“I made it here,” I said.
“Oh.” She frowned. “That’s weird, because you don’t have any coffee here. Nowhere in the house. I remember thinking it was odd. A caffeine addict notices these things.”
Right, just something you happened to notice, I thought. I knew a cop named Bony Moronie … Her traps are so obvious, they’re clearly phony …
“I had a leftover cup in the fridge I heated up.” I shrugged again: No big deal.
“Huh. Must have been there a long time—I noticed there’s no coffee container in the trash.”
“Few days. Still tastes good.”
We both smiled at each other: I know and you know. Game on. I actually thought those idiotic words: Game on. Yet I was pleased in a way: The next part was starting.
Boney turned to Gilpin, hands on knees, and gave a little nod. Gilpin chewed his lip some more, then finally pointed: toward the ottoman, the end table, the living room now righted. “See, here’s our problem, Nick,” he started. “We’ve seen dozens of home invasions—”
“Dozens upon dozens upon dozens,” Boney interrupted.
“Many home invasions. This—all this area right there, in the living room—remember it? The upturned ottoman, the overturned table, the vase on the floor”—he slapped down a photo of the scene in front of me—“this whole area, it was supposed to look like a struggle, right?”
My head expanded and snapped back into place. Stay calm. “Supposed to?”
“It looked wrong,” Gilpin continued. “From the second we saw it. To be honest, the whole thing looked staged. First of all, there’s the fact that it was all centered in this one spot. Why wasn’t anything messed up anywhere but this room? It’s odd.” He proffered another photo, a close-up. “And look here, at this pile of books. They should be in front of the end table—the end table is where they were stacked, right?”
I nodded.
“So when the end table was knocked over, they should have spilled mostly in front of it, following the trajectory of the falling table. Instead, they’re back behind it, as if someone swept them off before knocking over the table.”
I stared dumbly at the photo.
“And watch this. This is very curious to me,” Gilpin continued. He pointed at three slender antique frames on the mantelpiece. He stomped heavily, and they all flopped facedown immediately. “But somehow they stayed upright through everything else.”
He showed a photo of the frames upright. I had been hoping—even after they caught my Houston’s dinner slipup—that they were dumb cops, cops from the movies, local rubes aiming to please, trusting the local guy: Whatever you say, buddy. I didn’t get dumb cops.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I mumbled. “It’s totally— I just don’t know what to think about this. I just want to find my wife.”
“So do we, Nick, so do we,” Rhonda said. “But here’s another thing. The ottoman—remember how it was flipped upside down?” She patted the squatty ottoman, pointed at its four peg legs, each only an inch high. “See, this thing is bottom-heavy because of those tiny legs. The cushion practically sits on the floor. Try to push it over.” I hesitated. “Go on, try it,” Boney urged.
I gave it a push, but it slid across the carpet instead of turning over. I nodded. I agreed. It was bottom-heavy.
“Seriously, get down there if you need to, and knock that thing upside down,” Boney ordered.
I knelt down, pushed from lower and lower angles, finally put a hand underneath the ottoman, and flipped it. Even then it lifted up, one side hovering, and fell back into place; I finally had to pick it up and turn it over manually.
“Weird, huh?” Boney said, not sounding all that puzzled.
“Nick, you do any housecleaning the day your wife went missing?” Gilpin asked.
“No.”
“Okay, because the tech did a Luminol sweep, and I’m sorry to tell you, the kitchen floor lit up. A good amount of blood was spilled there.”
“Amy’s type—B positive.” Boney interrupted, “And I’m not talking a little cut, I’m talking blood.”
“Oh my God.” A clot of heat appeared in the middle of my chest. “But—”
“Yes, so your wife made it out of this room,” Gilpin said. “Somehow, in theory, she made it into the kitchen—without disturbing any of those gewgaws on that table just outside the kitchen—and then she collapsed in the kitchen, where she lost a lot of blood.”
“And then someone carefully mopped it up,” Rhonda said, watching me.