And Never Let Her Go (34 page)

“Well, under those circumstances, I would tell you. But I don't know where she is, and so I can't tell you.”

They had been talking in a very polite, if edgy, fashion for half an hour. Now the detectives asked if they might take a look around the house, and Tom shook his head. “My daughters are asleep upstairs,” he said. “This isn't a good time.” He explained that he didn't want to frighten his four girls with strange men clomping through the house, aiming flashlights at them. They acquiesced but said they would be back the next morning—actually, later the same morning.

Tom Capano had been cooperative—up to a point. They hadn't seen his daughters, but they took his word that the girls were in the house, sleeping upstairs. They didn't have a search warrant or any probable cause to get a search warrant. Moreover, they didn't know Anne Marie Fahey and they couldn't form an opinion on whether she was the kind of young woman who would go away for the weekend without telling anyone because she was stressed out or because, as Tom Capano said, she was an airhead given to such behavior.

They did know that Tom Capano had a solid reputation in Wilmington and that there had never been a breath of scandal about him. His brothers, yes. But not Tom. Tom was the “good Capano,” and he certainly appeared to be going about his life as he normally did. He didn't look like a man who was about to rabbit on them.

“We'll be back later today,” Daniels said. “We'd like to talk with you more then.”

Tom nodded and walked them to the door. The lights were out in the house before they had turned the corner and headed back downtown.

I
T
was a warm Sunday morning at ten when the Wilmington and State Police investigators returned to the Grant Avenue house. This time, their knocks on the front door went unanswered. They went back several times over the next few hours and found no one home. Puzzled, and a little annoyed that Tom Capano seemed to be deliberately avoiding them, they went looking for him, driving past the huge old houses in the neighborhood, the Delaware Art Museum, along the Bancroft Parkway, and past the big white stucco house on the corner of Greenhill and Seventeenth where Tom's estranged wife and children lived. They knew he drove a 1993 black Jeep Grand Cherokee and they watched for it.

In the meantime, they went back to Anne Marie's apartment
house. Mark Daniels talked with her landlady, Theresa Oliver. She explained that she kept the apartments secure from the street. “To get to the second or third floor,” she said, “you have to go through that clear storm door first, and it has a dead-bolt lock. Anyone would need a key.”

Mrs. Oliver told Daniels that a woman named Connie Blake lived in the apartment directly below Anne Marie's. “But she's at the shore—and won't be home until tonight.”

A
S
the investigators passed Kay Capano's house for the sixth or seventh time, Bob Donovan spotted Tom coming out of the garage area. They walked up to him, and this time, Tom was far more agitated than he had been the night before. He responded to their questions in short sentences, telling them that he was upset with himself for having said so much when they had wakened him hours before. He felt that he had betrayed Anne Marie's privacy by telling the police about their affair, but he had been groggy from taking several Excedrin PMs, and now he was sorry.

They asked to see his house and Tom agreed—but not happily. He followed them as they drove to his house. It was not a formal search; it was only a walk-through, but he seemed to resent the idea of detectives peering into his rooms and wouldn't give them permission to open drawers or look into his closets. It was, perhaps, an indication that they hadn't believed what he had told them earlier in the morning, and Tom was not accustomed to having his words questioned, particularly not when it came to police matters.

Tom's house was immaculate. “It was very clean, very orderly. We were looking for Anne Marie Fahey,” Bob Donovan recalled. “But she wasn't there.”

Nor was there any sign that she had been there. Tom led the detectives through the house and into the double garage beneath the dining room–great room area. They saw the pretty bedrooms he had decorated for his daughters, the lavish master bedroom, the kitchen, dining area, living room. All the furnishings were apparently brand new. But there was no indication that Anne Marie Fahey had even been in any of these rooms or that anything untoward might have happened here.

It was still Sunday, June 30—a day that seemed to be forty-eight hours long. Tomorrow, Anne Marie might walk into the governor's office at 7:30
A.M.,
rested, relaxed, and with a new sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose from a weekend in the sun. That was Tom Capano's prediction.

