“Mr Tagatoa, Mrs. Yamanaka is here to see you.” Announced the white-jacketed local houseman to the very large, dark and very ornately tattooed man lounging in the Jacuzzi on the deck overlooking the blue expanse of Maunalua bay.
“Please show her in Kamaka” It was as if an island in the middle of the Jacuzzi ocean had suddenly chosen to speak. His voice was low and his diction was educated and precise with only a hint of his Kalihi roots.
“Good afternoon Sonny” purred the striking Japanese woman in the tight white skirt and azure silk blouse.
“Won’t you join me?” he gestured at the burbling Jacuzzi. “Kamaka, bring Mrs. Yamanaka a martini and another for me eh, an’ no sneak one fo’ you’self out of the bottle, yeah?” he said with a smile that only partly mitigated the warning inherent in any instruction given by a 350 pound 6’ 9” Polynesian gentleman with tattoos over the same acreage of his body that might normally be covered by temple garments if he were still a Mormon and still married.
“Sorry Sonny, this is a business visit but I will take the martini.” she said as she sat down on the edge of the Jacuzzi. She was always amused that someone who looked like Sonny could sound like a haole who graduated from USC and had an MBA from Wharton: both of which he had and did.
“you’ve come a long way from Kalihi Mr. Tagatoa.” She thought but would never dream of saying it out loud.
Sonny Tagatoa’s resumé would make for interesting reading. She wondered if ripping off arms and legs, breaking heads like coconuts and devising new and attention-grabbing ways to make people cease to exist would come under “Experience, Education, or just Hobbies?”
“The ‘Family’ has, with the greatest respect, asked me to see if you could help us with a… a… problem. The ‘Family’ would be grateful if this particular problem could disappear but be done in a way that might discourage ahh, further problems.”
“I value my affiliation with the ‘Family’ and will be glad to help if it’s within my power to do so.” He sounded more like an attorney then the giant USC former linebacker. “You really ought to climb in. It does wonders for soothing tense muscles.”
“Now Sonny, don’t be naughty.” She said with a smile.
Chapter 1
Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai (Edith Kanakaole)
He hoʻoheno kē ʻike aku
Ke kai moana nui lā
Nui ke aloha e hiʻipoi nei
Me ke ʻala o ka līpoa
Such a delight to see
The great big ocean Open Water
So familiar and very cherished
With its fragrance of the lîpoa
It’s a short run for the dive boat from the Kewalo Basin harbor to the mooring buoy that floats at about fifteen feet below the surface and leads to the Sea Tiger wreck. Keala, the captain has made this trip so many times that he hardly needs to look at the GPS display on the bridge. The wreck itself is at a depth of about 110 feet and lies between Ala Moana Beach park and the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
The Sea Tiger is a very popular local dive site. It’s about 150 feet long and is home to clouds of fish, some cranky moray eels, and, often in the hold, Clyde, a six foot white-tipped reef shark.
I sat on the bench at the stern and shrugged into my BCD and tank. I took a couple of breaths from my regulator and looked over at my hopefully-soon-to-be-serious girlfriend Siobhan once again feeling grateful that she was in my life. Siobahn and my almost fifteen year-old daughter Chrissie had recently returned for the summer from the Arts Academy where Siobahn is the cello teacher and Chrissie, her student.
I had done this dive many times before, both in the daytime and at night. For Siobhan though, it would be something of a rite of passage from her basic Open Water SCUBA certification to Advanced status. It’s no small thing to put your regulator in your mouth, take a “giant step” into the ocean and follow the mooring line down into the progressively blue-ing ocean. Wondering where you are and why you are here, suddenly the faint outlines of the sunken ship begins to emerge.
“I am so proud of her.” I thought as I regarded her tall auburn-haired 31 year-old form. “Very few people can look lithe and beautiful in a neoprene wet suit but she pulls it off.” I said to myself. “She’s taken to the water with the same passion that she applies to her cello.”
Poor Chrissie had to stay behind and was loudly unhappy about the situation. She got her Junior Open Water certification but she’s not allowed to dive below 60 feet.
“Dad, I’m as good a swimmer as Siobhan.”
True, but it’s the rules. “You are not allowed below 60 feet.”
“But you are a Master Diver” she pleaded.
“That’s right.” I said “and I’m expected to be an example to the other divers and follow the rules.”
“That’s not fair.”
She was probably correct but that’s just the way it is, right? Since her mother died, I’ve tried to be the right kind of parent but it’s not easy for someone like me. A private investigator often keeps some pretty strange hours in some very strange places with some definitely strange people. It is probably just as well that Chrissie goes to a boarding school nearly 5000 miles away.
As it turned out, I’m glad Chrissie wasn’t with us down on the Sea Tiger that day.
I jumped into the water holding my GoPro camera in my left hand and grasping the side line in my right, and made my way to the bow mooring line. Emptying the air from my Buoyancy Compensator, I followed the class down the line toward the bottom. At about sixty feet, the ghost-like outline of the ship began to appear beneath my fins. Bit by bit, the form of the ship began to resolve itself until I joined the class and the instructor at the stern where the mooring line was attached.
The wreck has something of a history. It was formerly a Chinese owned trading vessel. Back in the 1990s it was impounded by local authorities when it was found to have a cargo of undocumented Chinese laborers. In 1999, it was sold to a submarine tour company and was sunk as an attraction off Waikiki.
