And Never Let Her Go (39 page)

Robert did not call him. He didn't believe that Tom would tell him what he needed to know and he wasn't about to play games.

I
F
Tom's affair with Anne Marie was now public knowledge, his relationship with Debby MacIntyre remained a secret. Moreover, on his instructions, she was out of town visiting one of her brothers. But Tom had always chosen women as his confidantes, and on July 15 and 19, he called Kim Horstman, talking to her as if they were longtime trusted friends. He brought her up to speed on what had happened to him, beginning with his surprise when Bud Freel came to his mother's home. Bud's visit and his later calls alarmed Tom. “He said Bud told him that he was there on behalf of Annie's family,” Kim recalled, “and that he said, ‘If you have her, could you please return her?' ”

Tom told Kim he was shocked.
“Have her?”
he had asked, and reported that Bud said that the family thought Tom had kidnapped her. “He said he just looked at Bud,” Kim recalled, “and he said he asked him, ‘Do you really think I would do anything like that?' and Bud said, ‘No,' but Tom should come home to Delaware.”

Tom also explored any number of theories about Anne Marie's disappearance with Kim, confiding that there was a big turf war
going on between the State Police and the other agencies, and they were all “screwing up the investigation.”

Kim was writing it all down, and her notes were precise. “He told me the first possible scenario was that Annie comes home. The second is that Annie is found—we find her body—and that the evidence around the body will lead the police in the right direction. And three, she's never found, and come Labor Day, the police are going to be getting a lot of pressure from the governor's office to indict somebody.”

At that point, Tom said that he would be “the fall guy.”

Tom wanted to know exactly whom Kim might have spoken to. The police? Mike Scanlan? He wanted to be sure the police knew the two of them had had dinner to discuss an intervention “to help Annie.”

Tom told Kim there were rumors flying around, and one was that Anne Marie had had an affair with Governor Carper when they were in Washington, D.C. He wondered if perhaps that was true. Kim was amazed. She knew nothing of the kind had ever happened. Tom also told her about a state trooper who had harassed Annie, and a neighbor who had been paying attention to her. He mentioned a man Annie had worked with five years before.

Kim sensed that he was reading from some kind of script as he made certain points over and over. Indeed, he called her back four days later and asked to review their last conversation. Tom stressed that he had been so good to Annie, helping her with money, being sure that he ordered extra food at restaurants so she would have doggie bags at home. And when he steered the conversation for the umpteenth time to the night of June 27, Kim felt as though he was drilling her on the sequence of events.

Tom told Kim that he'd talked to Anne Marie every single day without fail. “Did you talk to her Friday?” she asked. “The day after she disappeared, did you talk to her?”

She held her breath, waiting for his answer.

“Friday? No. Oh, no, no, no, no. I was going to call her on Friday, but I went out for my morning walk, and by the time I got back, I never got around to calling her.”

On July 19, Tom called Kim just as she was leaving work at the brokerage firm. “He felt that the two of us knew Annie the best,” she said, “and if we put our heads together, we could come up with something . . . to explain where she was.”

Tom asked Kim what she was doing for the weekend, and when she told him she was going to the shore, he said, “That's funny. I was going to invite you to spend the weekend at the shore with me.”

Kim didn't know what to say. And then she hurriedly explained she was busy both days.

“Why don't you go into work late on Monday?” he suggested. “And come here Monday morning and we will put our heads together and try to come up with where she is.”

“All right,” she lied. “I'll call you when I get to the shore.”

She didn't call him. There was something frightening about him. But Tom called Kim again several days later.

“The last thing I remember Tom saying to me,” she recalled, “is that the thing that upset him so much is that not only did he lose Annie, he was going to lose me as well, which I thought was an odd statement. It wasn't like we were close.”

Tom had been adamant that he could not talk with the police without sacrificing Anne Marie's—and his own—privacy. But he assured Kim that he had never hurt her. “You don't think I would hurt a hair on her head, do you?” he pressed.

“At the time,” Kim said, “I was very skeptical. But I was afraid to say anything.”

Kim was Annie's closest friend. She had known about her affair with Tom Capano and had seen it change from warmth and trust to possession and anxiety. Now she was certain of one thing. She didn't want to spend a minute alone with Tom Capano.

T
OM APPARENTLY
had no real comprehension of the forces that were gathering to investigate his relationship with Anne Marie. When he should have been looking over his shoulder at the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI, he was still planning how he would deal with the Wilmington Police. Unless he could make the ground rules, he was extraordinarily reluctant to get into an interrogation session with local investigators—partly because he knew it wouldn't be just with city police; it would also be with the Delaware State Police and the Executive Security Unit.

A lot of people seemed to be poking their noses into his private life, which made him uncomfortable, an alien feeling for Tom. How ironic that he, the man to whom the Wilmington Police chief once reported every morning, the man from whom the governor himself sought advice, should now be in such an untenable position. The
search for Anne Marie had spread, it seemed, over half the Eastern seaboard, and as Bud Freel had predicted, the national media were hovering already.
Inside Edition, Unsolved Mysteries,
and the
New York Times
had contacted one principal or another in the case and asked for interviews.

Although Tom would insist he had tremendous respect for the Wilmington Police Department, the way every federal law enforcement agency in the country seemed to be jumping in bothered him. In reality, those who knew him said that Tom counted on the Wilmington Police to bungle the investigation. He figured that everything would die down by the end of summer and he could get on with his life.

