Bach brooded on the matter for days. If Faiello had killed Maria Cruz, what would he have done with the body? “So then one day,” Bach goes on, “I was decorating a Christmas tree at a private home on Park Avenue when I started remembering that Dean had done this mysterious thing with the concrete in that room in the garage. I was talking to this girl I was working with. I’m just talking the whole thing out loud to her, and I’m having all these disturbing thoughts, like: My boyfriend may have killed someone. I tell the whole story to this girl, and she starts crying. That’s when I realized I was probably right.”

He wrote Brian Ford a letter, but received no reply. Then, one day in early January, he took a phone call from another of Faiello’s friends, who had just received a rambling e-mail from Faiello complaining about how almost no one in his new—and unidentified—“tropical” home spoke English. Bach sent the woman to Brian Ford. The next day Ford came to his apartment, eager to listen. For the first time Bach told Ford, and later a New York City detective, about Faiello’s concrete slab.

A month later, detectives arrived at the Newark house with a search warrant. Stunned, one of the new owners took the warrant to Mark Ritchey’s house. “I opened the front door and I could see something was bothering her,” Ritchey remembers. “I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘Then you don’t know. We were just served. Dean murdered someone and buried the body in the garage.’”

That day, Bach was at his gym when he received a call on his cell phone. It was one of the Newark neighbors. The house on Elwood Avenue was surrounded by a small army of New Jersey state troopers, police from New York and Newark, and camera crews from a half-dozen television stations. They had found Maria Cruz.

Even before finding Maria’s body, police had suspected Faiello was in Costa Rica. He had sent e-mails to several friends, which were easily traced to the Costa Rican capital of San José; Mark Ritchey confirmed that Faiello had flown there in September. The *Post’*s Jeane MacIntosh was the first reporter to arrive in Costa Rica, just two days after Maria’s body was found. She began showing Faiello’s picture around San José’s gay nightclubs and found he had been there all autumn. She even managed to find the Internet café where he read his e-mails.

In the end, it didn’t take long to find him. After Faiello’s photograph was printed in the local newspapers, the manager of a beach resort in the town of Samara, 120 miles west of San José, called police to say Faiello was there. He had been hanging around the pool, downing beers, and hitting on the bartenders for several days. When Costa Rican police arrived to arrest him, he offered no resistance. Back in San José, he actually grinned when he recognized the attorney general’s investigator, Brian Ford, who had arrested him in 2002.

“Hi, Brian,” Faiello said. “Nice to see a familiar face.” When Greg Bach heard about the exchange, he thought it was akin to a line Leonardo DiCaprio had muttered to the detective played by Tom Hanks, who tracked him down in Catch Me if You Can.

Today, Faiello is fighting extradition from a Costa Rican jail cell. It was there, wearing jeans and a sky-blue Hawaiian shirt, that he gave a brief and exceedingly polite interview to the intrepid Jeane MacIntosh. He wouldn’t discuss the case, but admitted, “I’m scared to death.”

He should be. Faiello has been charged with second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life. Investigators suspect Maria Cruz died after suffering an allergic reaction to lidocaine, though an autopsy failed to determine the exact cause of death. Why Faiello didn’t rush her to a hospital may never be known. He may have been high. Or he may have been frightened that police would have discovered he was working.

Whatever his mental state, Faiello is believed to have crammed Maria’s body into a tiny suitcase on wheels, rolled it out to his car, and taken it to Newark, where he wrapped it in garbage bags and kept it in his garage, and possibly Ritchey’s as well, for six long weeks. “That’s the part I just can’t fathom,” says Greg Bach. “All that time, while we were filing in and out of those garages, Maria’s body was there. I just … I just don’t think I’ll ever get that image out of my head.”

The magazine published a postscript to this article in the October 2009 issue.

Bryan Burrough is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.