Boney, Gilpin, and I had relocated to the police station. They kept asking if I wanted to call Amy’s parents, but I was hoping they’d get the message and call them themselves. Those people are impossible to have a less than 90-minute conversation with. You can’t even get a word in edgewise. I can imagine the phone call now:
“Hi Marybeth, it’s Nick. I’m sorry to call so late, but I have some bad ne—”
“Nick? Hi there! So tonight Rand and I had salmon for dinner…”
“That’s great, Marybeth, but I really need to—”
“Usually Rand eats the middle part of the fish while I prefer the edges…”
“Uh huh. Well I’d love to hear more about the salmon sometime but it’s really important that I tell you—”
“But tonight I ate the middle part of the fish and Rand ate the edges…”
“Please, can you just let me talk for five sec—”
“And the potatoes Rand made? They were so good that we both ate the edges…”
“Look Amy is miss—”
“I’ll put him on to give you the recipe. RAND? RANNNNNNNNND?”
Boney and Gilpin said they wanted to ask me some more questions, so we went into an interview room and sat down across a table. It was just like all those crime shows I’d seen on TV…although much cooler, because this time I was the star!
“You okay there, Nick?” asked Boney.
“Yep, why?”
“You’re smiling,” she said.
“Of course he’s smiling,” said Gilpin. “His wife might be gone for good.” Gilpin gave me another fist bump. I wasn’t sure if he was playing good cop, or just being a guy. Maybe it was a little bit of both.
“So Nick, we first want to ask you a little more about Amy,” said Boney. “How does she spend her days, usually?”
“Drives me crazy. Complains. Makes me wish she were dead.”
Boney and Gilpin gave each other that look again.
“What?” I said. “It’s the truth!”
“How about drugs, Nick? Does she do any?”
“She’s too crazy for drugs,” I said.
They looked confused.
“Amy’s way of being annoying is so manipulative, so subtly crafted, that it requires her full mental capacities to pull it off. She could never be this annoying on drugs.”
“Nick, can I ask,” said Gilpin, “if all this is true, why are you still married to her?”
“Because she has money and I don’t, duh.”
“What’s your wife’s blood type?” asked Boney.
“WHY? DID YOU FIND SOME???” I said, maybe a little too enthusiastically.
“Uh, no,” said Boney. “Okay that’s enough about Amy for now. Let’s move on to you. Sorry this is taking so long, by the way.”
“Totally fine with me!” I said. I knew the statistics from the crime shows I watched: if the victim wasn’t found in the first 48 hours, chances went way up she’d never be found, period. “You guys must be exhausted,” I said. “You’ve been going nonstop all day. How about we all take a break? Meet back here in, say, 48 hours?”
“Thanks Nick, but we really need to keep working,” said Gilpin. “I apologize for these next few questions, but we just want to establish you’re not responsible for what happened.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“Nick, can you just tell us where you were between the time you left the house in the morning, and the time you returned to find Amy missing?”
“I was at the beach.”
“The beach? In Missouri?” said Boney.
“Well not the beach beach, the picnic tables by the river.”
“And you were at this ‘beach’ the entire seven hours?”
“I also had a karate lesson.”
“Karate lesson. Really,” Gilpin said.
“Really! Oh, and I also went hang gliding, and shot a few scenes of a major motion picture with Keanu Reeves.”
Perhaps telling them all this wasn’t the smartest thing. If the police talked to anyone who knew me, they’d quickly learn that I didn’t like the beach or karate or hang gliding, and I wasn’t starring in a major motion picture with Keanu Reeves.
“Okay Nick, that’s it for now,” said Gilpin. “Thanks so much, you’ve certainly given us a lot to go on.”
Boney and Gilpin said I should get a good night’s sleep because there was a noon press conference tomorrow, and told me a squad car would drive me home. But I was feeling horny, so I had the squad car drive me to Go’s.
“You don’t want to go look for her?” Go said as we lay naked in bed.
“Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but it seems to me looking for her would increase the chance of finding her.”
“Nick, this is serious,” she said. And then after a pause, added, “Seriously awesome.”
