...And Never Let HerGo

along I-95 to move in. He was apparently oblivious to the government cars that were tracking him. Tom was signaled over, and FBI agents surrounded his car and told him he was under arrest for the murder of Anne Marie.
    “I heard the sirens over the radio,” Alpert recalled. “I knew they had him.”
    And Tom was still in Delaware. The arresting agents reported that he had not resisted as they cuffed his hands in front of him. He appeared to be resigned, as if he was expecting to be arrested.
    Ironically, Tom hadn’t been going anywhere. Casually dressed in a navy blue jogging suit, he was only driving Joey and his wife, Joanne, to the airport, where they could catch a plane to Fort Lauderdale. He had planned to turn around and head home. He had promised Debby that he would cook a steak dinner for her that night. “He said we’d have a really romantic evening,” she remembered, “because I was leaving for Italy the next morning.” Instead, she heard the news that Tom had been arrested.
    Tom was driven to the U.S. Attorney’s office on the eleventh floor of the Chase Manhattan building, in custody before word flashed like a forest fire over the media’s network. Almost immediately, reporters took up vantage points as close as they could get to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
    Tom had aged in triple time over the seventeen months since Anne Marie had vanished. The skin beneath his eyes was mottled and purple. But head held high, he seemed to ignore the cuffs on his wrists as if they had nothing to do with him. As he was led into the conference room, Tom’s heart may have skipped a few beats; a 162-quart Igloo cooler sat there. It wasn’t the real cooler, but Connolly had had Bob Donovan shoot into it in the spot Gerry specified in his affidavit. An anchor and a lock and chain rested near the cooler. No one mentioned the items as Tom walked by.
    Colm Connolly hadn’t really spoken to Tom since that day in September when they had first met in the hall outside the grand jury room. Now he remembered what Tom had hissed at him that day.
    “The day Tom was arrested,” Connolly recalled, “he was brought in here to a conference room and an agent sat with him. I went in to tell him that his attorneys would be coming shortly. I started to shut the door, and then I opened it back up and I said, ‘By the way, Mr. Capano, I sleep very well at night.’ ”
    Tom let out a deep breath and put his head in his arms. For the moment, the arrogance that was such a central part of him had vanished. It had felt good to say that, but a half hour later, thinking better of his remark, Connolly came back and softened his words. Tom was sitting with his attorneys as Connolly said, “I don’t want you to think this is a personal thing. Because it isn’t.”
    It was and it wasn’t. Connolly, along with Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert, had kept their promises to Anne Marie’s family to find her killer. And they believed they had done that. Starting out, they had had no way of knowing who he—or she—was. Tom Capano had never cooperated with the investigation. And they were a long way, still, from proving his guilt in a court of law. Facts rather than personal feelings were all that mattered.
    With his lawyers beside him, Tom had regained his composure. He looked at the man who had pursued him almost a year and a half and spoke to him as if they were old friends, as if he had done nothing wrong.
    “But Colm,” he said softly, “it was my
daughters.”
    What did he mean? Was he referring to the story about extortionists threatening his four girls—or was he simply explaining that he had struck out at Connolly because he’d subpoenaed Christy to testify before a grand jury?
    Bob Donovan was in that conference room and so was Eric Alpert. Tom was told that the government had statements taken from his brothers Louie and Gerry that described the way he had disposed of a body.
    “You
believe
them?” Tom said to no one in particular, incredulity in his voice.
    In answer, Connolly played the tapes of his brothers’ statements for Tom. He listened, stone faced.
    “We know,” Connolly said, “that Mr. Capano purchased a 162-quart marine cooler on April 20, 1996. And we know he is neither a hunter nor a fisherman.”
    “Yeah,” Tom said knowingly, “but my brothers are.”
    S TROBES flashed as Tom was led, still in handcuffs, to a van to be taken to Gander Hill, the prison over which he had once had authority,the prison he had