...And Never Let HerGo

months earlier.
    “And did he indicate anything about her recovery from surgery?” Connolly asked.
    “Yes,” Kim answered, “he said that she was doing much better and was going to be able to go to Europe with her uncle Lou that summer.”
    Now IRS agent Ron Poplos testified. Poplos had helped the investigators as they traced Tom’s expenditures, deposits, and withdrawals, but he had also volunteered for a lot of the tiresome legwork. He said he had talked to the managers of a number of hardware stores, looking for the origin of the chain and padlock used on the cooler, and had never been able to trace them—particularly not to Brosius-Eliason. And it was Poplos who had spoken, however briefly, to Tom’s mother, Marguerite. Since Tom had shouted at the jurors telling them to check on how badly his aging mother had been treated, Connolly asked Poplos about that.
    “Did you serve a subpoena in August of 1997 on Marguerite Capano?”
    “Yes, I did—It was on August twelfth,” Poplos said. He had gone to her beach house in Stone Harbor.
    “What were you wearing?”
    “Blue jeans and a sweatshirt.”
    “And did you see Mrs. Capano?”
    “Yes, I did,” Poplos said. “I went around to the back of the house. I didn’t see a door at the front—you know how beach houses are; they face the beach side. There was a glass-enclosed area open—a glass sliding door. And I knocked on the door. And she came to the door and I asked if she was Mrs. Capano. She said, ‘Yes.’ ”
    Poplos handed her the subpoena, she looked at it and shook her head, and then she closed the door. Poplos said he had been polite to her and that he had never even shown her his badge. And that was the extent of the harassment of Marguerite Capano by the federal investigators.
    I N the thirteen weeks of this seemingly endless trial, the state had presented more than a hundred witnesses and was nearing the end of its long list when Bud Freel recalled for the jury the day in July when he had driven to Stone Harbor to see his friend of twenty years, Tom Capano. Bud and Kathleen had dated for six years, the Faheys were like family, and Tom was an old friend. It had seemed possible at the time that Freel could help them all by persuading Tom to talk with the police. But despite his promises, Tom never had. Thereafter, Bud had had nothing to do with him. When he left the witness stand, he walked past the defense table, never glancing at Tom.
    Tall and dignified, Robert Fahey, Anne Marie’s big brother, was the last witness in the prosecution’s rebuttal. He read the letter he and Brian had composed and hand-delivered to Tom on July 24, 1996. They had begged him to give them the consideration that he would want if one of his own daughters was missing.
    When Joe Oteri asked him if a person should always do what his lawyer told him, Robert said, “No.”
    “You think a person should hire a lawyer, pay him money, and then not
listen?”
Oteri asked, perplexed.
    “I believe that happens,” Robert said. Smothered laughter rippled in the courtroom; of late, Oteri’s client had scarcely been listening to him.
    Oteri suggested that Tom had only been protecting someone else. “The only thing you wanted was what
you
wanted,” he said to Robert Fahey, returning to the subject of his letter to Tom, “and not what he might be doing to help someone else?”
    “The only thing I wanted was my sister back, sir.”
    O N Wednesday, January 13, 1999, Colm Connolly would speak to the jurors for the last time before they retired to debate the guilt or innocence of Tom Capano. Final arguments reflect the attorney who makes them. Some are emotional and some are cerebral. Connolly was—at least in court—the latter. Although he had empathized as much as he could with the agony of Anne Marie’s family, he felt that the best way to bring her justice was to present the facts, the inconsistencies, the obvious lies, the sad truths about her death, to this jury of six men and six women, and to ask them to use their own common sense as they made their decision.
    All the details of this case were in his head, although he occasionally glanced at a thick binder that he and Wharton had prepared so he could make reference to certain letters and E-mail printouts. Connolly had lived and breathed the investigation for more than two and a half years, not from a desk in the U.S. Attorney’s office but in the field, alongside Bob Donovan, Eric Alpert, and Ron Poplos. Two of