...And Never Let HerGo

Tom’s kitchen that he wanted to conceal. The couch that had been there was gone, and he had replaced the carpet with a cheap rug. Why?
    Alpert talked once more with Michelle Sullivan, Anne Marie’s counselor, who told him she could not imagine that Anne Marie would have gone willingly to Tom’s house on the night of June 27. “The
only
reason I can think of that Anne Marie even went to dinnerwith him that night would have been to break off their relationship.”
    On July 29, FBI special agents Kevin Shannon, Gordon Cobb, and Kathy Canning again interviewed Jacqueline Dansak, the waitress at the Panorama. Shannon showed her a lay-down of photographs and she chose those of Anne Marie Fahey and Tom Capano. That, in itself, wasn’t startling—their pictures had been in the Philadelphia papers—but Dansak’s recall of the couple was. She said that the woman in the picture was healthier looking than the woman she had served. “It was the Fahey girl, all right—but she was very frail, sallow, sad,” the waitress said. “She appeared disheveled and uncomfortable.”
    Dansak told Agent Shannon that she got the impression that Capano had wanted her to leave them alone. After she served cocktails, he had ordered a bottle of wine and said he would pour it himself. He had ordered chicken or veal, and Anne Marie Fahey had ordered fish. But neither of them ate their entrées.
    When she was told about the waitress’s description of Anne Marie’s glum demeanor during her meal with Tom at the Panorama, Michelle Sullivan nodded sadly. It all fit. During their last session, just the night before she disappeared, they had been working toward giving Anne Marie enough confidence to cut Tom completely out of her life. And Anne Marie was frightened of Tom, so frightened that Sullivan had encouraged her more strongly this time to report his behavior toward her to the Delaware Attorney General’s Office.
    She still didn’t want to do that—not yet. But she had been making great progress toward standing up for what she wanted out of life. “And she was
not
suicidal,” Sullivan said. “Not at all.”
    There had been no physical evidence in Anne Marie’s Washington Street apartment that would remotely indicate that she had been injured or killed there. Connie Blake had told the investigators that the glass door that closed off the stairs to her second-floor apartment and Anne Marie’s third-floor dwelling was always locked, although the two women often left the doors to their own apartments unlocked until they went to bed. They felt secure because no one could reach the stairway without a key to the door off the foyer.
    Oddly, the combination had been reversed on Thursday night when Blake came home. The dead bolt on the glass door was unlocked, something that rarely happened. And of course, Anne Marie’s door was locked, with the dead bolt thrown, which Theresa Oliver had opened with her key the following Saturday night.
    Connie Blake (who had once been Mayor Dan Frawley’s secretary)and Anne Marie were friends. In fact, she had once lived in Anne Marie’s apartment. When she moved downstairs, she had told Annie about the vacancy. Blake knew both Mike Scanlan and Tom Capano, and from time to time had seen each of them picking Anne Marie up. She had seen Anne Marie for the last time at about 6 P.M. on the Thursday night she had dinner with Tom. “I was in my living room and she pulled up across the street and parked her car. She was wearing a white blouse—that’s all I noticed.”
    Blake did not see Anne Marie later, although she was home all evening, packing for a weekend at the shore. She watched a Pay-Per-View movie, something about an American president, as she packed. She was used to hearing sounds from Anne Marie’s apartment—someone walking, water running, the low tones of a phone conversation, occasionally a loud television program. The layout of their apartments was almost the same. “You enter the living room first,” she explained, “and walk through the dining area, with the kitchen on the right. Anne Marie’s bedroom was on the back on the left, with the bathroom on the right. I have two more rooms—a den and a dressing room.”
    Blake told the investigators that the movie was almost over when she heard the sound of footsteps coming from Anne Marie’s apartment. “They weren’t high heels—just muffled walking. Someone walking through to the bedroom. It wasn’t very distinctive.”
    The time?