...And Never Let HerGo

stain on it.”
    “What kind of stain?”
    “Sort of a pinkish-looking stain on the bottom. It’s not unusual for a fish cooler, you know, because fish bleed.”
    Chubb said it was the same size as the battered cooler he had been using. “I thought, well, I can take the top off of mine and the handle, and I’ll convert this one, patch them two holes, and I can make myself a nice cooler.”
    And he had done that, using two of the rusted screws from his old cooler and two new ones still in the hinge of the cooler he’d found. He filled the bullet holes with fiberglass. “I’ve used it ever since to hold the fish I catch,” Chubb said, and he’d been surprised when Ron Smith called and told him that the police were looking for the cooler.
    Alpert and Donovan carried their unexpected treasure back to the evidence lab. It looked like any large Styrofoam cooler, but it wasn’t. Like almost everything else manufactured, it had marks of identification. When they checked with the Igloo company in Houston, Texas, they learned that it was a somewhat limited production item. In 1997, the company had made 7,797 of them, and a similar number in 1996. All large coolers had a bar code that meant something to the company and the stores that sold them. The number 034223 signified it was an Igloo product. And 08162 showed it was the 162-quart model. Moreover, there was a date code stamped into the bottom of the cooler, a little clock face with arrows pointing to the month and year. This cooler had come off the assembly line in May 1993.
    But more important, the bar codes on the coolers identified the stores where they were purchased. When the bar code for this coolerwas entered into the computer of the Sports Authority store on the Rocky Run Parkway across from the Concord Mall in Wilmington, it matched the store’s code for a 162-quart Igloo cooler.
    The investigators already knew that Tom had purchased an Igloo cooler there on April 20, two months before Anne Marie vanished. Short of saying this was the
exact
cooler, it was a match. But how that cooler made its way almost to the Delaware shore from far out in the ocean was something no one could explain.
    F OR a year and a half, the case against Tom Capano had seemed to go forward with agonizing slowness. Now it accelerated. On November 14, Delaware attorney general Jane Brady assigned Ferris Wharton to prosecute the case. Colm Connolly was cross-designated not only as an assistant U.S. attorney but as co-counsel with Wharton in the Delaware State prosecution. They were nothing at all alike, but they were naturals together. Alpert and Donovan would stay on as investigators.
    Of the four of them, three were native-born Wilmingtonians. Only Alpert was an “outsider,” having been raised in Alabama. Wharton had left Delaware long enough to get his degree from the University of Illinois College of Law, and of course, Connolly had traveled half the world before returning.
    Wharton had served as a deputy attorney general since 1980; he was the chief prosecutor in New Castle County until 1997 and became a state prosecutor thereafter. He had vast experience with murder cases, and it was somewhat ironic that he had had to be completely shut out of the investigation during the federal grand jury process. During his eighteen years with the Attorney General’s Office, Wharton had been in charge of the Trial Unit, the Drug Unit, and the Rape Response Unit of Delaware’s highest legal office. He was voted the best criminal prosecutor in the state by
Delaware Today
magazine’s lawyers’ poll in 1996.
    Wharton’s roster of murder trials was extraordinary and included the dismemberment murder of a Baltimore city police officer by his wife, herself a former police officer; the murder of Marie Kisner by David Dawson, an escaped prisoner; the double murder of Joseph and Beverly Gibson and the abduction of their infant son by Joyce Lynch; the murder of a north Wilmington couple in their home after they had tried to protect their daughter from Lonnie Williams, who unsuccessfully blamed his crimes on his multiple personality disorder; the rape/murder of an eight-year-old girl by Keith Thompson, who had kidnapped her from her grandmother’s homeand abandoned her body at a construction dump site; and the death of four-year-old Bryan Martin, forced by his mother, Carol Albanese, to drink the mouthwash that killed him. Of the eighteen people waiting on death row in Delaware, five of them