...And Never Let HerGo

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—thatshe’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,”