And Never Let Her Go (36 page)

Debby wasn't even thinking she could be making Tom so angry that he might leave her. She spoke her mind without thought of the consequences. She was absolutely devastated, but she didn't think of leaving
him.
Her mind scurried around, trying to mend the damage, albeit unconsciously. Her future had been with Tom for so long that she couldn't imagine life without him. It wasn't that she believed even for a second that he could have done anything to the girl; Tom
wouldn't hurt anyone. Debby's pain came from his cheating on her and telling her lies.

Finally she told him that she could take anything as long as they were truthful with each other. “No more lies, please,” she said. “OK? Let's put it all out on the table, here. You said you wouldn't tell me because you didn't want to hurt my feelings. You've hurt me more than you know by
not
being up front with me. Please, from now on. Please promise. Please don't lie to me anymore. If there is somebody else, please tell me. I'd rather know than have it this way.”

Tom promised. “So I thought everything was fine and wonderful,” Debby recalled. “From that point on, I never knew there was anyone else. I believed him.”

Tom had been anxious to get away from Wilmington for the Fourth of July holiday because he didn't particularly want to talk to any more detectives until he and Charlie Oberly established some ground rules. Although he had evinced interest in helping them find out what had happened to Anne Marie, he was not about to have them declare open season on his personal affairs. There were aspects of his life and his family's life that were none of their business.

His whole family would be at the shore for the long holiday weekend, and he suggested to Debby that she might want to get away for a while too. The press was going to have a field day with this thing. He had to tell Kay, too. He wanted her to round up the girls and head for the shore as soon as possible. Otherwise they would probably have reporters
and
police making their lives miserable.

T
OM
'
S
name did hit the papers on July 3, although the coverage was more subdued than it might have been:

Anne Marie Fahey . . . was last seen by Wilmington attorney and political insider Thomas J. Capano when the two had dinner Thursday night in Philadelphia, according to friends and sources close to the investigation. . . . Police said they do not consider Fahey's dinner companion, whom they did not identify, to be a suspect and said he had been cooperative with investigators.

It was the first breath of scandal ever to touch Tom, and everyone who knew him was surprised. But he was separated from his wife, and there was no indication in the article of what his relationship with Anne Marie might have been. It wasn't a crime to take a pretty woman out to dinner.

Back at Anne Marie's apartment, which her family had set up as a headquarters in the search for her, Brian didn't comment to the press on Capano's possible involvement in the case. “Her disappearance is so seamless,” he said quietly. “It's not that the trail's run out. There
is
no trail.”

On Wednesday, July 3, the Faheys began passing out hundreds of flyers bearing Anne Marie's picture to businesses that promptly taped them up in prominent spots or in their front windows. They were offering a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to finding Anne Marie. She had been missing six days now, and her face was rapidly becoming familiar around Wilmington. Soon the flyers would cross the Pennsylvania and New Jersey state lines. Newspaper articles and television and radio coverage of her disappearance were growing exponentially, and lots of tips and suggestions were coming in to the investigators—but as in most high-profile cases, virtually all of them were useless. Because people wanted to help, they tended to imagine that the young women they saw alone in bus stations, grocery stores, and airports were Anne Marie. But none of them was.

At noon on that first Wednesday, a mass was held for Anne Marie at St. Joseph's. Three dozen of her friends and family prayed for her safe return, and then her brothers and sister took up their quiet vigil on the broad white porch of the house where she had lived. They still hoped that she might come back to them, although their spirits sank lower with every passing day. But they were positive of one thing: if she was able, Anne Marie would either call them or find a way home. And when she did not, they had to accept that she could not. That left a number of possibilities—all of them bleak: she was being held somewhere against her will; she had amnesia; she was ill or injured; or she was dead. That last possibility was too terrible to contemplate, and yet their minds sometimes went there, in thoughts that skittered like mice over a gravestone.

