“Sir, please try to understand. We need something more concrete than what you’re giving me. We just don’t have the manpower to track down every sailboat in the Pacific that hasn’t been heard from for a week. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Shoemaker said before slamming the receiver down.
ON A BEAUTIFUL day with clear visibility, a twin-engine aircraft descended out of a pale-blue sky and dipped low over Palmyra Island, like an albatross circling for prey.
The pilot, Martin Vitousek, a University of Hawaii meteorological researcher, was a friend of Curt Shoemaker’s. Vitousek was very familiar with the islands in this part of the Pacific. He’d first visited Palmyra some years earlier while conducting weather experiments in the area, and he’d returned to the island several times since.
Vitousek had taken off from Fanning, where he was involved in a research project. A week earlier, before he left Hawaii, Shoemaker had asked him to conduct an aerial search of Palmyra.
From above, the lagoon was its usual emerald-blue. He kicked one rudder pedal, banking the aircraft to the left, eight hundred feet above the tallest trees. This pilot knew better than to fly any lower because of the very real danger of running into a horde of Palmyra’s birds, which could smash a plane’s windshield or even cause its engines to stop running.
He swung over the wharf area and then out over the dolphins, where he knew visiting boats usually moored. Banking next to the right, he flew along the edge of the lagoon, over the area where Curt’s friends reportedly had anchored their boat. He searched the clear water for a silhouette of a sunken boat. Then he made several sweeps over the interior of the island to give anyone down below a chance to come out to the sandy beach and signal for help. Finally, he flew above the farthermost shorelines along the outer rim of the island’s compact archipelago.
After thirty minutes of intense and orderly searching, he leveled the wings and pushed the throttle forward. The plane strained to gain altitude.
Vitousek picked up his radio mike and called the University of Hawaii’s powerful communications station, which was located on an Oahu mountaintop. He gave the operator a short message to be passed along to Shoemaker. Vitousek knew that Curt would be anxiously waiting for the results of the search. He was just sorry he didn’t have good news at all.
For there were no boats in the lagoon and, other than the omnipresent birds, no signs of life anywhere.
Palmyra was deserted.
CHAPTER 15
MID-SEPTEMBER 1974
THE SAILBOAT’S RIGGING CREAKED with the undulating motion of the ocean. Her forward speed was erratic. A gust would cause a quick acceleration, but with no hand at the tiller to correct for the shifting winds, most of the breeze would spill from her sails and she would slow to a standstill.
A gurgling came from below, where the cabin was steadily filling with seawater pouring through several holes that had been opened in the hull.
A mile or so off Palmyra, and without a living soul aboard, the doomed Iola sailed on.
EARLY OCTOBER 1974
SUNNY JENKINS lived with her second husband, Tom Nichols, in a mobile home park hugging the Southern California coast just north of Los Angeles. She was taken aback late one afternoon when she received a telephone call from a man named Shoemaker who asked if she’d heard from her daughter.
“Well…not for…awhile,” she stammered. Uneasy to be talking about her daughter with a man she didn’t know, she asked, “Just who are you?”
“I live in Hawaii. Some friends of mine were on Palmyra Island. We were keeping in contact by radio, but it’s been over a month since I’ve heard from them. My wife and I are worried about them. I know your daughter and her boyfriend were there at the same time.”
“Where is this, now?”
“Palmyra.”
“Where’s that?”
“A thousand miles south of Hawaii.”
“A thousand miles?” Sunny said incredulously. That sounded like the distance between New York and south Florida. Jennifer had sailed that far in that little boat?
“So have you heard from her?” Shoemaker asked impatiently.
“Yes, two letters. She never told me where she was. Just that she was…all right.”
“When was her last letter?”
“A little over two months ago, I guess. Say, how’d you find me?”
“Jennifer gave the Leonards, who were on Palmyra with your daughter, a letter to mail to you. They took down your name and address off the envelope. I’d appreciate it if you’d call me if you hear from her.”
