...And Never Let HerGo

had expected that; Ruth Boylan had cleaned the house the week before. But they weren’t looking for surface cleaning. They were looking for something minute, something that she—or anyone else who might have wiped away stains—would not have seen.
    Eric Alpert had indicated in his affidavit that the investigative team would be looking for weapons, tools, and “body parts,” which could be taken literally or could mean blood. They didn’t expect to find a pool of blood or a large stain; if such a thing had ever been in Tom’s house, it was long gone. What the searchers hoped for was a speck so small that it might have been missed. They could not risk spraying with Luminol or leuco-malachite green or other chemicals that might reveal where large areas of blood had been cleaned up; it might also destroy the blood for DNA testing.
    Special Agent Linda Harrison, a sixteen-year veteran with the FBI, was responsible for searching the great room off the kitchen. Ruth Boylan had said that Tom had recently changed the furnishings in that room. Squinting, Harrison used her own eyes to sweep the room for blood spots. She found them. Or thought she had. Tiny, isolated, dark brown flecks. The one on the baseboard was only two millimeters wide, but large enough to do a presumptive test that showed it was blood from
some
source. She found another tiny speck on the metal cover at the bottom of the radiator on the wall where the TV stood, but she dared not use any of it for testing. With cotton swabs moistened with sterile water, she lifted the dried blood, and then allowed the swabs to air-dry before she packaged them in brown envelopes and gave them to Dougal, who was photographing the room and the brown spots. Only after photographs of the specks were enlarged would other microscopic dots show up in a faint spray pattern around the ones that could be seen with the naked eye. The paint on the walls looked fresh; in case the room had been painted since June 27, the agents sawed out squares of wallboard for testing in the lab.
    If this
was
blood, would it match Anne Marie’s DNA? At the moment it was a moot question. They had yet to find anything that they could use to determine her DNA profile. Her own passion for cleanliness had defeated them every time. There had been no blood in her apartment, and nothing from which they could extract DNA. Her toothbrush was free of her saliva; her hairbrush had no hairs wound around the bristles. Most people fail to clean the U-joints intheir sinks until they are clogged with hair—but when the plumbing was dismantled, it had no hairs. Even the inside of her hats had no strands of her beautiful hair caught there. If they had found hairs with tags (roots), the criminalists might have had a chance to isolate her DNA. But Anal Annie had been true to form in her neatness.
    Now the FBI search team had found what they knew in their guts was human blood. Somehow the investigators would have to find Anne Marie’s DNA. There had to be a way, even though the samplers they had wouldn’t be enough to attempt a familial match with her siblings.
    They also found blood flecks in Tom’s laundry room and on the door there. And there was something else that might or might not be vital to the investigation. There were many, many cleaning compounds and bleaching agents, far more than in most households, especially a bachelor’s household. Several could be used to remove bloodstains. One, Carbona, was specifically meant for that purpose. That might be significant, but lots of people had Carbona cleaners in their cupboards.
    A murmur went through the wilting reporters who waited stoically in the afternoon sun. The FBI team was carrying out a toilet. What could that mean? The search team hoped to find evidence caught in the trap. Obviously, this was not going to be a slam-dunk case, where everything came together like clockwork. At the end of the day, none of the searchers knew if the bits of hair and fiber, the minuscule dark brown speckles, the vacuum cleaners, the blood spot removers, the mops, the small ax with fibers attached, the broken fireplace poker, or any of the other items they carried away in the two vans were going to make any difference at all in an investigation already five weeks old.
    Time and the FBI crime lab would tell.
    O N August 1, the
News-Journal
had long articles about the search of Tom Capano’s house. But there was more. Somehow the Wilmington paper had gotten access to Anne