...And Never Let HerGo

checks on two consecutive days for $8,000 and $9,000. It appeared that Tom might be “structuring,” a tactic drug dealers—or anyone who wanted to hide money from the IRS—often used. Any withdrawal of over $10,000 required that a CTR—a currency transaction report—be filed.
    Connolly called Ron Poplos of the Internal Revenue Service and asked him for some help in following Tom Capano’s money trail. Either Tom had been preparing to launder money by deliberately structuring or he had reason to stockpile it. Poplos was game and he was a veteran of the Whitewater investigation, expert on tracking where money came from and where it went. Why would Tom have needed $17,000 in cash when he already had a cushy bank account?
    Tom obviously liked to dine out often and well. It was rare for him to spend less than $100 for dinner, and not at all unusual for the bill to top $300. In one month, on one of his credit cards, he had dined at the Dilworthtown Inn, the Victor Cafe, Toscana, the Ristorante La Veranda, Panorama, Pan Tai, Kid Shelleen’s, Madeline’s, the Shipley Grill, and DiNardo’s Famous Crabs. His Visa and MasterCard statements averaged between $2,000 and $5,000 a month. He often purchased designer women’s clothing at Talbot’s, but he also bought more prosaic items, shopping at the Happy Harry’s drugstore in Trolley Square or the Sports Authority.
    Tom had shopped at Happy Harry’s on Sunday, June 30. What he had purchased was not stipulated, but Alpert and Donovan showed a clerk the bill, and he described a man who sounded like Tom: he had been looking for a cleaner that would remove bloodstains. The clerk said he had recommended one of the Carbona cleaners and the customer bought it.
    But Tom might have had a perfectly innocent reason to buy a cleaner that removed blood. He had four teenage daughters who visited him, and his colitis was so severe that he often bled from the rectum, staining his underwear.
    The FBI lab had determined that the dark brown specks on the baseboard in the great room in the Grant Avenue house
were
human blood, and there was enough of it for a sampler to compare with a known DNA profile—but the investigators had been unable to findany of Anne Marie’s blood. It was desperately important to find a sample. The blood used for the tests of her potassium levels that Michelle Sullivan had ordered had been disposed of.
    But then, looking over her day-planner, Eric Alpert saw something that had so far escaped notice. Anne Marie had jotted down “Blood bank.” Her family said that she had been a regular blood donor, and a search of her E-mail confirmed that she had given blood in April.
    “Blood banks usually extract and save plasma,” Alpert said, “and plasma won’t work for DNA testing. But sometimes the plasma isn’t as pure as it might be. We figured if we could trace that plasma, we might be able to use it for comparison purposes.”
    It was better than wading through the city dump for almost a week, but it was almost as frustrating. The Blood Bank of Delaware’s records did verify that Anne Marie had donated blood. Chris Hancock, a donor advocate, told the investigators that careful histories of donors were taken, including their social security numbers. After Anne Marie had passed her medical interview, a unit number—unique to her—was assigned to her that would stay with her blood or plasma. It was an FDA requirement. Anne Marie’s unit number for her last donation was 0387029.
    But where was that blood now? Alpert found that the red cells had been shipped to a hospital. The rest of it had been used for fresh-frozen plasma, but the plasma wasn’t even in the country. It was on its way to the Swiss Red Cross, somewhere on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. At the government’s request, Chris Hancock arranged to retrieve Anne Marie’s plasma, and it came back, still frozen: 0387029. Now it was up to the FBI lab to see if it matched the spots found in the great room in Tom Capano’s house.
    Special Agent Allan Giusti was a DNA analyst in the FBI laboratory. “DNA,” he explained, “is an abbreviation for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’ the blueprint every living organism is made of, which is found in the form of a twisted ladder that is called a double helix.”
    Body fluid stains larger than a quarter are fairly easy to match to known samplers. But minuscule amounts of body fluid and tissue can be tested too. One test, termed the PCR test, is used when the