...And Never Let HerGo

stretch so thin that they could see one another’s eyes through the gaps in their logic. And what they were thinking was chilling.
    The police had already done a door-to-door canvass of the houses around Anne Marie’s apartment and searched the park across the street, even though it had so few trees along the greensward that they doubted she could have been hidden there. It seemed more likely that she had left her apartment in a vehicle, but they could not be sure. They didn’t even know
when
she had vanished.
    Perhaps the last to see her on the governor’s staff was Diane Hastings, the office manager. She told the investigators that she had ridden down in the elevator with Anne Marie at about 4:30 P.M. on Thursday. “I was going home and she was going home.”
    “What was she wearing?” she was asked.
    “Jeans and a white scoop-neck T-shirt. She was happy that she had the next day off, and she was going to read a book in the park and have a manicure, a pedicure.”
    Since several of her friends recalled that Anne Marie hadplanned to spend Friday getting a pedicure and other beauty treatments at the Michael Christopher Designs salon, and then go to Valley Garden Park with a good book, it was possible she had spent Thursday night in her apartment, gone to the salon, and then encountered someone in the park the next day.
    But a check with the staff at the salon brought the information that Anne Marie had not shown up for her appointment—nor had she called in to cancel.
    Valley Garden Park was on the Hoopes Reservoir, northwest of Wilmington, and old-timers on the police force remembered the beautiful park’s ghosts of murder. In 1956, ten years before Anne Marie Fahey was even born, Alberta Cousins, twenty-two, also made it a habit to take books to Valley Garden Park. On August 23, almost nine months pregnant, she sat in the park reading, shoes off in deference to the stifling heat. As police reconstructed what happened next, a bullet had whizzed by her head, startling her. She apparently got to her feet and had made it part of the way to her car when a second bullet slammed into her right side and pierced her heart. A police officer found her hours later, much too late to save her unborn child.
    The murder of Alberta Cousins launched the most massive State Police investigation Delaware had ever seen. A shell casing was found 135 feet from her body, and indentations there showed where her killer had sat as he took a bead on her, but the police had no way to find her killer—not until twenty-five years later, when a woman with a niggling conscience came forward to describe a man she had observed close to the park that day. Using a computer-generated composite image, the police found that it matched almost exactly the photograph of a man imprisoned in Florida. The man had confessed to his cell mate, saying, “I shot a woman in Delaware once.” But he had mental problems and no one had ever taken him seriously until the composite matched. By the time that happened, the convict was long dead.
    F OUR decades after the massive search for Alberta Cousins’s killer, another search began in the Valley Garden Park, searchers and dogs below, helicopters above. Sweeping wider and wider, the searchers beat the bushes and looked along the open ground with little hope. Anne Marie’s car was still parked on Washington Street, and the park was much too far to walk to. She would have to have had a ride to reach it. And there was no reason at all to think that she had.
    Bob Donovan entered Anne Marie’s name and description andthe 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.’