...And Never Let HerGo

this was pretty remote in time.” But now the fact that Tom had bought a huge cooler no longer seemed remote or irrelevant.
    They had broken the back of the case, but there was little jubilation for Connolly, Donovan, Poplos, and Alpert. The woman they had come to know better, perhaps, than anyone they had known in life had been carried out to sea and dumped in Mako Alley, where the sharks prowled. It was a horrible thought. They still didn’t know
how
Anne Marie had died. But now it looked as if Tom Capano had not simply lost it in a burst of jealous rage. He had been carrying out a well-organized plan. He had apparently set up a scenario about extortionists way back in February, a good four months before Anne Marie vanished.
All those months . . .
    Had Tom known what day he would kill her? Or had he kept his dark strategy in abeyance to use as a contingency plan? Would it have come into play at any point when he became convinced that he could no longer bend Anne Marie to his will and make her come back to him? For some reason, June 27 appeared to have been Tom Capano’s day of decision. Bolstered with newfound confidence that she had the right to choose whom she would love, Anne Marie had, all unaware, finally convinced Tom she didn’t want to be with him.
    The cooler was gone in the Atlantic Ocean, the couch was buried beneath hundreds of layers of garbage. Only the cruel gameplan remained, something Tom had surely never expected would be revealed. Only two people had ever balked at the role he had cast them in; one was Linda Marandola and the other was Anne Marie Fahey.
    T HE house that Lou Capano had built so proudly was crumbling. Two days after Gerry’s confession—on Monday, November 10—Louie Capano appeared at the IRS building with his attorney Catherine Recker. He too signed a plea agreement. Admitting that he had lied to the grand jury out of his allegiance to Tom and his belief in his brother’s innocence, Louie agreed to tell everything he knew about the death of Anne Marie Fahey and plead guilty to tampering with a witness in exchange for a sentence of one year’s probation.
    Louie said he had no knowledge of what had happened until Tom called him on Sunday morning, June 30, 1996, and asked him to come over. When he arrived at North Grant Avenue, Tom told him that the police had shown up in the middle of the night and that he was very upset.
    “He told me that he had had a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey,” Louie said. “And that she was anorectic and bulimic and a troubled person—that he had stopped seeing her and he didn’t want his wife, Kay, to find out about their relationship. He also told me that after he had dinner with her that evening [June 27], they went back to his house. While he was upstairs using the bathroom—when he came down—she had slit her wrists and had gotten blood, a superficial amount of blood, on the sofa.”
    Tom had explained that he and Gerry had gotten rid of the sofa in the company’s Dumpster on Foulk Road, and asked Louie to have it dumped. “After the conversation with my brother,” Louie said, “I went up to the job. We had men working, and I was curious and looked in the Dumpster behind the building. I saw what looked to be like a sofa, turned upside down, and I saw the legs.”
    He meant the
sofa’s
legs; he said he hadn’t seen any sign of a body. He’d made a mental note to have the Dumpster emptied, but it slipped his mind.
    It had not slipped Tom’s mind. Louie said he had called on Monday morning to ask if it had been dumped yet. “I told him no,” Louie said, “but that I would have them dumped.”
    “Did he tell you what had caused him some concern on Monday morning?”
    “Anne Marie Fahey had not shown up for work,” Louie said.“He was concerned that the police might start looking around and could get the Dumpsters.”
    At that point, Louie said he believed Tom to be innocent of any crime against Anne Marie Fahey. Tom had done a good job of convincing him she was a very disturbed and impetuous young woman who would show up in her own good time.
    Louie said that sometime later he had asked Tom why the carpet in his great room was gone. Was that bloody too? “He told me he had disposed of some carpet at the Holiday Inn over in New Jersey. It was cut up and put into plastic bags.”
    The Capanos happened to own that particular Holiday Inn, and Tom told Louie he had asked the manager to have their Dumpsters emptied early,