Squadrons of butterfly fish, yellow tangs, and goatfish flew up and over the side of the ship as we made our way along the deck at a depth of about 90 feet. I took my small light out of the pocket of my BCD, and peered into various cracks and crevices around the wheelhouse looking for morays that I could point out to the class members. One cute little zebra moray about three feet long showed me his teeth. I made the snapping jaw hand signal to Siobahn and she followed the beam of my light, giving the closest approximation of a big smile that can be made with a regulator in your mouth. I made hand signals to Siobahn
“We’re going to enter the wheel house and go down the central passage of the cabin.”
There’s a group of divers who make sure that the wreck is safe and clear of obstructions. Two of them who have something of a sense of humor, have set a tableau in the galley dining area that always gets a rise out of first-time visitors. They’ve put plates and coffee cups on the table, left a couple of old whiskey bottles lying around, and fastened a life-size plastic human skeleton to one of the chairs. I wanted to see Siobhan’s reaction to this macabre joke. I got a lot more of a reaction than I was expecting.
We swam slowly down the passageway taking care not to stir up the thick layer of silt and other marine debris. As we entered the galley area, I turned halfway around expecting to see her eyes get wide. I wasn’t expecting the cloud of bubbles from her regulator and the frantic back peddling of hands and feet. Because of the narrowing of the field of vision when you’re wearing a mask, I had to turn back to the galley to see what had startled her so badly. What I saw was not the plastic skeleton I expected to see.
In one of the two chairs at the dining table was what appeared to be the body of a male adult dressed in an aloha shirt, slacks, and loafers. When I say the body, I mean just that. There was no head attached. As I played my light around the dark galley area, I found what I was looking for. On the dining table directly in front of the body on one of the marine-encrusted dinner plates was the head that I presumed went with it.
Siobhan was still in the doorway to the passage manically looking left, right, up, and down. I carefully swam over and made the “Okay?” sign. She shook her head violently “No.” I motioned her to back into the passage and signed
“Stay where I can see you.”
I turned my attention back to the strange setting at the table. When I was still a Crime Scene Investigator with the Honolulu Police Department, I had taken a class in Underwater Forensic Investigation at West Oahu College from Dr. Baker, probably the most highly regarded authority in the field. I didn’t have much time but I knew that I had to try to document as much of the scene as possible and very quickly.
I swam as carefully as I could to the area of the table and started to take mental notes. The body was secured to the chair with white zip ties at the wrists and ankles. On the left wrist, the body was wearing a gold Rolex watch. The head appeared to have been severed relatively neatly but probably not surgically. I looked at my compass. The body was facing approximately south and the head faced north. Looking at the table, the center of interest was, of course, the head itself. It appeared to have belonged to an Asian male of approximately middle age. It exhibited only a few remarkable features. One was that there was a hole with blackened margins and stellate flaps of skin in the forehead directly between the eyes. Another was that a portion of the occipital area was a three inch jagged hole. I quickly looked around. No skull fragments. The third thing that struck me as unusual was that a pair of metallic looking Ohashi or chopsticks were protruding from the left eye-socket. Next to the plate and head, a tanto, a type of Japanese knife nearly a foot and a half long was stuck into the wooden tabletop.
Not having the luxury of underwater crime scene tools such as grids, lights, and recovery bags, the best I could do to document what I was seeing using my light and GoPro camera to try to record everything I could about the corpse and the surroundings. I photographed from the four sides and diagonally in the small cabin. I shot the overhead and the deck and then got as many close shots as I could of the body and the associated items. I was thinking that this might be very important to the case due to the transient nature of things in the ocean and the appetites of some of the residents of the wreck.
We had only been in the galley for a few minutes but it seemed to me as if normal time had slowed down to the point of almost stopping. The other thing that was etched on my consciousness was that I knew who the corpse used to be in healthier and happier times.
I swam to Siobhan in the passageway. From the look of her exhaust bubbles, her breathing had become a little more regular. Checking her dive computer, I saw that she had about 600 pounds of air left. I gave her shoulder a squeeze and motioned to her
“Follow me down the passage and out of the wheelhouse.”
Eric, the instructor had the rest of the class on the bridge right outside the wheelhouse door.
Swimming up to him, I signed, “We have to surface. Now.”
He gave me a quizzical look through his mask but immediately got the class together and we went slowly up the line to the 15-foot safety stop.
Breaking the surface first, I went straight to the stern boarding ladder, tore off my fins and hauled myself out. Even before getting out of my gear, I yelled for the skipper.
“Keala, get on channel 16 and inform the Coast Guard that there is a dead body on board the Sea Tiger wreck and the wreck is a crime scene. Have them inform Honolulu Police Department and the Department of Land and Natural Resources Enforcement Division as well.”
I thought to myself “Man, this case is going to be a crappy hurricane of turf wars and messed up forensic investigation. I’m glad it’s not my problem anymore. Little did I know.
“The body on da Sea Tiger stay make/dead?” Keala’s eyes were huge.
“Yup, several times over. We’ll have to stay tied to the mooring until the cavalry arrives.”
By the time Keala was explaining the situation to the folks on the other end of channel 16, the marine emergency frequency, Eric and the rest of the class had exited the water and were on board. I looked over at Siobahn to see how she was doing. Her eyes flashed laser beams at me and she said very slowly and distinctly
“I am NEVER diving with you again.”
I guess I’ll have to give her a little time before the dive trip to Maui.