...And Never Let HerGo

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 wargoing 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.

Chapter Twenty-four
    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