And Never Let Her Go (35 page)

Bob Donovan entered Anne Marie's name and description and
the details of her disappearance into the DELJIS-NCIC systems at 10
A.M.
on Monday morning. She was in the computer, a routine investigative tack but one that was often effective. The National Crime Information Center's computers in Quantico, Virginia, could connect missing people with incidents outside their usual environments.

Michelle Sullivan talked to the police again and told them that she feared Anne Marie had been abducted. She recalled a remark Anne Marie had made once during a session. It had seemed out of context, but now she wished she had pursued it further. Anne Marie had said that she was afraid that someone might kidnap her.

“She came into the office and mentioned that [a friend] said that somebody could kidnap her,” Sullivan told police. “I said, ‘Well, talk to me more about this,' and she said, ‘Oh, I don't know—somebody could just take me away or something.' ”

Sullivan had asked her, “Who would do this?”

“Probably a third party.”

“What do you mean—that somebody would
hire
a third party?”

“Yeah.”

“Who would do that?”

“Tom Capano.”

Even before this conversation, Anne Marie had told Sullivan about Capano's stalking behavior and his incessant phone calls. Michelle Sullivan had been trying to get her to contact the Attorney General's Office or go to the police. But Anne Marie had been adamant that she couldn't do that; it would be too embarrassing, especially because she worked in the governor's office. She feared the press might find out. But she told Sullivan that she had gone so far as to contact an acquaintance in the Attorney General's Office and pretended she was asking for advice for a friend.

“Anne Marie asked her friend, ‘Somebody I know is being harassed. What would you tell her to keep herself safe?' And then she wrote down the answers,” Sullivan told the police.

It was apparent to the detectives who were looking for her that Anne Marie had been worried about a number of things, and most of them could be linked to Tom Capano.
But why would she think he would have her kidnapped?

And had he? They couldn't ask him at the moment. Since Sunday afternoon, he had made himself unavailable to them.

O
N
July 1, Mark Daniels had driven to the Ristorante Panorama in Philadelphia and asked to speak to the waiters who had been on
duty on June 27. It was fairly easy to establish from a credit card receipt that Tom Capano and a companion had eaten at the Panorama that night. Jacqueline Dansak's initials were on the check, designating her as their server.

Daniels soon found that Dansak had an excellent memory. She said she remembered the couple well; they were distinctive in several ways. “They were unusually dressed for the atmosphere,” she explained. “And this couple—especially the female—she was wearing a flower-printed dress. Most of our clientele are from the Main Line . . . very fashionably dressed, bedazzled and bedecked and whatnot. Most women [who come in] wear black or something a little more jet-setty looking.”

Jacqueline Dansak had always liked to figure out couples' relationships to each other, but she had been at a loss with this pair. They gave her so little to go on. They didn't seem like a dating couple, nor did they look married. They clearly weren't there on business. The man was considerably older than the woman, but not quite old enough to be her father. And there was virtually no interaction between them; it was as if they were trapped in the same elevator together, staring glumly ahead.

“They didn't speak to each other at all,” Dansak said. “This man—the gentleman—ordered everything for the woman without even consulting her. They started off with cocktails. They had a three-course meal. I sold the special to the woman—she had swordfish. The gentleman had veal or chicken.”

Looking at the check, which had come to a total of $154, she could tell that the man had ordered a Myers's rum and tonic for himself and a Sea Breeze (vodka and cranberry juice) for the woman.

Aside from their not speaking, Dansak noted that the woman was very quiet—“somber. She looked haggard and gaunt. Her hair was unkempt. She was very thin.”

They had barely touched their food, she reported. “They picked at it. I had to wrap it up. I asked the woman if she wanted something else—because she wasn't eating it.”

But the woman had only shaken her head. She hadn't seemed angry—or frightened, for that matter. She had seemed more depressed or sad, as if she wasn't at all happy to be there.