The next day was the Fourth of July. It was to have been a day of celebration for the Fahey family, who had planned a barbecue. Instead, they would spend the day in a massive search for their sister. Anne Marie's family and friends asked for help from the public to search Wilmington's Brandywine Park and canvass her neighborhood for any possible clues to her disappearance. Volunteers were asked to come to the Baynard Stadium at 8
A.M.

Three hundred people—friends and strangers—showed up. With police assistance, they were split into search groups, working in assigned areas so that the same places wouldn't be searched twice
and others missed. They spread out, only an arm's length apart in the park itself, looking under trees and bushes and along the banks of Brandywine Creek. On the city streets and alleys of Wilmington, they looked into garbage cans, empty garages, anyplace where a person, a body, a weapon, clothing, or some other physical evidence might be hidden.

Police helicopters equipped with infrared devices had scoped out the huge park earlier in the week. With infrared film, freshly turned dirt and decomposing bodies of humans and animals glow red, something that cannot be detected by the human eye. Nothing had shown up. But now, one of the search teams found a small area of fresh dirt that was hidden from the air. Grimly, the police began to dig with shovels. There was nothing buried there. Some women's clothing turned up; it wasn't Anne Marie's size or recognizable as anything she had ever worn.

The Faheys continued to make themselves available to reporters and used the vast resources of the media to help find Anne Marie. They knew when they made that decision that they would lose any vestige of their privacy and be subjected to endless interviews and speculation. But it was a very pragmatic choice. “We knew we could speak out well,” Robert recalled, “and we were fairly photogenic. It was the best way we knew to find our sister.”

The long day ended and still there was not even a trace of Anne Marie. If she was dead, the police investigators didn't know where she had died. The putative crime scene would be the last place she was said to have been—her apartment—but they had found no sign of a struggle there. The last person she was known to be with—Tom Capano—had been questioned and his house briefly examined. Nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. In order to get a search warrant, the investigators would have to establish a probable cause to indicate that a crime had been committed and that there might be evidence in a house, a yard, or a vehicle. They did not yet have that probable cause.

W
HILE THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION
of Anne Marie's disappearance was hampered by a complete lack of evidence of foul play, one of her friends was able to contribute a few more provocative details.
Kim Horstman told Bob Donovan that she had spoken to Anne Marie on Wednesday night, the night before she vanished, and it had been a very upbeat conversation. Kim had been one of the first of Annie's friends to learn that she was missing. Susan Fahey, who had gone to high school with Kim, called her at her brother's house shortly after Anne Marie had failed to show up for dinner on Saturday night.

“She asked me if I knew where Annie was,” Kim said, “and I didn't know where she was.” But her first thought was that Annie might be with Tom. She wasn't going to give that deep secret away to Susan, so Kim decided to call Tom herself. She got two numbers from information. When she dialed the first number, a young girl answered, so Kim hung up, believing it was Tom's family's house. But when she called the second number, Kay answered. She hung up again. But Kay, suspicious, pressed *69 and called her back.

Kim didn't say anything. If Annie was OK, she didn't want to make things worse. To be on the safe side, Kim had her brother call Tom's house this time and ask for him.

When Tom came on the line, Kim asked, “Where is Annie?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Where is Annie? She is missing. Do you know where she is?”

Tom seemed confused and upset at the news that Anne Marie was missing. “Where are you?” he asked Kim.

“I'm at my brother Michael's house,” she said.

“I thought you were supposed to be at the shore this weekend,” Tom said with surprise in his voice. “I thought Annie was with you at the shore.”

Kim explained that their lease at the shore had ended on that very day, but Tom kept asking her where she was, until she finally made him understand that she was at her brother's.

“She was going to the shore with you this weekend, Kimmie,” Tom insisted.

“That was never the case.”

Tom sounded genuinely stunned and told Kim that she had “blown his mind” because he was sure Annie was with her. He seemed very agitated and asked her over and over where she was calling from. He finally took her number and said he would call her back.