Tom spoke with Harry Manelski, who was a retired Wilmington chief of police. “We talked in general terms about the case,” Tom said later, “and we talked about what was clear to both of us—about the massive political ramifications of the case; and what with the federal government and State Police and the governor's security task force, just something didn't smell right. I said, ‘Harry, you know, I'd like to get this cleared up. I've even tried to reach out to the family, but I don't know what to do.' ”

Manelski suggested that Tom talk to Lieutenant Mike Maggitti, who was head of the Wilmington Detective Division, and he offered to arrange a meeting. That meeting never took place. Tom was still adamant that he would not talk to the police about his family or his personal life.
He
would set the conditions of any police interview. Meanwhile, Anne Marie was still missing and the Wilmington Police were at an impasse. It was obvious that Tom was never going to submit willingly to questions about her disappearance.

Anne Marie's siblings kept their lonely vigil at her apartment, often sitting on the front porch, as if watching to see who came up and down Washington Street and might help them find their sister. Someone had wound yellow ribbons around the porch's thick white columns. Everyone in town knew that Annie was gone, and her family members were approached with all manner of words of sympathy and concern, suggestions, and theories. The case was like gold to psychics and would-be psychics, who called or wrote with their otherworldly messages about where Anne Marie might be found. A missing persons case with so much publicity attracted pseudoscientists, the definitely peculiar, and the just plain crazies. And still, the Faheys were polite to them all, always hoping that someone might provide the shred of information that would lead them to their sister.

Through Robert's connections, Revere Outdoor Advertising offered
to donate a billboard along Interstate 95 at the Delaware 141 interchange, with an 800 number that anyone with information could call. Now, forty thousand motorists a day read,
HELP US FIND ANNE MARIE FAHEY
: 1-800-TIP-3333, as they drove the interstate.

It was so hard for any of the Faheys to sleep at night. Their days took on a grim routine, a marathon of hope, anxiety, and mourning. By mid-July, Kathleen, Kevin, Mark, Robert, and Brian probably knew in their hearts that Annie wasn't coming back. If she was alive, she would not have stayed away for more than a month; she would have found some way to come home or to get word to them.

If Anne Marie had left of her own accord, as Tom Capano suggested, how was she surviving? None of her clothing was gone; she didn't have her purse or her wallet. The only things missing were her keys and her favorite ring, and maybe her Walkman. She didn't have her car, and there had been no activity on her credit cards, no checks written or withdrawals from her bank account.

And so her family was still caught in that no-man's-land of not knowing. They could not, however, accept that she was gone forever; in the best of moments—which were fewer and fewer—they believed that she would come home. They had to believe that; they did not even have the bleak cleanness of knowing she was dead, or the closure of a funeral mass and a grave to visit. And so they were caught on a seesaw of hope and despair.

Mike Scanlan was officially on vacation, but he was really looking for Anne Marie. He was with her family every day, and they all took some comfort from one another. Wakeful, Mike sometimes wandered out into his garden at dawn and pulled weeds. The images that kept popping unbidden into all of their minds could sometimes be blotted out with physical activity.

None of them knew that the federal government was investigating Anne Marie's disappearance. It might have made her family and friends feel more hopeful, but it was vital at the moment to keep the participation of the U.S. Attorney's office under wraps.

Tom didn't know either. And until an actual federal grand jury investigation might begin, Ferris Wharton knew only that it was a possibility. As interested as he was in working on the baffling case, he was willing to step out of it completely if it meant that all the power of the federal government could be channeled toward finding Anne Marie. He finally told the press that Tom Capano and his attorneys would not submit to any further talks with the police. “We can't talk to Capano unless he agrees to talk,” Wharton said.

Like almost everyone else along the Eastern seaboard, Governor
Tom Carper wondered if Anne Marie was still alive. In his office, her desk sat empty, and as the month of July inched by, one hot, humid day after another with no word at all, he commented that he usually saw a glass as half full, “but we're being realistic,” he said. “We realize the glass is half empty.”

The rumor mills, always active, worked overtime. One persistent thread of gossip held that Anne Marie was dead and her body buried under the new Home Depot store. Nearly finished, the sprawling home supply store was being built under the supervision of Joey Capano and the commercial division of Capano & Sons. Wilmington detectives came out to the site, asked questions, and looked around. If Anne Marie's body was buried somewhere under the concrete of the huge store, they realized, they might never find her. They didn't have any evidence to get a court order to jackhammer the whole floor. And such a project would have cost millions of dollars.

The Home Depot went into advertising and publicity overdrive to avoid tremendous revenue loss, as Wilmingtonians shivered with the thought that Anne Marie might lie buried beneath the aisles where they shopped.

The Wilmington investigators traveled to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to confer with special agents expert in solving missing persons and homicide cases.

“There's not going to be any miracle revelation, no divining rod to say where she is,” Ferris Wharton said. “But they might say, ‘Have you considered this?' or, ‘From our experience, you might want to look over here.' ”

O
N
July 18, Colm Connolly and Eric Alpert, representing the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI, invited the Wilmington Police to join them in a grand jury investigation of Anne Marie's disappearance. Once the Wilmington Police signed letters signifying that they wanted to participate, the police were no longer allowed to share information with
anyone.
The letters were signed, and now the police had, indeed, made a “federal case” out of it.

On July 19, Eric Alpert and Bob Donovan traveled to the inner sanctum of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. There they sat down with a half dozen agents skilled in studying the patterns of a vast array of antisocial killers. The profilers of the Behavioral Science Unit are not as all-knowing as they are sometimes portrayed in movies or on television—no human could be—but they have an intuitive sense, honed by scores of interviews with murderers and by studying hundreds of cases. Given descriptions of a group
of suspects in a particular case, they can usually point investigators in the right direction by identifying the most likely suspect.

Alpert and Donovan didn't have a handful of suspects in the disappearance of Anne Marie; they had only one—and that was Tom Capano. They laid the circumstances of the case out for the profilers, and together they explored many scenarios and possibilities. No one at Quantico suggested they were on the wrong path.