Sunny took down Shoemaker’s number, then asked him to spell the name of the island. “I’m glad to know where Jennifer is. I’ve been so worried.”
For several seconds, there was silence on the line. “Well,” Shoemaker finally said, “she’s not there anymore.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I had someone fly over the island. He didn’t see any boats.”
When they hung up, Sunny went to a bookshelf and found a world atlas. It hadn’t been opened for years. In the index, she found small towns named Palmyra in Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and upstate New York. But no island. Had she taken down the correct spelling? She flipped to the Pacific Ocean page, put her finger on Hawaii, and moved downward. There it was—Palmyra was a remote, tiny dot surrounded by blue. As isolated as the place looked, Sunny would have at least known for certain where Jennifer was, but evidently she had moved on.
Sunny remained still for a long time, staring at the map of the Pacific Ocean. It had been such a relief to get Jennifer’s letters and to know she had safely reached her mysterious destination. But now, familiar fears and anxieties began gnawing again, more painfully than ever. Her baby could be in grave danger at this very moment. Where in the world had she gone in all that blue?
WHATEVER HAD happened to Mac and Muff, Shoemaker believed, had to have happened against their will. Any other explanation strained logic. They had planned to stay on Palmyra for a considerable time, perhaps a year, and if they had changed their minds, they would have alerted him by radio. The purpose of staying in touch was for him to know they were all right.
Just as certainly, Shoemaker knew that the Grahams’ fate had somehow intertwined or collided with that of the hippies. That’s why he had called the Leonards to see if they knew how to reach Jennifer’s family. Shoemaker had been in contact with this couple several times since their return from Palmyra. When Shoemaker said that he’d lost radio contact with the Sea Wind, the Leonards reinforced his fears by explaining that they had sensed trouble brewing on Palmyra.
But Shoemaker still couldn’t get the authorities to do a damned thing. Finally, he turned to his fellow ham operators for help. At the time, there existed the Mickey Mouse Network, an extensive chain of radio amateurs operating in the Pacific. Many of the members lived aboard small boats. The network was run by a gabby New Zealander named Robby. Shoemaker radioed Robby in New Caledonia and told him the story. Beginning the following night at six o’clock—when all the network’s hams were supposed to be monitoring a specific frequency—Robby put out an urgent call for assistance in locating the Sea Wind. “We think there’s a boat missing,” the message began. “Be on the lookout for a white-and-blue ketch named the Sea Wind.” Robby gave a complete description of the sailboat and her owners. Any possible sightings of the boat were to be radioed to him immediately. Finding the boat that the Coast Guard declined to search for became the top priority of the Mickey Mouse Network.
A BEAUTIFUL THIRTY-SEVEN-FOOT sailboat, its auxiliary engine purring evenly, slid quietly into Honolulu’s Ala Wai yacht harbor on the afternoon of October 28, 1974.
The sparkling white ketch was trimmed in a fresh coat of lavender. It did not pull up to any of the many dozens of crowded boat docks, with hundreds of boats moored to them, but anchored instead out in the yacht basin.
Any boating enthusiast would have instantly noticed something peculiar
. No name or home port was displayed on the boat’s stern.
LATER THAT day, around five o’clock, FBI Special Agent Calvin Shishido, forty-one, a Hawaii-born Nisei, received a call at his Honolulu home from a clerk in the FBI office. The Coast Guard had called to report that a missing sailboat had just been spotted in the Ala Wai.
“Why call us?” groused Shishido, who had the day off. “So they found a missing boat. Big deal.”
A few minutes later, the phone rang again.
This time it was Lieutenant Bruce Wallisch of U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence. “Cal, we’ve been carrying a sailboat reported missing for more than a month. It’s a documented vessel, number 282330, registered to a Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Graham. We think the boat is in the Ala Wai right now, but it looks like the owners aren’t aboard.”
“So maybe they went shopping.”
“It looks like it’s been repainted.”
Shishido, a pleasant-faced man with a generally kindly disposition, was more interested in trying to keep his young son from knocking a cup of milk off the kitchen table. “Maybe someone got tired of the old color, Bruce. What am I supposed to do about it?”