Dansak explained the Visa receipt to Lieutenant Daniels. It indicated that Thomas J. Capano had begun to run a tab at 7:10
P.M.
, and the final amount was run through the credit card machine at 9:12. There was a generous tip included in the receipt.

“The gentleman pushed the check and the credit card receipt toward
the woman,” Dansak recalled, also an unusual circumstance. The woman had apparently figured up the check and added the proper tip. The receipt was signed “Thomas J. Capano.”

The couple would have left shortly after nine-fifteen, although Dansak said she hadn't actually seen them go. But she had remembered them even after they left because their demeanor was so odd; the woman looked so unhappy, and the man seemed so bossy to her. The waitress could not tell Mark Daniels what they talked about during the two hours they were in the Panorama, or even
if
they had talked. The woman had tried to smile at her when she approached the table, but it seemed an effort.

The man? She could remember nothing special about him more than his glasses, which had a tint to them that virtually hid his eyes. Daniels showed Jacqueline Dansak a photograph of Anne Marie; he didn't have a picture of Tom. She said that she recognized her as the woman who had eaten there Thursday night.

So far, Tom Capano's story of that Thursday evening seemed to be completely accurate. The doggie bags in Anne Marie's refrigerator were from the Ristorante Panorama, and one had contained a scarcely touched portion of swordfish. The cotton dress with flowers on it sounded like the dress the detectives had seen in her apartment. Everything indicated that she had come home from Philadelphia, gone up to her apartment with Tom, who had carried the doggie bags and the gift from Talbot's upstairs for her, and then left. She had taken her dress off, but had half folded it and tossed it over a settee instead of hanging it up as she routinely did.

It didn't sound as if the evening had been a happy one, however. Even a waitress who didn't know them had wondered why Anne Marie and Tom had seemed glum and had only picked at their meals. She was quite sure, though, that they weren't having an argument; they just seemed to be at an impasse, bored, or even silently angry. But that evening was becoming more and more important to investigate, since Jacqueline Dansak appeared to be the last person—other than Capano—to have seen Anne Marie before she vanished.

On Tuesday morning, July 2, with Anne Marie still missing, the Wilmington paper noted that she had last been seen in an unidentified Philadelphia restaurant on Thursday night and added quotes from her brothers. “This is very odd . . . very confusing for everybody,” Robert told reporters. “It's so unlike her to be out of touch for more than an afternoon, let alone a whole weekend. She's your normal, 30-year-old single girl with a lot of local friends and family.”

Kathleen, Robert, Kevin, Mark, and Brian were spending most of their time at Anne Marie's apartment. Mark moved in so that someone would be there constantly. He was the brother she had agonized over, loving him so much that she wept for him. Now, she was gone—and Mark would have done anything to get Annie back. They all would.

The police asked Kathleen to inventory everything in Anne Marie's apartment to see what might be missing. She did, and the only things she could be sure of were Anne Marie's keys, her Walkman, and the blue topaz ring that Paul Columbus had given her. Anne Marie had worn that ring with the cotton dress they'd found flung over her settee; it matched the little blue flowers in the pattern. But now it was missing, along with Anne Marie. And by the end of the day, rumors were already circulating that she had last been seen dining with a “prominent Wilmington attorney” in Philadelphia just before she vanished.

D
EBBY
M
AC
I
NTYRE
was only peripherally aware that a woman was missing in Wilmington. In retrospect, she remembered that she had seen the picture of a pretty woman on the front page of the paper and read the headline. It didn't seem to touch her world, and she rarely read crime news. She had heard the rumor but thought nothing of it. Wilmington was filled with attorneys, many of whom could be described as prominent.

Sometime on that Tuesday, Debby got a phone call at work from Tom. “I have something very shocking to tell you,” he began. “You'd better sit down.”

Automatically, Debby sank to her chair, ready for what must surely be bad news.

“Do you recall reading about a woman who is missing who had gone to dinner with a prominent attorney?”

“I think I saw something in the paper . . .”

