...And Never Let HerGo

about a foot and a half away from me,” Connolly recalled, “looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I hope you can sleep at night.’ ”
    Connolly said nothing. He walked away—but the gauntlet had been thrown down. Tom Capano was a father prepared to fight fiercely to protect his daughter. Or was he protecting himself?
    When she took the stand, Christy Capano refused to answer Connolly’s questions and now faced contempt of court charges.

Chapter Twenty-seven
    D EBBY M AC I NTYRE had been seeing Tom clandestinely for fourteen and a half years and openly for one. Tom suggested that itwould be prudent for them to say that their romantic relationship had begun
after
he separated from Kay. That would protect Kay’s feelings, and besides, the feds were already poking around in his private life enough; there was no need to give in to their salacious curiosity.
    As always, Debby did what Tom requested. She had no desire for everyone to know that she and Tom had been intimate since 1981. Except for lies of omission and her one blatant lie to her family when she joined Tom in Montreal, she had always told the truth. Indeed, when Bob Donovan interviewed her on July 23, she told him what she remembered—save for the fact that she classified Tom as only a very good friend whom she had known for twenty years.
    “I talk with Tom every day,” she said, “and see him once or twice a week.”
    “Has he ever talked about a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey?” Donovan asked.
    “Never.”
    In a way, that was true. He had never mentioned Anne Marie until after she disappeared. Asked to recall whether she had talked to Tom on Thursday night, June 27, Debby said she had. “I called him sometime between ten and eleven,” she said. “I know it was in the middle of
ER.
He called me back at about eleven-thirty. I called him at twelve-fifteen, but he didn’t answer and I hung up. He called me back within five or ten minutes.”
    That call had come in with an odd ring, the extended shrill that indicated that the calling party had hit *69 to return the last call made to his number.
    “How about on Friday—the next day?”
    “I saw Tom Friday morning between eight and eight-thirty at the Tower Hill track,” Debby said. “He was walking. He called me around ten-thirty to say he was playing golf that day at the Wilmington Country Club.”
    Donovan jotted down his notes in short sentences, and they continued in a staccato fashion:
    “Spoke with Tom later on Friday at approx 1730.
    “Tuesday, July 2. He called her at work around 1500 and told her that he had been out to dinner with Anne Marie Fahey.
    “Did not know that Tom was having any relationships.”
    Debby didn’t know where Tom had been for most of the day on Friday, the twenty-eighth. He might have called her several times during the day but she wasn’t sure. She said she had spoken with him on Saturday, and he had stopped by on Sunday twice. The secondtime, he had told her that the cops were at his house and they had searched it. “He was very upset,” Debby told Donovan. “He felt he was being set up, but he didn’t discuss what was going on.”
    It seemed strange that she hadn’t pressed him for details. Debby appeared to be so confident that no one realized that Tom ran the show and that she would never dream of insisting that he tell her what was wrong.
    As he had done for years, Tom had suggested a script for Debby to follow, and she stayed with it; it was what he wanted. They were together and everything was going to be fine. If she remembered things that frightened her, the memory never even got up to the surface of her mind before she buried it. One of the memories that would loom large with the investigating team when they discovered it was a favor Debby had done for Tom. She had buried that recollection deeper than all the rest.
    “I honestly never thought about the gun,” she would recall. “I never connected buying the gun for Tom with Anne Marie Fahey until a long time later.”
    Sometime very early in the spring of 1996, Tom had phoned to ask Debby to do something very special for him, something very “important.” He wouldn’t tell her what it was, so she hadn’t said either yes or no. But in April, Tom asked her again and this time specified what the task was; he wanted her to buy a gun for him.
    “Why?” she asked, mystified.
    “Somebody is trying to extort me,” he’d explained. “I’m not going to
use
it. I just want to threaten