...And Never Let HerGo

happened and why are you involved? Will you ever be able to tell me? I think not, and that will always keep us apart.”
    Ferris Wharton asked Debby if it was true that the day after she wrote the letter she had just read, she came in to speak to him and Colm Connolly and told them about buying the gun.
    “Yes, I did.”
    And still, she had written to Tom, trying to explain to him why she was not changing lawyers, despite his insistence that she fire Tom Bergstrom. “For me,” Debby read aloud,
    changing lawyers is not proving to you that I love you. . . . I could not mentally or physically make another change without compromising my health. I am tapped out and can take little more. Besides, I like him and believe in him. . . . If you love me, you will support me for the choices I have made. . . .
    I want to believe more than anything that we will go to our eventual destinies in the future knowing that both of us have been loved and have loved completely.
    Debby put her last letter to Tom in her lap as Wharton offered the next exhibit for identification. It was the floor plan of her home that Tom had drawn with all of the things she treasured marked for the attention of a burglar. She had seen it before, of course, but she had tried to bury the memory of Tom’s meticulous scheme intended to intimidate and terrify her.
    Wharton then peppered Debby with short questions about her home and the mirror in her bedroom. “What was the significance [of that mirror] as related to Tom Capano?”
    Her voice was hushed. “We could watch ourselves having sex in the mirror.”
    The jurors would have a chance to review the diagrams of Debby’s house at their leisure, but now, alert, they craned their necks to see what Tom had drawn.
    “During the period of time roughly from March eighteenth to March twenty-eighth of 1998, did you have any travel plans?”
    “Yes—to go to Sanibel Island in Florida.”
    “You had a lengthy relationship with the defendant, did you not?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “Did you fall in love with him? Did you tell him that?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “Did he ever tell you that he was in love with you?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “Did he ever tell you that you were soul mates?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did he ever tell you that he would give his life for you?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “Did he ever tell you about dumping Anne Marie Fahey’s body in the Atlantic Ocean?”
    “No, he did not.”
    “Did he ever tell you that she died as a result of an accident?”
    “No, he did not.”
    “No other questions.”
    F ERRIS W HARTON turned away, but Debby still sat in the witness chair, waiting. Now it was Gene Maurer’s turn to question her, and she knew he had ample ammunition. She had lied to the federal investigators and to the grand jury. It was all documented. She had stonewalled them to protect Tom, because he had asked her to. In the beginning, she had detested Colm Connolly for trying to hurt Tom.
    Now it was obvious what Maurer intended to do. His questionsdemanded answers that seemed to show Debby as a faithless friend to Kay Capano, a tempting seductress who almost forced Tom to have sex with her back in 1981, and the initiator of the idea to bring Keith Brady to her house.
    Quoting letters Debby had written to Tom shortly after his arrest—letters written when she shared his view that Connolly and the other investigators were trying to trap him—Maurer read: “‘And I can’t think of why they think I would hurt your case. Maybe he [Connolly] thinks I’ve had a change of mind since your arrest, but I don’t know how an obsessed mind works.’ ”
    Debby’s blind devotion to Tom had come back to haunt her. Again and again, Maurer quoted her own words. She had truly believed what Tom told her about the federal investigators and she had distrusted them. She had lied to them then to protect Tom. Might not she be lying now to protect herself?
    At last, that day was over. The trial would not resume until Monday. But there would be headlines and endless television and radio coverage about her testimony. If being the other woman was a sin, Debby was paying the price. And Connolly and Wharton had warned her that it might get even worse.

Chapter Forty-one
    O N M ONDAY , Maurer hammered Debby with questions about purchasing the Beretta, pointing out that she had had six separate meetings with investigators—including the grand jury—and still continued to lie about buying the gun for Tom. She didn’t