...And Never Let HerGo

way;
very
depressed.”
    From Jacqueline Dansak’s description of the unhappy woman she waited on, Anne Marie hadn’t wanted to be at the Panorama with Tom. She hadn’t eaten anything and had seemed miserable.
When
had she told him she no longer wanted to see him, not as a lover and not even as a friend? In his Jeep Cherokee going home? At her own apartment? Or during what the three investigators believed were the very last moments of her life, in the great room off Tom’s kitchen?
    Some kind providence had given them a timeline. All they had to do was follow it back, decipher what Tom’s abbreviations meant, and find the evidence that might be connected to the entries he had hidden so carefully. They had worked long hours of overtime and they had been lucky. Would fortune continue to smile upon them?
    Life and work didn’t stop for any of them. They all had other cases to work, in between their investigations of Anne Marie’s case. When it began, Connolly had a one-year-old son. (He would have two more sons before it was over.) Donovan and Alpert both had very young children at home, but there wasn’t much family time. “Christmas came and went for two years,” Alpert would recall, “and we hardly knew it.”
    T HE Christmas season of 1996–97 was the second holiday season Debby had spent with Tom, and things seemed to
her,
at least, to be normal. They were talking about marriage and the future. For the most part, Tom was very good with her children, and her son, Steve, idolized him. A year ago, Tom had been so moody, but she understood that. It was his first Christmas away from his daughters.
    Victoria was not as fond of Tom. He humiliated her as she came downstairs to meet her date for the Holiday Dance. She looked beautiful in a little black, sleeveless dress, and she was so excited; her date and all of their friends were watching her entrance.
    “You look like a slut,” Tom said, but he was smiling, “just like a little slut.”
    Victoria burst into tears, sobbing in front of her friends. When Debby looked at him, horrified, he was surprised. “What?
What?”
he asked. “I didn’t mean that as an insult. I say that to my girls all the time. They think it’s funny.”
    “I never liked him after that night,” Victoria would recall, although Tom left an apology on her answering machine and he assured Debby he hadn’t meant anything negative.
    They smoothed it over, but Victoria viewed Tom cautiously after that. But her mother was going to marry him and she was so happy. In all the years before, Debby had waited at the edge of Tom’s holidays. She had helped him choose presents for his girls, and one year she had even gone with him downstate to pick up the puppy he was giving them. Kay never knew that the dog she loved so much had ridden home from the kennel cuddled in Debby’s arms.
    Tom had never bought Debby sentimental or impractical presents, and again he ran true to form. For Christmas 1996, he gave her a cobalt blue KitchenAid mixer. It had all the bells and whistles, cost over $300, and was something she had wanted, but it wasn’t exactly what a man in love might pick out.
    Tom sensed that Debby was disappointed. “He asked me, ‘What would you really like?’ ” she recalled, “and I said, ‘You’ve never bought me anything nice—any jewelry.’ So two days later, he came walking into my house with this ‘guilt’ gift, a solid gold necklace. I told him I’d wear it all the time, and I did—for a long time. I still believed I was the only one in his life.”
    She was very touched. It wasn’t an engagement ring, but the chunky solid gold necklace felt warm around her neck, reminding her that Tom loved her. Debby was forty-seven years old and she had never believed that anyone had truly loved her. Now she did.

Chapter Twenty-nine
    O N J ANUARY 3, 1997, the affidavit that Eric Alpert had prepared five months before as he sought a search warrant for Tom’s house was released to the public. Dozens of facts and theories filled the
News-Journal
’s pages, and few of them burnished Tom’s reputationas a devoted family man and a kind and concerned friend. Nor did the headline,
Evidence Points to Capano.
    As, of course, the evidence did. The explicit coverage caught Tom’s attorneys off guard and they asked for time to respond. U.S. Attorney Greg Sleet, Connolly’s boss, refused to comment on one of the few aspects of the case that the public didn’t know: the test results