The detectives hoped that he was right, but like all good cops, Bob Donovan had a feeling in his gut that told him otherwise.

K
ATHLEEN
F
AHEY
-H
OSEY
had gone home to check on her babies, but she was back at Anne Marie's apartment at seven-thirty that Sunday morning. Neither she nor Mike Scanlan had slept during the wee hours after the detectives had left to go to Tom Capano's house. She met Mike now on the front porch of 1718 Washington Street. Besides her worry about her sister, Kathleen had another burden on her mind. Mike hadn't seen the letters from Tom, and Kathleen knew she had to tell him what she had found. If she didn't, somebody else was going to bring it up. There was no other way; Anne Marie would just have to straighten things out with Mike when she came home.

“Mike,” Kathleen said, “we need to talk.”

She told him about the letters and warned him that it appeared that Anne Marie had been somehow involved with Tom Capano—and it seemed to have been more than just a friendship. Her words hung suspended in the air between them for a long moment as Mike tried to assimilate what they might mean. Finally, he tapped Kathleen on the arm and said, “Let's go up.”

If her relationship with Tom Capano was too much to take in, the most important thing, still, was to find Anne Marie. Shafts of early morning sun sliced through the windows now, but nothing had changed in her apartment. They had hoped against hope that there might at least be a message on her answering machine—some clue to where she might be.

For many years now, the orphaned Fahey siblings had formed a tight circle. If one of them was in trouble or in danger, they all were. Already they were mobilizing, prepared to do whatever they had to do to find their sister and bring her home safely. Early on, they decided that one of them would try to be in her apartment at all times. If she called, or if someone called
about
her, there would always be someone to answer the phone; there would always be someone waiting to welcome her back. And if someone had hurt her, he—or she—would have to answer to the family.

The Faheys dealt with what they had to. They all had long experience
in working through trouble and tragedy. Frightened as they were, they didn't panic. Robert recalled how disturbed his wife, Susan, was when there was no word from Anne Marie. “Susan had had no experience with chaos; she was raised in upper-middle-class America,” he said. “For us, chaos and turmoil were not intimidating; we had long since been forced to develop skills to cope.”

They clung together that Sunday morning, all except Brian, who got the news of his sister's disappearance when he was thousands of miles from home. When he'd left for Ecuador, he had told a friend not to give his phone number out to anyone, “unless someone in my family dies.” Brian's in-laws didn't speak a word of English, and if a call from the States came in while he and his wife were away, they wouldn't be able to understand.

When the phone rang in Ecuador on Sunday, Brian heard his wife answer it and say, “Hi, Kathleen,” and his breath slowed. “I knew it was bad news.”

O
N
Monday morning, everyone in the governor's office waited nervously. Anne Marie was almost always the first to get to work, but she wasn't there at seven. Or seven-thirty. Or eight. They didn't really expect her to be, as much as they hoped they were wrong. Now, Anne Marie gazed from the front page of the
Wilmington News-Journal,
her photograph visible through the window of every newspaper vending machine along the downtown streets, a beautiful girl with huge eyes and soft lips.

One of the Faheys' earliest decisions was to get word out to the public so that everyone would look for Anne Marie. They were in complete agreement with the authorities to release information to local newspapers as soon as possible. Sheri Woodruff, Governor Carper's spokeswoman, helped the Faheys understand the workings of the media. Mark Daniels had taken the picture of Anne Marie to the
News-Journal
and asked for coverage that might elicit tips from the public. The short article about her was to be the first eight inches in what would become many miles of newsprint.
Carper Staffer Is Sought,
read the headline. “Anne Marie Fahey . . . was reported missing by family members at 12:15 a.m. Sunday. . . . Fahey, who works in Carper's Wilmington Office, left without her wallet or vehicle. . . . Police have checked hospitals and with family and friends without success.”

