...And Never Let HerGo

Dover for the end of the legislative session and would probably be staying up all night. “She didn’t want to go,” he said, and told the investigators that she had problems at work and hated going down to Dover for the twenty-four-hour sessions that marked the virtual end of the political year.
    Tom also told them that Anne Marie had had a “big fight” with her sister earlier in the week, speculating that an airheaded girl with so many problems had almost certainly simply decided to run away from her life for a few days.
    Asked to describe his relationship with Anne Marie, Tom was frank. He told the detectives that he and Anne Marie had once been involved sexually but that they now had only a very close friendship.
    “We haven’t done anything sexual for the past six months,” he explained. “She has psychological problems, she’s been on medication, just having a hard time dealing with it all. I’ve spent a lot of time helping her with her psychological problems.”
    Asked if he thought Anne Marie might be suicidal, Tom sighed. That concerned him because he felt she was definitely suicidal. He told the detectives that she had talked a lot about committing suicide with pills in the past. The medicine she was taking currently was making her sick. “She wakes up at night with insomnia,” he added. Tom said he knew Michelle Sullivan. In fact, he was the one who arranged for her and Anne Marie to meet.
    “You give Miss Fahey a lot of gifts?” Donovan asked.
    Tom nodded. He gave lots of people gifts, and that included Anne Marie. “Lately, I’ve regularly been giving her food. I’ve given her money, and I recently gave her some Cézanne prints.”
    “Mr. Capano,” Mark Daniels asked suddenly, “can you tell us whether or not Anne Marie is in this house at the moment?”
    “No,” he said. “She is not.”
    “If you knew where she was, and if she had just gone away, and she told you she didn’t want anyone to know where she was, would you tell us?”
    “No, I’d respect her confidence.”
    When Donovan and Daniels explained that Anne Marie was officially a missing person whose family was terribly concerned, andno one knew if she was in danger or needed help or what might have happened to her, Tom changed his mind.
    “Well, under those circumstances, I would tell you. But I don’t know where she is, and so I can’t tell you.”
    They had been talking in a very polite, if edgy, fashion for half an hour. Now the detectives asked if they might take a look around the house, and Tom shook his head. “My daughters are asleep upstairs,” he said. “This isn’t a good time.” He explained that he didn’t want to frighten his four girls with strange men clomping through the house, aiming flashlights at them. They acquiesced but said they would be back the next morning—actually, later the same morning.
    Tom Capano had been cooperative—up to a point. They hadn’t seen his daughters, but they took his word that the girls were in the house, sleeping upstairs. They didn’t have a search warrant or any probable cause to get a search warrant. Moreover, they didn’t know Anne Marie Fahey and they couldn’t form an opinion on whether she was the kind of young woman who would go away for the weekend without telling anyone because she was stressed out or because, as Tom Capano said, she was an airhead given to such behavior.
    They did know that Tom Capano had a solid reputation in Wilmington and that there had never been a breath of scandal about him. His brothers, yes. But not Tom. Tom was the “good Capano,” and he certainly appeared to be going about his life as he normally did. He didn’t look like a man who was about to rabbit on them.
    “We’ll be back later today,” Daniels said. “We’d like to talk with you more then.”
    Tom nodded and walked them to the door. The lights were out in the house before they had turned the corner and headed back downtown.
    I T was a warm Sunday morning at ten when the Wilmington and State Police investigators returned to the Grant Avenue house. This time, their knocks on the front door went unanswered. They went back several times over the next few hours and found no one home. Puzzled, and a little annoyed that Tom Capano seemed to be deliberately avoiding them, they went looking for him, driving past the huge old houses in the neighborhood, the Delaware Art Museum, along the Bancroft Parkway, and past the big white stucco house on the corner of