Gone Girl

totally checked out. I basically got the word from on high: Shut this shit down . Shut it down. We look like giant, rube, redneck jackasses in thenational media. I can’t do anything unless I get something from you, Nick. You got anything ?’
    I shrugged. ‘I got everything you got. She confessed to me, but—’
    ‘She confessed ?’ she said. ‘Well, hell, Nick, we’ll wire you.’
    ‘It won’t work. It won’t work. She thinks of everything. I mean, she knows police procedure cold. She studies, Rhonda.’
    She poured electric-blue syrup over her waffles. I stuck the tines of my fork in my bulbous egg yolk and swirled it, smearing the sun.
    ‘It drives me crazy when you call me Rhonda.’
    ‘She studies, Ms Detective Boney.’
    She blew her breath upward, fluttered her bangs again. Took a bite of pancake. ‘I couldn’t get a wire anyway at this point.’
    ‘Come on, there has to be something, you guys,’ Go snapped. ‘Nick, why the hell are you staying in that house if you aren’t getting something?’
    ‘It takes time, Go. I have to get her to trust me again. If she starts telling me things casually, when we’re not both stark naked—’
    Boney rubbed her eyes and addressed Go: ‘Do I even want to ask?’
    ‘They always have their talks naked in the shower with the water running,’ Go said. ‘Can’t you bug the shower somewhere?’
    ‘She whispers in my ear, on top of the shower running,’ I said.
    ‘She does study,’ Boney said. ‘She really does. I went over that car she drove back, Desi’s Jag. I had ’em check the trunk, where she swore Desi had stowed her when he kidnapped her. I figured there’d be nothing there – we’d catch her in a lie. She rolled around in the trunk, Nick. Her scent was detected by our dogs. And we found three long blond hairs. Long blond hairs. Hers before she cut it. How she did that—’
    ‘Foresight. I’m sure she had a bag of them so if she needed to leave them somewhere to damn me, she could.’
    ‘Good God, can you imagine having her for a mother? You could never fib. She’d be three steps ahead of you, always.’
    ‘Boney, can you imagine having her for a wife?’
    ‘She’ll crack,’ she said. ‘At some point, she’ll crack.’
    ‘She won’t,’ I said. ‘Can’t I just testify against her?’
    ‘You have no credibility,’ Boney said. ‘Your only credibility comes from Amy. She’s single-handedly rehabilitated you. And she can single-handedly undo it. If she comes out with the antifreeze story …’
    ‘I need to find the vomit,’ I said. ‘If I got rid of the vomit and we exposed more of her lies …’
    ‘We should go through the diary,’ Go said. ‘Seven years of entries? There have to be discrepancies.’
    ‘We asked Rand and Marybeth to go through it, see if anything seemed off to them,’ Boney said. ‘You can guess how that went. I thought Marybeth was going to scratch my eyes out.’
    ‘What about Jacqueline Collings, or Tommy O’Hara, or Hilary Handy?’ Go said. ‘They all know the real Amy. There has to be something there.’
    Boney shook her head. ‘Believe me, it’s not enough. They’re all less credible than Amy. It’s pure public opinion, but right now that’s what the department is looking at: public opinion.’
    She was right. Jacqueline Collings had popped up on a few cable shows, insisting on her son’s innocence. She always started off steady, but her mother’s love worked against her: She soon came across as a grieving woman desperate to believe the best of her son, and the more the hosts pitied her, the more she snapped and snarled, and the more unsympathetic she became. She got written off quickly. Both Tommy O’Hara and Hilary Handy called me, furious that Amy remained unpunished, determined to tell their story, but no one wanted to hear from two unhinged former anythings. Hold tight , I told them, we’re working on it. Hilary and Tommy and Jacqueline and Boney and Go and I, we’d have our moment. I told myself I believed it.
    ‘What if we at least got Andie?’ I asked. ‘Got her to testify that everywhere Amy hid a clue was a place where we’d, you know, had sex? Andie’s credible; people love her.’
    Andie had reverted to her old cheery self after Amy returned. I know that only from the occasional tabloid snapshot. From these, I know she has been dating a guy her age, a cute, shaggy kid with earbuds forever dangling from his neck. They look nice together, young and healthy.