“You heard that she was last seen having dinner with a prominent attorney?”

Debby waited, her heart suddenly thudding.

“That was me.”

“Oh, no,” she breathed.

“I'm a suspect in her disappearance,” Tom said. “I've hired Charlie Oberly to represent me. I wanted to call you now because I'm going down to Stone Harbor a day early for the Fourth.”

“Who is this woman?” Debby asked, puzzled.

“Her name's Anne Marie Fahey. I'll call you later tonight and we'll talk about it.”

Debby was stunned. What had Tom been doing with a woman who had disappeared? For that matter, what had he been doing having dinner with another woman without even mentioning it to her? It was as if the earth had opened up beneath her feet and everything in Debby's world had begun to slide in. She would have bet money that Tom had no secrets from her—not about women. She had bet her life on him for fourteen years.

Tom was still talking. He said that Charlie wanted to speak to her on the phone and asked her when he could call her.

“Five-thirty, I guess,” she said. “At my house.”

Charlie Oberly was a respected attorney in Wilmington and had once been the Delaware State Attorney General. He was a good friend of Tom's. Debby didn't mind talking to him. Actually, she wanted to find out more about what was going on. She stayed at work for another hour, blindly doing what she needed to do to clear her desk. But she couldn't focus or concentrate as she tried to figure out what on earth Tom was involved in.

When Charlie Oberly called Debby, he asked her if she had spoken with Tom on the previous Thursday night and during the day on Friday. That was simple enough to answer. Tom had said he had a meeting with his law firm in Philadelphia on Thursday night and she had spoken to him on the phone a couple of times after ten—the first time, she thought, was during
ER,
and again later. She had seen Tom early Friday morning and talked to him on the phone a few times during the day, and he had spent Friday night with her.

Oberly listened to her timetable but he didn't give her much information. She needed to talk to Tom.

At nine-thirty Tuesday evening, Tom called her from his mother's house in Stone Harbor. By this time, Debby had had too many hours to think and she was very upset. As soon as she heard Tom's voice, she said, “Who
is
this Anne Marie Fahey?”

“I've been seeing her.”

“When?”

“Up until September of last year, but it's over.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“I did fall in love with her,” Tom said, “but it's over, Debby.”

She could scarcely believe that Tom had been that involved with another woman and never once mentioned it to her. On the rare occasions when she dated anyone else, she had always told him. And
now it seemed that Tom had hidden what was apparently a love affair from her, even as he kept telling her how very much he loved her.

“How can you tell me you love me?” she asked.

“I do.”

“I know she's a lot younger,” Debby said. “I can't compete with someone who's thirty years old.”

“She had so many problems,” he said. “I was so good to her—I was helpful and I was interested—but then I couldn't get rid of her. She was so mentally ill, Debby, and she attached herself to me, and I knew I had to unload her.”

“How long, Tom?” Debby asked. “How long did you see her?”

“About three years.”

“Three years?”

Tom kept insisting that she had nothing to feel bad about now, since he was no longer in love with Anne Marie Fahey. He didn't seem to understand why she was so emotional, but Debby was so distraught that, for once, she couldn't hide her real feelings. She felt betrayed, and she felt a fool for never once suspecting him.

Tom said he was sorry that he'd ever had to tell her about Anne Marie, but since it was probably going to hit the news any minute, he wanted her to know the truth first. Of course, he had no idea what had happened to Anne Marie, who was such a ditsy girl that he never could tell what she might do next. She could be any of a dozen places.

“Are there others?” Debby asked when he had finished telling her about Anne Marie, a woman she had never even
heard
of until the day before.

“One
other,” he replied quietly. And then he said that he had been seeing Susan Louth since November.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Debby cried. “How could you let me believe that I was the only woman in your life?”

“I didn't want to hurt your feelings.”

“My
feelings?”
Debby felt as though she had no breath left in her body. “Don't you know that lying to me is worse than that?”