...And Never Let HerGo

They moved in with her father-in-law in New Jersey.)
    Tom wanted to know every detail of how many times Riley had called Linda at home and at work, or her husband at his DuPont office. He took, apparently, grim satisfaction in knowing that Linda was being driven half crazy by her mysterious caller’s threats to expose her two intimate incidents with Tom to her husband.
    But Tom didn’t know that Joe Riley had gone to the FBI agent–turned–private investigator with his tapes. And one of the private investigator’s clients was the Board of Censure of the Delaware Bar Association. It should, perhaps, have been the end of Toms’s career, but he received a slap on the wrist instead. A lot of women claimed then—and still claim—that Wilmington was a bastion of good old boys, and that Tom was in the thick of them. Perhaps. His pursuit of Linda Marandola was treated as a man/woman thing, and he walked away from it unscathed. No one thought to let Linda know that it was Tom who had been behind the threatening phone calls. All she knew was that the calls from the stranger had stopped.
    It was, perhaps, one of the many times in Tom Capano’s life that helped him maintain his belief that he was above the law.
    Sometime in 1981, Tom Capano finally lost interest in punishing Linda. Riley didn’t know why—but that, of course, was when Tom had fixed his gaze on another woman: Debby MacIntyre. But he didn’t forget Linda. Six years later, she was more than startled when he called her office on business and “acted as if we were long-lost friends.” It was 1987 and Tom was chief of staff to the mayor of Wilmington. Linda was separated from her husband by then, and at loose ends. She wondered if Tom had really been as mean as he seemed; maybe he really had cared for her, and he had just been desperate when he wrote her bizarre letters and threatened her when she refused to see him.
    Linda had no way of knowing, of course, that Tom had tried to have her legs broken and that it was he who had hired the blackmailer to phone her. Given their changed circumstances, Linda gave Tom a second chance and met him in the parking lot of a motel in New Castle. He seemed contrite about scaring her with his passion and she felt he had changed.
    A month later, in April, they went to Atlantic City together for her thirty-third birthday. The trip started out well enough. Tom gave her a gold watch that he had had engraved with both their initials, and Linda was touched by the gesture. But their overnight trip turned ugly when Tom began to question her about other men. When Linda told him that she was dating a few men, he reacted with rage. It didn’t matter that he had been out of her life for six years and that they had just resumed dating. He seemed to expect her to remain celibate when she wasn’t with him. He called her a slut and a whore, and Linda wondered why she had ever thought he had changed. Grateful when she was safely back in Wilmington, she swore she would never have anything to do with Tom again.
    In 1987, Tom had a wife and a mistress. And neither Kay nor Debby knew about his liaisons with Linda. If either of them had known about Linda Marandola’s ordeal, they might have made different life choices. But of course, they had no idea. Debby knew only what Tom had told her—that some legal secretary had tried to seduce him back in the late seventies.
    Anne Marie had even less information. She was fifteen when Tom tried to order a hit on Linda Marandola, and in college when the disastrous trip to Atlantic City took place.
    She had no idea how hard it could be for a woman to walk away from Tom Capano. Even in the mid-1990s while Anne Mariewas dating Tom, she was unaware that he was pressuring another pretty young woman, Tedra Scopelli,* to let him set her up in an apartment. Tedra had small children and the offer of a free apartment was very tempting. Tom promised to take care of her, pay for her children to go to private school, and even arrange for her to have a job with his brother Louie.
    But like Anne Marie, Tedra Scopelli had felt an invisible cage rising around her and declined Tom’s offer. But he still called her often enough to make her nervous.

Chapter Fifteen
    I T WAS O CTOBER 1995, and soon after he and Kay separated, Tom had gone looking for a house to rent. He found one within easy walking distance of the home he had shared with his wife and four daughters. For that matter, the redbrick two-story house at