
    “Now when you were out on the ocean,” Connolly asked, “did you see any other boats?”
    “I did—I saw a small boat out in the same area we were in, with a dive flag.”
    “Did you see any people?”
    “No.”
    “About how far away was this other boat?”
    “Quarter