...And Never Let HerGo

As closely as she could judge, it would have been somewhere between a quarter to and eight minutes to ten. It sounded as though there was only one person in the rooms above. Connie said she’d turned off her TV at ten and had gone to bed at eleven. She had heard nothing at all from upstairs during the night, nor did she hear Anne Marie moving about in the morning. They went to work at the same time and often chatted on their way out, but not on Friday. When she came home at noon, Blake saw that Anne Marie’s car was still parked where it had been the evening before.
    O N July 30, Anne Marie’s continued absence was cast in a more sinister light. The public had no knowledge of the gears that had begun to mesh. Nor did the Fahey family. But suddenly the news media were reporting that her disappearance was now being considered a criminal case and that Tom Capano had been named a suspect. No one was saying what he was suspected of. But Anne Marie was still missing, and if any evidence had been found to indicate what had happened to her, the investigators were not revealing it.
    Ferris Wharton’s official comments were more inscrutable thanever. “In a broad sense, sure, Tom Capano is a suspect,” he said. “So are other people the police are curious about. Certainly, in any circumstance, the last person seen with her is a suspect. . . . As more and more time goes by, the possibility of a benign explanation diminishes, given her close ties to her family and her job. You have to conclude foul play came into the picture. It’s just sort of an evolutionary thing. I think most people would now say it’s likely that she’s a victim of a crime.”
    Charlie Oberly sprang to Tom’s defense, saying that his friend and client had been made a “scapegoat,” and a sacrifice to political pressure. “You’ve got everyone from the president of the United States on down wanting it to be solved. But they’ve been able to come up with nothing. They are branding this person without a shred of evidence, and that is terrible.”
    Marian Capano’s husband, Lee Ramunno, spoke up for his brother-in-law: “Tom is a wonderful person. Honest. Decent. He has the respect of the community. It’s ludicrous that someone would suspect him. . . . He was at the restaurant with her, and when they left, he brought her home. They’ve established that the person living in the apartment underneath did not hear any struggle or noise. After that, who knows?”
    The investigative team had been convinced for weeks that whatever had happened to Anne Marie, it had not occurred in her apartment. Except for the food left out and the jumble of shoes, everything there was as it always had been. And Connie Blake would almost certainly have heard any sounds of a struggle. But they had needed something to put on an affidavit to show cause why a search warrant should be granted for Tom’s house. Now they had that. The first crack in the seemingly impervious wall that Tom and his attorneys had thrown up was the credit card charge at Air Base Carpets. That, along with the missing carpet and sofa, and the statements of Anne Marie’s friends and her psychologist, gave them their probable cause.
    They didn’t doubt that Anne Marie had been scared to death of Tom Capano and of what he might do next; none of the three men who had taken on the quest of finding her believed that she had gone willingly to Tom’s house. But they
did
believe that she had gone there.
    Although Tom’s rented house was surrounded by other houses, the lots were large and the homes had thick, solid walls. In an earlier canvass of North Grant Avenue and neighboring Kentmere Place, the detectives hadn’t talked to anyone who remembered hearing ascream or an argument on the night of June 27. But memory and checks with the weather bureau verified that it had been beastly hot that night; everyone had their air conditioners turned on high. A scream or an argument would not have been heard inside the houses nearby. If Tom had, for some reason, become enraged at Anne Marie inside the house where he lived alone, no one else would have heard any sound at all above the hum of air conditioners.
    I F Tom would not come to the investigators, then they would go to him—or rather, to the house where he lived. Eric Alpert drew up an affidavit listing the reasons for a federal search warrant that would allow the FBI team and Wilmington police to thoroughly search the brick house on North Grant