Because she was the governor's secretary and because she was beautiful, wire services picked up the story of Anne Marie's disappearance. Some reporters commented on the fact that Anne Marie
had disappeared exactly one week after Aimee Willard; it had become the practice of the media to link vanishings and murders, particularly when the women involved were young and lovely and lost from the same general area. But Aimee's body, sadly, had been found within hours, and Anne Marie had been gone, according to news reports, for more than eighty.

It took Brian until Monday morning to get as far as Miami, and it was afternoon before he landed in Philadelphia. Father James, his uncle, picked him up and took him to where he'd parked his car at the Friends School. Brian then drove straight to Anne Marie's apartment, where he and his sister and three brothers pored over Annie's address book, dividing up the pages. “We all got on a telephone somewhere,” Brian said, “and started to call all of her friends, and then tried to come up with a list of people who
weren't
in the book that might have known her whereabouts.”

Anne Marie had so many friends and acquaintances, and it helped to keep busy. They even called the family she had lived with in Spain on the faint possibility that she might have made plans to go back to the country she loved so much.

They continued to find reasons, however far-fetched, to believe that Anne Marie was OK. Maybe she hadn't read a paper or listened to the radio or watched television. Maybe she was really getting away from it all and she didn't know that everyone was looking for her. Their explanations began to stretch so thin that they could see one another's eyes through the gaps in their logic. And what they were thinking was chilling.

The police had already done a door-to-door canvass of the houses around Anne Marie's apartment and searched the park across the street, even though it had so few trees along the greensward that they doubted she could have been hidden there. It seemed more likely that she had left her apartment in a vehicle, but they could not be sure. They didn't even know
when
she had vanished.

Perhaps the last to see her on the governor's staff was Diane Hastings, the office manager. She told the investigators that she had ridden down in the elevator with Anne Marie at about 4:30
P.M.
on Thursday. “I was going home and she was going home.”

“What was she wearing?” she was asked.

“Jeans and a white scoop-neck T-shirt. She was happy that she had the next day off, and she was going to read a book in the park and have a manicure, a pedicure.”

Since several of her friends recalled that Anne Marie had
planned to spend Friday getting a pedicure and other beauty treatments at the Michael Christopher Designs salon, and then go to Valley Garden Park with a good book, it was possible she had spent Thursday night in her apartment, gone to the salon, and then encountered someone in the park the next day.

But a check with the staff at the salon brought the information that Anne Marie had not shown up for her appointment—nor had she called in to cancel.

Valley Garden Park was on the Hoopes Reservoir, northwest of Wilmington, and old-timers on the police force remembered the beautiful park's ghosts of murder. In 1956, ten years before Anne Marie Fahey was even born, Alberta Cousins, twenty-two, also made it a habit to take books to Valley Garden Park. On August 23, almost nine months pregnant, she sat in the park reading, shoes off in deference to the stifling heat. As police reconstructed what happened next, a bullet had whizzed by her head, startling her. She apparently got to her feet and had made it part of the way to her car when a second bullet slammed into her right side and pierced her heart. A police officer found her hours later, much too late to save her unborn child.

The murder of Alberta Cousins launched the most massive State Police investigation Delaware had ever seen. A shell casing was found 135 feet from her body, and indentations there showed where her killer had sat as he took a bead on her, but the police had no way to find her killer—not until twenty-five years later, when a woman with a niggling conscience came forward to describe a man she had observed close to the park that day. Using a computer-generated composite image, the police found that it matched almost exactly the photograph of a man imprisoned in Florida. The man had confessed to his cell mate, saying, “I shot a woman in Delaware once.” But he had mental problems and no one had ever taken him seriously until the composite matched. By the time that happened, the convict was long dead.

F
OUR
decades after the massive search for Alberta Cousins's killer, another search began in the Valley Garden Park, searchers and dogs below, helicopters above. Sweeping wider and wider, the searchers beat the bushes and looked along the open ground with little hope. Anne Marie's car was still parked on Washington Street, and the park was much too far to walk to. She would have to have had a ride to reach it. And there was no reason at all to think that she had.