...And Never Let HerGo

themselves to protect and defend their own needs, or to set boundaries. Any confrontation makes them physically ill, and many who seek therapy actually
apologize
to the therapist for talking about themselves; above all, it is essential not to make anyone else uncomfortable or angry.
    With Tom in prison, Debby did her best to please him, to keep up his spirits. She couldn’t visit him because visits were reserved for his daughters and his family, but Tom called her almost every evening and she curtailed her activities so she would be there when he called. They wrote each other daily letters.
    In those phone calls, “We really talked more about emotions,” Debby recalled. “How he was feeling, how he was faring, what I was doing. We rarely talked about the case. He said a couple of times that he didn’t want to talk about the case because he didn’t know how safe the phones were—the phone he was calling from.”
    At one point, however, Debby brought up something that had begun to eat at her. Now that Tom was charged with Anne Marie’s murder, it was almost impossible for her
not
to think about it. She asked Tom what had become of the gun she bought for him.
    His response was immediate and stern. “Please don’t mention that on the phone. I don’t want to discuss anything like that on the phone or about the case.” He seemed so agitated that she instantly regretted mentioning the gun.
    With Tom’s warnings ringing in her ears, Debby didn’t care much for the men who had brought him down—Colm Connolly, Eric Alpert, and Ferris Wharton, particularly. Bob Donovan seemed somehow nicer to her. He didn’t say much, and he didn’t seem to be bearing down on her as hard as the others. But still, she knew they wanted her to help them convict Tom and she wasn’t going to do it.
    Debby was getting another kind of pressure from Tom himself. Although she was perfectly content to wait for him until he got out of jail after his bail hearing, Tom kept urging her to see other men and have sex with them. He still found that thought as arousing as ever—perhaps more so because he no longer could make love to her himself.
    In fact, Tom had always been almost obsessively curious about the bodily functions and responses of the women he was intimate with. Unlike most men, he seemed fascinated with their menstrual cycles and demanded to know all of their secrets. Nothing was too personal for him to ask or write. Either he was convinced that his mail was private or he didn’t care. His long letters to Debby were full of pornographic descriptions and sexual innuendo, declarationsof his love, complaints about his unbearable living conditions, and his hope that it would all be over soon. But most of all, they told her what to do.
    Christmas 1997 was yet another holiday for the Fahey family without Anne Marie. Yet there was the hope that when Tom Capano went to trial, they would finally have some kind of closure. Tom fully expected to get out on bail and to prepare for trial in the comfort of civilized surroundings. Debby just wanted to have him back with her.

Chapter Thirty-three
    T HERE WAS NO WAY for the men building the case against Tom to know for certain how Anne Marie had died. The utensils and tools taken from Tom’s house had tested negative for human blood, refuting their original suspicions that, in a blind rage, he had beaten her to death. Gerry Capano said the ten-millimeter handgun he’d given to Tom in February 1996 had been returned unused. And a tedious search through receipts of gun sales in the state of Delaware for the first six months of 1996 had turned up no record of a firearm being sold to Tom Capano.
    However, there was a record of a gun sale to someone close to Tom. The investigators learned that Debby MacIntyre had bought a .22 caliber Beretta handgun on May 13—forty-five days before Anne Marie vanished. That purchase certainly interested them.
    Whatever had happened to Anne Marie, now Connolly, Wharton, Alpert, and Donovan were convinced that her fate had been plotted out carefully for a long time before she disappeared. Tom had borrowed money from Gerry way back in February 1996—$8,000, allegedly to pay off an extortionist. If there really had been an extortionist, why didn’t Tom simply go to his bank and take money out of his own account? He had had a balance of over $153,000 at the time. Indeed, he’d paid Gerry back the very next day. No, it was obvious that Tom had borrowed the money