Kim dialed Anne Marie's apartment next but she got only the answering machine. By this time it was eleven on Saturday night. At midnight, Tom
did
call Kim at her brother's house. In a twenty-minute conversation, he said he had had time to think and decided that Anne Marie must have just gone away for the weekend—that
she'd had a rough week. He told Kim about what he called “Annie's big fight” with Kathleen and said he'd had dinner with Anne Marie on Thursday night.

“He said he was confident that she would be back to work on Monday,” Kim recalled, “and that this whole mess would be cleared up.”

Then Kim told Tom that she'd heard Kathleen was going to file a missing persons report with the Wilmington Police.

“I wonder if they'll be looking for me,” he said in what seemed to be a non sequitur.

Calls went back and forth during the wee hours of Sunday. Kathleen called Kim and put her on the spot. She asked Kim if she knew who Tom Capano was and what connection he had to Annie.

“I said I knew of him—I had heard Annie speak of him,” Kim said, and recalled that she had lied to Kathleen to protect Annie. “She asked if I thought they were involved—because she had found some disturbing letters at Annie's apartment. I said no—I didn't have any knowledge of that. I was sure that Annie was going to be to work on Monday, and I didn't want to betray her confidence.”

Tom's explanation had soothed Kim's fears. At that point, she really believed that everything would be all right, and the last thing Anne Marie would want was for Kim to reveal her secrets.

But then Tom called Kim again, just before eight on Sunday morning, complaining that the police had, indeed, come pounding on his door around 3
A.M.
He told her he'd been very groggy because he'd taken five or six Excedrin PMs so he could sleep. He now believed that Anne Marie had probably gone away for the weekend with Jackie—that he'd been confused before when he thought it was Kim. Tom spoke to her for thirty-eight minutes, and most of his conversation was his calm reassurance that Anne Marie was perfectly fine and there was no reason for anyone to be worried.

Tom spoke to Kim again on Sunday night and made an odd request. He was calling to
ask
if he could call her later. He said he was at Kay's house and couldn't talk. She heard him yelling to someone in the house, “Let Uncle Louie in! Uncle Louie's at the door!” Then Tom hung up hurriedly, promising to call her back later that night—but he didn't. And of course, Annie had not come to work on Monday.

Kim shared all of this information and her worries with Bob Donovan. She told him that Tom Capano was a control freak and that Anne Marie had been trying, with little success, to break away from him since the previous summer.

Kim also talked to Robert Fahey several times during the first terrible week of Annie's disappearance, and once his name hit the papers, Kim was anxious to speak with Tom again. At Robert's suggestion she kept a pad and pencil near the phone. She planned to write down everything Tom said to her so that she would remember it all precisely. However, it would be a while before she heard from him again.

L
IEUTENANT
Mark Daniels gleaned a similar assessment of Tom Capano from yet another source. On July 2, he got a phone call from Lisa D'Amico, who worked at Michael Christopher Designs. D'Amico told him that she was the one who always cut Anne Marie's hair. The two had become confidantes and Anne Marie had shared intimate secrets with her. While she hadn't shown up for her appointment on June 28, D'Amico remembered their conversation during Anne Marie's last appointment, in May. She had been happy and excited about being with Mike Scanlan. “But she said that Tom Capano was crazy and that he scared her,” D'Amico told Daniels. “She wanted to stop seeing him, and they were always getting into arguments about it. He kept giving her stuff. He'd wait for her outside her apartment and she wouldn't let him in.”

Anne Marie had told D'Amico that Capano had “gone crazy” and grabbed her, accusing her of ruining his life. She said that she was going to tell him that they no longer had any relationship, even though she was frightened that he might harm her.

T
OM
had had an appointment for some dental surgery for weeks. He kept that appointment on Tuesday morning, July 2, and then left for the shore. He was under a lot of stress, and he probably felt more secure in the comparative privacy of his mother's huge brown house at Stone Harbor. Two fake owls were anchored on the deck off the second story to scare away the seabirds before they left their droppings. Standing beside them, all you could hear was the roar of the sea, perhaps a comforting sound in Tom's mind compared to the detective's questions in Wilmington.