Last Dance, Last Chance

the usual things for killing weeds and for pest control. All of those items were kept in a box in the garage.
    “Do you know who might have brought arsenic into your home?” Craven asked.
    Anthony looked baffled. “I have no idea.”
    “Who did the cooking?”
    Anthony explained that Debbie did the majority of the cooking, although he occasionally cooked meat on the barbecue grill. The only thing he could recall fixing was some packaged soup for Debbie after she became ill. He said he didn’t do the grocery shopping, and the only person who brought food into the house would be his mother-in-law, Caroline Rago.
    When the two D.A.’s investigators asked him about any troubles in his marriage, Anthony admitted to moving out in February. His wife had gotten very angry with him and changed the locks on him after she caught him with another woman. “But that’s over now,” he said earnestly. “Debbie and I have been working on our marriage.”
    Anthony told them he was very concerned because Child Protective Services in Erie County were apparently involved in the situation with his children. “Why would that be?”
    Finnerty shrugged. “By law, the hospital had to notify them.”
    Anthony told them that he felt his family was being victimized. He wondered if the county water system had been tested. Perhaps some terrorist had poisoned the county water?
    That was a long shot. No one else in their neighborhood had become ill. Indeed, there weren’t any reports of mysterious viruses or unexplained gastrointestinal upsets anywhere in West Seneca. If the public water system were contaminated, surely many people would be affected.
    The detectives asked Anthony if his wife could have taken the poison herself, and he shook his head. That wasn’t possible, he insisted. “She’s too close to her children to ever do that.”
    There was a long pause in the conversation, and then Chuck Craven asked the question that hung heavily in the air between them. The obvious question. “Did you poison your wife?” he asked, his eyes watching Pignataro’s face.
    The silence was even longer this time, and then Anthony answered in a calm voice without really answering at all: “I can see why people might think I would do that.”
    Oddly, Anthony wasn’t at all upset or offended by Craven’s question, while Debbie had been shocked and outraged when her mother-in-law asked her if she had deliberately taken poison.
    Anthony was quite matter-of-fact, and his affect was very flat—as if he were giving the time of day. But, Craven and Finnerty noted he had answered neither “Yes” nor “No.”
    They asked him for permission to search his home, and he said that, personally, he would have no problem with that—but, of course, his wife would have to be the one to give permission. They already had that, although Debbie had stipulated that it be done when the children were not there. She didn’t want them to see police going through their rooms and their possessions.
    “How would someone obtain a poison like arsenic?” Pat Finnerty asked.
    “I don’t know,” Anthony answered. “I’m a doctor, and I don’t even know where you would get it.” He mentioned an article he’d read in the newspaper about some man who had tried to kill his wife with cyanide. “He got it over the Internet. Maybe you could look on the Internet for arsenic.”
    He looked at them with a faint smile and clear eyes. He had answered their questions in a polite manner. He was now trying to help them do their jobs, offering them an idea of where they might find a source of arsenic. But it was only a guess on his part, he pointed out.
    Finnerty and Craven had already been to the Internet and, not surprisingly, nobody was selling arsenic on eBay. They could sense that Pignataro viewed himself as vastly superior to them in intelligence and the ability to do research.
    Craven and Finnerty looked back at Anthony Pignataro. He had no idea how serious they were about pinning him to the wall for what they believed he had done to the paralyzed woman who lay in bed down the hall from where they talked. And he clearly had no idea how good they were at their jobs. That was fine with them; let him see them as “dumb cops.”
    It seemed now that Debbie Pignataro was going to live. She had beaten unbelievable odds, but it would be weeks before she could leave the hospital. Craven and Finnerty had plenty of time.

18
    O n August 30, 1999, Ralph and Lauren were released