Keeping track of the thousands of private boats in Hawaii was not an FBI responsibility. Missing boats were routinely a matter for the Coast Guard, but because Wallisch was so insistent that the owners might have been victims of foul play, Shishido reluctantly agreed to come down to the harbor.
After service in the U.S. Air Force, followed by college on the G.I. Bill, Shishido had gone to work for the Internal Revenue Service in 1962. A few years later he ended up in Washington, D.C., for the investigation into the Johnson administration’s Bobby Baker scandal. Working closely with FBI agents in the Baker case, Shishido liked what he saw in these highly professional, well-trained investigators. He applied to the FBI and was hired in 1965 as a special agent. Since 1971, he had been assigned to the Honolulu field office.
At the Hawaii Yacht Club in the Ala Wai, Shishido met with Wallisch and a very excited Bernard Leonard, who had, two hours earlier, reported the arrival of the Sea Wind.
He and Evelyn had sailed over from Kauai for a few days. Longtime members of the Hawaii Yacht Club, they had docked the Journeyer at one of the club’s boat slips in the Ala Wai and had spent the afternoon picnicking at a nearby seashore park. When they returned to the yacht club, Leonard had immediately recognized the unique and elegant silhouette of the Sea Wind.
As he had watched, a man had pulled away from the ketch in a dinghy. According to Leonard, the man was definitely not the owner, Mac Graham, but someone named Roy Allen.
The schoolteacher uncharacteristically stumbled over his words as the whole complex story came rushing out: his missing friends, mysterious Palmyra, the menacing Roy and desperate Jennifer, the striking differences between the Sea Wind and the Iola.
Shishido still wasn’t convinced that a federal crime had been committed. In fact, he wasn’t sure there was evidence of any crime having been committed. Despite Leonard’s assumptions, the owners could be ashore on a shopping trip. Maybe they had given this fellow Roy a ride up from Palmyra. Shishido could think of all kinds of plausible scenarios short of boat theft and murder.
Still, he decided to take a closer look at the nameless boat. The three men climbed into a skiff and rowed out toward it. Since no one seemed to be aboard, they circled slowly, looking for clues.
Leonard immediately pointed out some spots of blue trim paint under the fresh coat of lavender.
Although he’d grown up in Hawaii, Shishido knew very little about boats or sailing, but he was impressed by the apparent significance of the details Leonard was discovering. A gilded figurehead was missing from the bowsprit. Many of the features still visible were Mac Graham’s modifications. “I’m positive this is the Sea Wind,” Leonard said firmly. “They stole the boat and repainted it.”
He directed Shishido’s attention to some netting that extended around the sides of the deck. “This used to be on the Iola, Roy and Jennifer’s boat. They used it to keep their three dogs from falling overboard.”
They headed back to the yacht club landing.
“The Grahams might have given them a ride back to Honolulu,” Shishido said, still disinclined to leap to the worst possible conclusion.
“If the Grahams were in Hawaii,” Leonard pressed on, “they would have called. There’s a fellow on the Big Island they were talking to by radio every week. He was the first one to report them missing. They would have called him.”
“How do you know they didn’t?” Shishido asked, not even trying to play the tough interrogator. “You’ve been out of touch on your boat for a couple of days.”
Leonard was doing a slow boil. “Don’t be ridiculous! The Grahams would never have brought Roy and Jennifer back with them on their boat. I tell you, something terrible has happened to Mac and Muff! You have to arrest Roy and Jennifer and find out what they did to Mac and Muff.”
“I don’t have probable cause to arrest anybody,” Shishido said softly.
“So what are you going to do?” Leonard demanded. “Nothing?”
Shishido looked knowingly at Wallisch.
The Coast Guard officer had agreed to Shishido’s request to post a lookout. “If he comes back,” Wallisch said, “we’ll go out and ask some questions.”
“My God,” Leonard groaned, “Mac and Muff are either stranded somewhere or…dead. Don’t you understand?”
