...And Never Let HerGo

that the federal agents were raiding his home solely to force him to implicate his brother in a murder investigation.
    Interestingly, Joe Hurley, Tom’s attorney, distanced his client from the raid. He didn’t want Tom’s image soiled by the mention of drugs and an arsenal of weapons. Hurley told reporters that he wasn’t surprised that Colm Connolly had been involved in the gun and drug investigation. “That is a small office over there,” Hurley said, thus dismissing the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office as pretty small potatoes.
    Connolly had no comment.
    Gerry’s attorney called Connolly often now, asking if Gerry should come in for questioning. “We kept saying, ‘We’re not ready for him yet.’ We acted as if we weren’t that anxious to talk to him,” Connolly said. “We said, we’re not going to bring him in—to borrow a line from
The Godfather
—until we had an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
    They would let Gerry sweat until he would have no choice but to tell them the truth. If their hunch was right, Gerry was the most vulnerable in the Capano dynasty and quite possibly the one who had the information they needed to move in on Tom.

Chapter Thirty
    T HANKSGIVING WAS APPROACHING and the Faheys faced another holiday season without knowing what had become of their sister. The flyers with Anne Marie’s picture on them were still out there, but they were weathered now, faded by the summer sun and winter storms. It didn’t seem possible that a person who was lovedso much could simply disappear off the face of the earth and never be found. But Anne Marie had.
    And then, like the first pebbles of a massive rock slide, it began. All of the digging at the underpinnings of the Capanos had weakened the family loyalty that heretofore had overridden everything. Loyalty, usually an admirable trait, is not always a good thing—not when it is blind and when the object of that loyalty is undeserving.
    On Saturday, November 8, 1997, and by agreement, a perspiring and nervous Gerry Capano appeared at the IRS office building with his attorney Dan Lyons. Because reporters were watching Connolly’s office and the Wilmington Police Department, Ron Poplos had offered the use of his office. The IRS building was off the beaten path, north of Wilmington. The government probers hoped they could interview Gerry without having it turned into a media event.
    Colm Connolly, Eric Alpert, and Bob Donovan had waited a long time to hear what Gerry had to say. Along with Poplos and the Iardellas, they were basically the entire investigative team and they had worked on a shoestring budget for seventeen months to solve a case that many said was unsolvable. This interview could turn out to be what they had been waiting for.
    As they questioned Gerry, they had some idea of what they were about to hear. They had come to believe that Tom had been with Gerry on the day after Anne Marie Fahey vanished. One neighbor they talked to in Stone Harbor thought he had recognized Tom and seen Kay’s Suburban parked around the corner for several hours in the middle of the day.
    They believed that Gerry might know where Anne Marie’s body was—and if they were lucky, he might even be able to shed some light on what had driven Tom to commit murder. But they were unprepared for the whole story, a story that revealed the modus operandi of a man as cold as death itself.
    It was four in the afternoon. Shadows fell across the barren boughs of the trees in Rodney Square, where people huddled together waiting for buses to take them home. It was hard to believe that two years before, Anne Marie’s November calendar had been full of happy times with Mike. So much had changed.
    Gerry had not come forward with an open heart; before he agreed to have his formal statement taped, he had signed a plea bargain with the government that would save him from prison. But he also asked for protection from prosecution for his sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee Ramunno, and his mother. He wasn’t surehow many people in his family might be holding back information from the government.
    For the record, Connolly began by discussing the terms of the plea bargain. “You understand,” he said, “you are agreeing to plead guilty to misprision of a felony—the felony being kidnapping—and in return, the government is entering a plea agreement with you, which has a stipulated sentence of three years’ probation? And you understand that any statement you make has