Denials Amid a Cloud of Scandal

Zamsky last heard from Chandra on April 29, two days before she disappeared. She left a message on her aunt's answering machine, saying she was heading back to California and had some "big news." Zamsky said she didn't sound upset.

In his recent Post interview, Condit denied that he told Chandra he wanted to start a new life with her.

"I don't believe the aunt knows anything about me," he said. "I had no interest in starting a family and leaving my wife. Those conversations never occurred. It's just made up."

On April 29, the last time he spoke with Chandra, Condit said, he told her he would help her line up job interviews with the FBI and the CIA.

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On July 5, as Zamsky was going before the cameras, police were interviewing Condit's wife, Carolyn, in an FBI office near the Tysons Corner Center. It was the "circumstance" that prevented the Condits from attending the Fourth of July parade in Modesto. Also in the meeting were Assistant U.S. Attorneys Barbara Kittay and Heidi Pasichow. The prosecutors were assigned to supervise the investigation, guiding detectives and FBI agents to ensure that they were putting together a court-ready case.

Kittay had worked as a prosecutor in Philadelphia and at the Justice Department before joining the U.S. attorney's office in Washington. Pasichow was a veteran of the D.C. office, serving as a deputy of its homicide division at one point. Both women had won convictions in a number of high-profile cases. Now they were focusing on Gary Condit.

Carolyn Condit was slender and attractive, a kind, thoughtful woman who had been an asset to the congressman's political career. She said she had a close relationship with her husband of 34 years. They talked twice every day, and he returned to their California home in Ceres almost every weekend.

The investigators wanted to know when she first heard about Chandra. Carolyn Condit described the phone call she received on May 6 from Robert Levy, who wanted to talk to her husband about his missing daughter.

Carolyn told the investigators that the missing intern and her husband were just friends. They asked if she was aware that Chandra had visited her husband's apartment as "just friends."

The Condits' attorney, Abbe Lowell, interrupted, instructing Carolyn not to answer by invoking the marital privilege. Jack Barrett, the chief of D.C. detectives, who supervised the case, was uncomfortable with the tenor of the questioning by the prosecutors. It was "very combative," Barrett recalled. Kittay said she was just trying to elicit information. "It wasn't hostile," she said.

During the three-hour interview, Carolyn was asked to account for her whereabouts around the time Chandra went missing. She said she flew to Washington on April 28 for a luncheon event for first lady Laura Bush at the Washington Hilton. While she was in town, she stayed with her husband at his Adams Morgan apartment and met him for brunch and dinner. One day, they shopped together in the neighborhood. After the May 3 luncheon, she flew home to Ceres.