Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

NICK DUNNE
THE NIGHT OF
B
oney and Gilpin moved our interview to the police station,
which looks like a failing community bank. They left me
alone in a little room for forty minutes, me willing myself not
to move. To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way. I
slouched over the table, put my chin on my arm. Waited.
‘Do you want to call Amy’s parents?’ Boney had
asked.
‘I don’t want to panic them,’ I said. ‘If we don’t hear
from her in an hour, I’ll call.’
We’d done three rounds of that conversation.
Finally, the cops came in and sat at the table across
from me. I fought the urge to laugh at how much it felt like a
TV show. This was the same room I’d seen surfing through
late-night cable for the past ten years, and the two cops –
weary, intense – acted like the stars. Totally fake. Epcot
Police Station. Boney was even holding a paper coffee cup
and a manila folder that looked like a prop. Cop prop. I felt
giddy, felt for a moment we were all pretend people: 
Let’s
play the Missing Wife game!
‘You okay there, Nick?’ Boney asked.
‘I’m okay, why?’
‘You’re smiling.’
The giddiness slid to the tiled floor. ‘I’m sorry, it’s all

---

just—’
‘I know,’ Boney said, giving me a look that was like a
hand pat. ‘It’s too strange, I know.’ She cleared her throat.
‘First of all, we want to make sure you’re comfortable here.
You need anything, just let us know. The more information
you can give us right now, the better, but you can leave at
any time, that’s not a problem, either.’
‘Whatever you need.’
‘Okay, great, thank you,’ she said. ‘Um, okay. I want to
get the annoying stuff out of the way first. The crap stuff. If
your wife was indeed abducted – and we don’t know that,
but if it comes to that – we want to catch the guy, and when
we catch the guy, we want to nail him, hard. No way out. No
wiggle room.’
‘Right.’
‘So we have to rule you out real quick, real easy. So
the guy can’t come back and say we didn’t rule you out, you
know what I mean?’
I nodded mechanically. I didn’t really know what she
meant, but I wanted to seem as cooperative as possible.
‘Whatever you need.’
‘We don’t want to freak you out,’ Gilpin added. ‘We just
want to cover all the bases.’
‘Fine by me.’ 
It’s always the husband
, I thought.
Everyone knows it’s always the husband, so why can’t they
just say it: We suspect you because you are the husband,
and it’s always the husband. Just watch
Dateline.
‘Okay, great, Nick,’ Boney said. ‘First let’s get a swab
of the inside of your cheek so we can rule out all of the DNA
in the house that isn’t yours. Would that be okay?’
‘Sure.’

---

‘I’d also like to take a quick sweep of your hands for
gun shot residue. Again, just in case—’
‘Wait, wait, wait. Have you found something that
makes you think my wife was—’
‘Nonono, Nick,’ Gilpin interrupted. He pulled a chair up
to the table and sat on it backward. I wondered if cops
actually did that. Or did some clever actor do that, and then
cops began doing it because they’d seen the actors
playing cops do that and it looked cool?
‘It’s just smart protocol,’ Gilpin continued. ‘We try to
cover every base: Check your hands, get a swab, and if we
could check out your car too …’
‘Of course. Like I said, whatever you need.’
‘Thank you, Nick. I really appreciate it. Sometimes
guys, they make things hard for us just because they can.’
I was exactly the opposite. My father had infused my
childhood with unspoken blame; he was the kind of man
who skulked around looking for things to be angry at. This
had turned Go defensive and extremely unlikely to take
unwarranted shit. It had turned me into a knee-jerk suckup
to authority. Mom, Dad, teachers: