...And Never Let HerGo

air, and summer was only a memory. Anne Marie, who had disappeared during the first week of summer, was still missing. Kathleen had finally packed up everything in her apartment and her brothers moved it into storage.
    Tom’s rental house sat empty. The new tenants weren’t moving in until December 1 and the owners of the house gave Anne Marie’s family permission to visit the house that they believed was the last place their sister had been alive. They had never had a chance to say good-bye. They moved quietly through the empty rooms, saying little, their faces solemn.
    T HAT fall, as more secret grand jury sessions were held, Wilmington and Philadelphia newspapers sued to have the affidavits for search warrants in the Fahey case unsealed. With a more pressing need, the Fahey family begged to know what was happening in the probe.
    On November 11, Colm Connolly appeared to be giving in to media pressure when he agreed that there was no longer any need to keep the affidavits sealed. After all, Tom Capano’s attorneys already knew many details of the investigation and who the witnesses were. It was almost impossible to keep a secret in Wilmington. In actuality, Connolly had caught the defense off guard; he was unperturbed about having the public learn of the growing evidence and information that painted Capano as something less than the beleaguered innocent he purported to be.
    The Fahey family had hired attorney David Weiss to represent their interests. Weiss, himself a former assistant U.S. attorney, had explained to them that much of the information unearthed by a grand jury investigation could not be disclosed. Still, it was so hardfor the Faheys to wait and wonder. They retained a private detective to do a parallel investigation. Nobody on the federal investigative team resented that. It was very difficult for them not to be able to talk with Anne Marie’s sister and brothers about what they were doing, but federal law forbade it. At least, with the unsealing of the affidavits, the family could see that progress was being made. Whether the rest of the public had a right or need to know the intimate details of the probe was questionable. It was unlikely that anyone was in imminent danger from the prime suspect, but people were fiercely curious. Seldom had there been a case on the Eastern seaboard that sparked so much speculation.
    The only faction truly upset when Judge Trostle unsealed the affidavits was Tom Capano and his attorneys. They, too, had argued to see the documents—but
privately.
The last thing Tom wanted was to have the whole world know what cause the government had had to invade his privacy and his home. His attorneys filed to block their release, delaying the Faheys’ chance to see them.
    While the tug-of-war over unsealing the affidavits went on, the grand jury continued to meet; Connolly, Alpert, and Donovan were relentless in their search for the truth, the intensity of which Tom Capano could never have imagined. If he was innocent of harming Anne Marie Fahey, that would come out as the people in their lives marched into the grand jury room in the federal building and answered Connolly’s questions. If he had destroyed her, that would come out, too.
    There were those, like Tom’s sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee Ramunno, who stood by Tom without flinching. But there were others, like Kim Horstman, Jill Morrison, Ginny Columbus, and Jackie Steinhoff, who remembered a friend they had cherished, a friend caught in a net not of her own making.
    Although there were no hurrahs from the three men who were quietly tracking Tom Capano, things were beginning to happen behind their wall of silence. Not everyone in Wilmington found Tom the “good Capano.” An informant had come forward, an informant who could never be identified. Indeed, the manner in which the investigators found a remarkable document could never be revealed, and even the assumption that it was one individual who came to them might not be true. When any of the three was asked how they found the timeline pages, a shadow fell over his eyes.
    “I can’t tell you that,” one said. “I can only say that none of the names mentioned in connection with that discovery is correct.”
    But suddenly, in November 1996, Eric Alpert asked for a searchwarrant for the office of one of Tom Capano’s law partners. The attorney himself had no idea of what was hidden there between the volumes on one of his bookshelves. He got a telephone