“When’s the last time you been in here, Nick?”
“I came in here very recently, when my wife’s treasure hunt led me here. But it’s not my stuff, and I did not touch anything—”
Tanner cut me off: “My client and I have an explosive new theory—” Tanner began, then caught himself. The phony TV-speak was so incredibly awful and inappropriate, we all cringed.
“Oh, explosive, how exciting,” Boney said.
“We were about to inform you—”
“Really? What convenient timing,” she said. “Stay there, please.” The door hung loose on its hinges, a broken lock dangling to the side. Gilpin was inside, cataloging the goods.
“These the golf clubs you don’t play with?” Gilpin said, jostling the glinting irons.
“None of this is mine—none of this was put there by me.”
“That’s funny, because everything in here corresponds with purchases made on the credit cards that aren’t yours either,” Boney snapped. “This is, like, what do they call it, a man cave? A man cave in the making, just waiting for the wife to go away for good. Got yourself some nice pastimes, Nick.” She pulled out three large cardboard boxes and set them at my feet.
“What’s this?”
Boney opened them with fingertip disgust despite her gloved hands. Inside were dozens of porn DVDs, flesh of all color and size on display on the covers.
Gilpin chuckled. “I gotta hand it to you, Nick, I mean, a man has his needs—”
“Men are highly visual, that’s what my ex always said when I caught him,” Boney said.
“Men are highly visual, but Nick, this shit made me blush,” Gilpin said. “It made me a little sick too, some of it, and I don’t get sick too easy.” He spread out a few of the DVDs like an ugly deck of cards. Most of the titles implied violence: Brutal Anal, Brutal Blowjobs, Humiliated Whores, Sadistic Slut Fucking, Gang-raped Sluts, and a series called Hurt the Bitch, volumes 1–18, each featuring photos of women writhing in pain while leering, laughing men inserted objects into them.
I turned away.
“Oh, now he’s embarrassed.” Gilpin grinned.
But I didn’t respond because I saw Go being helped into the back of a police car.
We met an hour later at the police station. Tanner advised against it—I insisted. I appealed to his iconoclast, millionaire rodeo-cowboy ego. We were going to tell the cops the truth. It was time.
I could handle them fucking with me—but not my sister.
“I’m agreeing to this because I think your arrest is inevitable, Nick, no matter what we do,” he said. “If we let them know we’re up for talking, we may get some more information on the case they’ve got against you. Without a body, they’ll really want a confession, so they’ll try to overwhelm you with the evidence. And that may give us enough to really jumpstart our defense.”
“And we give them everything, right?” I said. “We give them the clues and the marionettes and Amy.” I was panicked, aching to go—I could picture the cops right now sweating my sister under a bare lightbulb.
“As long as you let me talk,” Tanner said. “If it’s me talking about the frame-up, they can’t use it against us at trial … if we go with a different defense.”
It concerned me that my lawyer found the truth to be so completely unbelievable.
Gilpin met us at the steps of the station, a Coke in his hand, late dinner. When he turned around to lead us in, I saw a sweat-soaked back. The sun had long set, but the humidity remained. He flapped his arms once, and the shirt fluttered and stuck right back to his skin.
“Still hot,” he said. “Supposed to get hotter overnight.”
Boney was waiting for us in the conference room, the one from the first night. The Night Of. She’d French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick. I wondered if she had a date. A meet you after midnight situation.
“You have kids?” I asked her, pulling out a chair.
She looked startled and held up a finger. “One.” She didn’t say a name or an age or anything else. Boney was in business mode. She tried to wait us out.
“You first,” Tanner said. “Tell us what you got.”
“Sure,” Boney said. “Okay.” She turned on the tape recorder, dispensed with the preliminaries. “It is your contention, Nick, that you never bought or touched the items in the woodshed on your sister’s property.”
“That is correct,” Tanner replied for me.
“Nick, your fingerprints are all over almost every item in the shed.”