...And Never Let HerGo

They could not, however, accept that she was gone forever; in the best of moments—which were fewer and fewer—they believed that she would come home. They had to believe that; they did not even have the bleak cleanness of knowing she was dead, or the closure of a funeral mass and a grave to visit. And so they were caught on a seesaw of hope and despair.
    Mike Scanlan was officially on vacation, but he was really looking for Anne Marie. He was with her family every day, and they all took some comfort from one another. Wakeful, Mike sometimes wandered out into his garden at dawn and pulled weeds. The images that kept popping unbidden into all of their minds could sometimes be blotted out with physical activity.
    None of them knew that the federal government was investigating Anne Marie’s disappearance. It might have made her family and friends feel more hopeful, but it was vital at the moment to keep the participation of the U.S. Attorney’s office under wraps.
    Tom didn’t know either. And until an actual federal grand jury investigation might begin, Ferris Wharton knew only that it was a possibility. As interested as he was in working on the baffling case, he was willing to step out of it completely if it meant that all the power of the federal government could be channeled toward finding Anne Marie. He finally told the press that Tom Capano and his attorneys would not submit to any further talks with the police. “We can’t talk to Capano unless he agrees to talk,” Wharton said.
    Like almost everyone else along the Eastern seaboard, GovernorTom Carper wondered if Anne Marie was still alive. In his office, her desk sat empty, and as the month of July inched by, one hot, humid day after another with no word at all, he commented that he usually saw a glass as half full, “but we’re being realistic,” he said. “We realize the glass is half empty.”
    The rumor mills, always active, worked overtime. One persistent thread of gossip held that Anne Marie was dead and her body buried under the new Home Depot store. Nearly finished, the sprawling home supply store was being built under the supervision of Joey Capano and the commercial division of Capano & Sons. Wilmington detectives came out to the site, asked questions, and looked around. If Anne Marie’s body was buried somewhere under the concrete of the huge store, they realized, they might never find her. They didn’t have any evidence to get a court order to jackhammer the whole floor. And such a project would have cost millions of dollars.
    The Home Depot went into advertising and publicity overdrive to avoid tremendous revenue loss, as Wilmingtonians shivered with the thought that Anne Marie might lie buried beneath the aisles where they shopped.
    The Wilmington investigators traveled to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to confer with special agents expert in solving missing persons and homicide cases.
    “There’s not going to be any miracle revelation, no divining rod to say where she is,” Ferris Wharton said. “But they might say, ‘Have you considered this?’ or, ‘From our experience, you might want to look over here.’ ”
    O N July 18, Colm Connolly and Eric Alpert, representing the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI, invited the Wilmington Police to join them in a grand jury investigation of Anne Marie’s disappearance. Once the Wilmington Police signed letters signifying that they wanted to participate, the police were no longer allowed to share information with
anyone.
The letters were signed, and now the police had, indeed, made a “federal case” out of it.
    On July 19, Eric Alpert and Bob Donovan traveled to the inner sanctum of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia. There they sat down with a half dozen agents skilled in studying the patterns of a vast array of antisocial killers. The profilers of the Behavioral Science Unit are not as all-knowing as they are sometimes portrayed in movies or on television—no human could be—but they have an intuitive sense, honed by scores of interviews with murderers and by studying hundreds of cases. Given descriptions of a groupof suspects in a particular case, they can usually point investigators in the right direction by identifying the most likely suspect.
    Alpert and Donovan didn’t have a handful of suspects in the disappearance of Anne Marie; they had only one—and that was Tom Capano. They laid the circumstances of the case out for the profilers, and