Wallisch told Shishido he would call him as soon as he heard of anyone boarding the Sea Wind.
Feeling there was nothing further he could do at this point, Shishido went home for a family barbecue.
Shishido was a veteran agent, not a hot dog. Playing by the rules protected him and the Bureau. He would take his time and let the Coast Guard carry out its investigation. With jurisdiction over any boat in U.S. waters, the Coast Guard could board a vessel, check its registration papers, and ask questions of crew members any time it pleased.
Although Shishido, at the time, had no inclination to reference the law, if he had he would have learned, of course, that Palmyra was a U.S. possession, and since the faraway island was located outside any state’s jurisdiction, the FBI had jurisdiction over any crime committed on the island, be it boat theft or murder. But even if the worst had happened and the Grahams were victims of foul play, it still might not be a federal case. For instance, if the Grahams had come back to Hawaii on their boat and been killed after their arrival, it would be a matter for local authorities, not the FBI. One thing Shishido did know. His office would be overwhelmed if it took too seriously every citizens anxious account of serious crime. Shishido had dealt with scores of Bernard Leonards, each one imagining himself to be Sherlock Holmes. He decided he had no reason to make a move yet.
THE NEXT morning, word spread among the early-bird crowd at the Hawaii Yacht Club that something big was coming down. No one knew exactly what, but the sudden swarm of armed Coast Guard personnel in the basin was good reason to guess that a gang of drug smugglers was about to get busted.
The harbor, as usual, was packed solid with private boats of all sizes, shapes, and colors, most tied up to the docks but a few dozen anchored on the water in neat rows. Ala Wai was the largest and busiest boat basin in all of Hawaii. Often, as was the case this morning, over five hundred vessels were moored there. Even from the picture window overlooking the marina, it was impossible for curious club members to pick out the most likely target in the jumble.
Bernard Leonard had stayed at the yacht club until late the previous evening after talking to the FBI agent, waiting for something to happen. Coast Guardsmen discreetly attempted to interview several people on boats adjacent to the Sea Wind. Leonard thought that was a mistake, because it might tip off Roy and Jennifer that they were being sought. When no one had boarded the Sea Wind by midnight, Leonard returned to his own boat. It had been a long, emotionally taxing day and night.
Promised that Coast Guard authorities would bring their cu
tter into the harbor the next morning in order to board the Sea Wind, Leonard was up at dawn and walked to Coast Guard headquarters at Pier 4 about a mile away. His self-appointed role was to help identify whoever was found aboard the boat.
A few minutes after he arrived at his office that morning at eight o’clock, the FBI’s Cal Shishido received a hurried call from the Coast Guard. The lookout posted near the yacht club had just reported seeing a man and woman getting ready to leave the Sea Wind in a dinghy. Since the lookout had obviously missed their return to the sailboat during the night, the cutter’s crew had been caught unprepared. It would take a few minutes to get ready, Shishido was told, and if he could get down to Pier 4 pronto, he could join in the pursuit.
Driven in a rush by another agent, Shishido arrived at the pier three minutes later. As usual, he wore a colorful aloha print shirt,* which stood out on deck among all the blue dungarees of the Coast Guardsmen.
The Coast Guard cutter’s engine was already rumbling when Shishido stepped aboard. He nodded to Wallisch and Leonard.
The Coast Guard officer started to say something, but a crackling radio report from a lookout interrupted: “The woman dropped the guy off at one of the docks in the harbor and headed back to the sailboat.” Things were getting complicated. Now there were two separate quarries.
The deckhands cast off, and the forty-foot cutter was on its way, speeding toward the harbor entrance from its nearby base.
A second report from the lookout came in: the man on the dock, apparently trying to avoid Coast Guardsmen in the harbor, had shed his clothing and dived into the water.
It took only a few minutes for the swift cutter to arrive at the Ala Wai, where it immediately swung into the harbor. From its deck, Shishido and the others spotted the dinghy—with a woman aboard—now heading lickety-split for shore.
“That’s her!” Leonard cried out. “That’s Jennifer!”