...And Never Let HerGo

went back and forth over it, crushing it before it was buried. It was all the same brownish color when they finished.”
    “You couldn’t recognize that couch if you saw it,” Bob Donovan added. “Everything was broken down into small pieces.”
    Then it rained and things got worse. “We sank in mud to our knees,” Alpert said, “and our boots came off. We stank. We began to feel like, What’s the use?”
    It was a little better at the other site, where the construction debris had been dumped. At least it didn’t smell. But nothing looked as it once had, and in the end, the investigators had to agree that any further searching was useless. In their hearts they didn’t believe that Anne Marie’s body was there. They hoped it wasn’t. But they were quite sure that there had been something in those Dumpsters that caused Louie to order them emptied when they were half full. Was Louie somehow involved in Anne Marie’s disappearance? They didn’t know. But they believed
something
connected with the case had been taken to the dump before it was reduced to indistinguishable rubble.
    Nobody was calling it murder, not officially. Officially, the FBI was calling Anne Marie’s disappearance “interstate kidnapping.”
    T HE toll back edits on Anne Marie’s and Tom’s phones had been completed, and all the calls Tom was currently dialing out were being printed on the pen register. Connolly began to chart a time line.
    Only one call had initiated from Anne Marie’s phone on the evening of Thursday, June 27. At 11:52 P.M. , someone had hit *69to see who the most recent caller had been. That call was from Mike Scanlan, who had phoned from a friend’s house to invite Anne Marie to join him at Kid Shelleen’s. Phone records and her answering system showed that Mike’s call had been at 9:45. Who was in Anne Marie’s apartment at 11:52?
    Tom had made numerous calls on that vital night and the day after. At 12:05, he had checked his voice mail at Saul, Ewing. He had made two calls to Debby MacIntyre, one a *69. On Friday, he had called Debby several times, beginning early in the morning. He had called her from Stone Harbor later in the morning.
    T OM didn’t stay another night in the brick house on North Grant Avenue. He told his friends and family that he couldn’t live there anymore, not with the memories of cops and FBI agents overrunning the place. If there were other memories there that disturbed him, he didn’t speak of them. He vacated the premises as of September 30, 1996, but, in reality, he moved in with Louie the night the search warrant was executed, and later, he moved in with his mother. There was plenty of room in the big house on Weldin Road, where he’d grown up, and Marguerite was glad to have him. He was seeing Debby several times a week and he continued to assure her that everything was fine, despite the occasional intrusion of cops and agents, who were more bothersome than dangerous.
    The search warrants, however, kept coming. On August 23, eight weeks after Anne Marie Fahey had vanished, Tom was forced to submit to a search warrant that asked for samplers of his blood and his body hair. With one of his attorneys, Bart Dalton, he appeared at Riverside Hospital, where an FBI technician waited. Drawing the vial of blood was easier than taking the hair samples. Hair must be plucked—from the head, the genital area, and possibly other body sites. To be useful in DNA testing, the tag (or root) has to be present, so the hair cannot be cut. Pubic hair has characteristics different from head hair.
    It was an ignominious event for Tom, one in a series. He was not accustomed to such invasions of his home, his cars, his person, and he was growing annoyed with the stubborn investigative team. But it was only the beginning. And maddeningly, the media seemed to have a line into his run-ins with the authorities. Tom had never sought publicity—even when he was a public figure. He certainly didn’t care to see his personal business on the front pages of the Wilmington and Philadelphia newspapers.
    In fact, Tom had no idea how much of his personal businessColm Connolly, Bob Donovan, and Eric Alpert already knew. His credit card statements and his bank statements revealed a great deal about him, as they would for anyone: patterns of spending, personal preferences, available income. Unusual and one-time purchases stood out, too.
    In checking Tom’s banking transactions, Connolly saw that Tom had cashed