...And Never Let HerGo

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.
    F EW people in Wilmington knew Charles Freel by his given name; he was Bud Freel to everyone. Bud, of course, was one of the owners of O’Friel’s Irish Pub, former owner of Buddy’s Bar, and more important, a Wilmington city councilman and director of the Office of External Affairs for the Delaware State Department of Transportation. Bud had been Tom Capano’s good friend for over twenty years; theyhad worked closely together on many Democratic campaigns. Bud was also very close to the Faheys. Anne Marie was like a little sister to him.
    Bud had been in Dover at the Legislative Hall when his brother Ed called him on Sunday afternoon with the news that Anne Marie was missing. Ten hours later, in the early hours of July 1, the legislature closed up shop for the summer. And just before dawn, Ed told Bud that he had learned that Tom Capano was the last person to have seen Anne Marie before her disappearance.
    With no motive beyond friendship, Bud had called Tom’s house and left him a message of concern. “I knew he had been friends with Anne Marie,” he said, “and I told Tom I was thinking about him and I felt bad. If there was anything I could do, to let me know.”
    Tom called Bud back Monday evening. “It was a very brief call,” Bud recalled. “He just said that I was going to hear a lot of shit about him in the next couple of months—and not to believe it. And that he was going to need my support. And he basically hung up.”
    Bud Freel was equally concerned about the Fahey family. On Wednesday morning, July 3, he went to Anne Marie’s apartment to talk with her brothers and sister, hoping he would find them there without the crowds of people who were coming by out of compassion or curiosity. “They were asking me questions,” Bud recalled, “and I basically couldn’t answer. So while I was there, I offered to talk to Tom.”
    Bud was caught between two sides of a mystery involving people he cared about, a situation that wasn’t likely to happen anywhere but Wilmington, where everyone was somehow connected. Anne Marie’s family was searching desperately for any nugget of information they could find about her disappearance, and a dark cloud was forming rapidly over Tom’s heretofore impeccable reputation. They weren’t talking to one another; Bud was the natural link. He decided to drive to Stone Harbor and talk to Tom. “My hope,” Bud recalled, “was that he would come back and cooperate with the police and do whatever he could to help.”
    Back in Wilmington, flyers with Anne Marie’s pictures had just begun to blossom in store windows. The search for her was omnipresent there, but the Atlantic Ocean made all of it seem very far away. It was July 3 when Bud pulled up at Marguerite Capano’s house on the beach and walked in through the sliding glass doors on the ocean side. One of Tom’s daughters was sitting on the couch with a friend, and Bud asked where her father was. She pointed to the den in the back of the house. He found Tom talking on thephone. Bud Freel was an imposing man, standing well over six feet, with a physique that was reminiscent of a professional wrestler’s; no fat, just substance. He could fill a doorway. Tom looked a little startled when he saw Bud looming over him, but he only raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
    Bud waited until Tom was off the phone. Not a man to edge his way in, he started with the hard questions. “I asked him if