...And Never Let HerGo

were Wharton’s.
    But he had remained outside the investigation of Anne Marie’s disappearance for almost a year and a half. “I only knew what I read in the paper,” he said. “Just what anyone in Delaware might know—until the arrest was made.”
    If Tom had two of the best criminal defense attorneys in the region—and he did—the prosecution team was also top flight. There would never be any dissension among them, none of the resentment that often occurs when local, state, and federal branches of the law work the same case. The four men worked together as a smoothly orchestrated team, with one goal in mind.
    M OST people never think of what kind of trail they leave behind as they go about their daily lives. Unless we are someplace we should not be or with someone we should not be with, we are unconcerned about who might have seen us at one place or another, what receipts we have signed, or what roads we have driven. Gasoline and restaurant receipts matter only as items to be tossed in our income tax files.
    But sometimes it is vitally important
not
to be seen or remembered, to leave no records behind. Gerry Capano had outlined a grisly round-trip mission that took almost eleven hours, crossed two states, and involved a number of transactions. From the first hour after his arrest, Tom had sneered at Gerry’s version of what happened on June 28. To try to confirm it, the investigators fanned out once more to follow Tom’s trail from Grant Avenue to Emma Court to Stone Harbor to the open sea and back to Grant Avenue. The more backup they could find to substantiate the state’s case, the better.
    Jeffrey Stape, who lived next door to Gerry on Emma Court, told the investigators that he had seen Tom Capano’s car in Gerry’s driveway very early in the morning of June 28. “I went out to get my paper at 5:45 A.M. ,” Stape said. “My house faces Gerry’s garage. Tom was parked in the driveway with the motor running. He saw me and turned away.”
    Stape knew Tom’s car—a black Grand Cherokee. And he knew Tom by sight.
    And although the public wasn’t aware of it, FBI agents had already been to Stone Harbor a year earlier—when Tom’s timelinenotes were discovered in 1996. They had quietly done a land-and-sea search at the New Jersey shore. They had even asked Gerry’s neighbors if they had seen anything large enough to be a body being carried to or from a boat. But no one had. In retrospect, who was going to look twice at a cooler?
    Still, they hoped they might find witnesses as alert as Ron Smith and Ken Chubb. Tom had been either very discreet or very lucky in conducting a series of long-term affairs without being discovered. They suspected his luck might, at last, have run out.
    Perhaps not. According to Gerry, he and Tom had driven down to Stone Harbor on the morning of June 28 after Tom got some money from the ATM of the Wilmington Savings Fund Society at Trolley Square. Tom had noted that, too, on his timeline pages. Now, a security officer of the bank pulled the frames from the automatic video camera at the ATM for the FBI. Tom’s face was there at 8:41 A.M. , the date and time clearly stamped on the photo.
    Assuming that he and Gerry left Wilmington shortly thereafter, they could not have made it to Gerry’s beach house much before 11 A.M. Had they arrived any earlier, a number of people might have seen them. Gerry spent little time at his own lawn care business back in Wilmington and he didn’t like gardening; he employed a local firm to take care of his house in Stone Harbor.
    Gary Barber, who was a schoolteacher, worked summers for his family’s lawn care business. Shortly before nine-thirty on the morning of June 28, he went to Gerry’s house to replace an automatic sprinkler head. In order to set the time clock on the revised system, Barber had to enter the house itself. That was no problem because he had a key. However, he was mortified when he heard the burglar alarm sound and realized he didn’t know the code to turn it off.
    The alarm had sounded for almost twenty minutes as four calls were automatically dialed into the monitoring service. It was close to 10 A.M. when a Stone Harbor police officer drove up in front. The alarm was turned off, Gerry’s house was secured, and everything was back to normal when Gerry and Tom arrived with the cooler. A half hour or so earlier and they would have driven up and seen a police car parked at the house.
    One of Gerry’s Stone Harbor