Last Dance, Last Chance

their client in the poisoning of his now estranged wife.
    And they were right. Joel Daniels sought an order that would compel the West Seneca Police Department to comply with Judge Marjorie Mix’s subpoena instructing them to turn over all the information they had in the poisoning of Debbie Pignataro and—as rumor had it—her children. The West Seneca department balked at releasing their files, and the Erie County District Attorney stepped in to join the small police department. Their investigation was confidential, and they wanted it to stay that way.
    The matter was left in abeyance, waiting for more evidence that either of the Pignataro children had had toxic levels of arsenic. Actually, tests on Lauren and Ralph hadn’t shown alarming amounts of arsenic in their systems.
    Anthony had visitation rights with his children on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but Carmine Rago told Frank Sedita that he had come to see Ralph and Lauren only once between August and November, 1999. Carmine suspected that Anthony had chosen to go to Ralph’s football practices to speak to his son there—against family court Judge Marjorie Mix’s orders.
    When he could not get to Debbie directly, Anthony continued to work on their children. Ralph was a strained rope in an emotional tug-of-war. No matter how Debbie tried to protect him, Anthony always found ways to draw him in.
    “Why is your mother doing this?” he asked his son, blaming Debbie for the divorce, for failing to let him come home, for all of their troubles. “We will have no more family. You know there will be no more vacations to Florida.”
    Carol Giarizzo Bridge, the D.A.’s assistant bureau chief for domestic violence cases, talked with Patti Rago, Carmine’s wife, and learned that the children had permission from the Department of Social Services to go to the Buffalo Bills/Indianapolis Colts football game on January 2, 2000, with their father. But Ralph had come home with his mind full of Anthony’s dire warnings of what would happen to their family if his mother didn’t do as his father wanted.
    “She [Debbie] cannot say I did this, because if she does, I will go away for twenty-five years,” he had told Ralph. “If Daddy goes to jail, you will have to leave your house—but if Daddy stays out of jail, you can stay in the house.”
    It was clear that Ralph was supposed to persuade Debbie to stand by his father. If she didn’t, Anthony had painted a world that would come tumbling down for Ralph and Lauren—a world with no home, no money to live on, and no family. Ralph was smart, probably far more intelligent than his father—but he was only thirteen. No responsible adult would ever have suspended him in the middle of this struggle.
     
    The state wasn’t ready to indict Anthony on attempted murder charges. Some questions hadn’t yet been answered. There might be questions they could never answer. And all the time they were working on two fronts. While Frank Sedita was fighting to protect Debbie from the relentless pressure of unending hearings in family court, he was also striving to find enough evidence to arrest Anthony for attempted murder.
    Chuck Craven was determined to find the source of the arsenic trioxide that had been used to poison Debbie. Even two decades earlier, it would have been easier. Most farmers then kept poison in their barns to kill rats and mice. There was even some horse medicine that contained arsenic: one to kill worms and another called Appitone that was given to them to stimulate their appetites. But the Environmental Protective Agency had long since ordered that the age-old preparations containing arsenic be taken off the market. One thing Craven learned was that there were virtually no cases on record of suicide by arsenic. It would have taken too long and hurt too much.
    The only thing Craven really had to go on was the statement Lauren Pignataro had made about seeing her dad placing little round tins or cans around their house to kill ants. He searched hardware stores and the huge club stores for something that resembled that description, but it was winter, and the ant season in Buffalo was over.
    Since Buffalo is so close to Canada, Craven wondered whether Anthony might have gone out of the country to buy arsenic, but he didn’t make any headway with that theory.
    Craven heard about a product called Terro Ant Killer, but he found out that it had been removed from the market about a decade earlier. It had proved too toxic to