It’s eight in the morning, and Slater sits in the break room picking through the remains of last night’s takeout: a watery pad Thai that he dresses up now with ketchup and red pepper. While he eats, he again reads through the meager case file labeled Gypsy Rose Blancharde. He wonders if the search might lead them to New Orleans, if someone from Gypsy’s past came to retrieve her. Lately, his mind has been spinning out theories faster than he can reject them. Theories are easy to come by, he thinks. Facts, not so much.
He feels as though it’s been weeks since he slept. Last night, at three a.m., he gave up trying, slipped out of bed, and drove around the streets of Springfield, hoping that Gypsy’s captor, if she had in fact been captured, might take her out for some air in the dead of night. He squinted at every porch, got out and peered over fences. He kept at it all the way until his shift started.
Alone in the break room, he feels his eyes shutting. He pushes aside his plate, folds his arms on the table, and starts to rest his head when Draper comes bolting through the doorway.
“Nicholas Godejohn,” she says.
She’s panting like she’s run up multiple flights of stairs though her desk sits just a short distance down the hall.
“Who?” Slater asks, rubbing his eyes.
“Nicholas Godejohn, 512 Crestview Road.”
“Emily, take a breath. Start from the top.”
“Forensics tracked him down through the credit card he used to pay for Christian Couples.”
“You’re saying…”
“I’m saying it’s him. Gypsy’s Secret Sam.”
Slater stands as though in a daze, then grabs up his coffee mug and swallows the dregs so quickly that brown liquid dribbles down his chin.
“Get the team together,” he says. “I’ll call SWAT.”
* * *
Nicholas Godejohn wakes, lifts off his night mask, sees that Gypsy is already up. He runs a hand over her side of the bed, finds it still warm. The clock says nine fifteen. Probably making my breakfast, he tells himself. The way I showed her.
He smiles to himself, shuts his eyes, and drops his head back onto the pillow. True, their relationship got off to a rocky start—killing a nearly four-hundred-pound woman had been messier and more physically taxing than he’d imagined, and Gypsy had not been as grateful as he would have liked—but there is no denying that, overall, Nicholas has done well. Pick ’em fresh from the tree, his second foster father used to say. And they don’t come any fresher than Gypsy Rose Blancharde. In a way, it’s like her life started when she met him. Before that, she’d been living someone else’s life, a life someone else had made up for her. She was his now to train, to raise up right.
Of course, there are rough patches ahead of them, too. They will have to get clear of Missouri, then get out of the country altogether. Nicholas has a place picked out in Canada, a trailer on a large plot of land in the northern Rockies. He can rent it for a song from his co-worker’s father who is too ill now for hunting and fishing, let alone skiing. Nicholas is just waiting for his last check from the bottling plant to clear. His savings, coupled with the four thousand dollars from Dee Dee’s safe, should last them a good while.
It’s the travel that scares him. Stopping for gas and eating at diners and checking into motels—all those places where Gypsy might be recognized. Lucky for him, the girl loves to wear disguises.
He feels air moving in his stomach, listens for signs of Gypsy bringing his breakfast. He is keeping her culinary lessons simple for now: instant oatmeal with frozen strawberries mixed in; instant coffee with just a dollop of creamer. He’d had to teach her how to boil water. When they get to Canada, he’ll teach her more: how to gut and fry the fish he catches; how to make a proper duck stew; how to pick chokecherries and turn them into jam. Things he learned from a string of foster families all across the state of Wyoming. They will live off the land as much as possible, grow old in the company of Mother Nature.
He hears a crashing from somewhere inside the house, a metal pot hitting the floor and clattering around. He can’t blame her: in a way, she’s still learning how to walk. He considers going out to help her but doesn’t yet have the energy to rouse himself.
Then he hears something else, this time coming from outside the house, from just outside his bedroom window, in the narrow space between his bungalow and his neighbor’s fence. A crackling sound, like static on a radio, followed quickly by a string of hushed curses. He sits up, slaps himself awake, goes to the window, and pulls the shade back an inch. There’s a man dressed all in black standing maybe a yard away, fiddling with some kind of handheld device. Still drowsy, Nicholas thinks it must be the gas man, but then he realizes: employees of the gas company don’t carry side arms.
He steps back, tugs the shade as far open as he dares, cranes his neck. There are cop cars with their lights flashing and sirens muted clogging his quiet residential street. He pulls his hand away, lets the shade fall shut, and hops around in his bare feet as though the floor were made of burning coals.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” he says.
He looks furiously around the room, spots his jeans lying crumpled in a corner, pulls them on. He has no time to worry about a shirt or shoes. He jets down the hallway and out the back door, finds his yard crowded with men in black masks brandishing machine guns. He throws his hands in the air, but they tackle him anyway, pushing him face-forward into the dirt.
Once the cuffs are on, they roll him onto his back. He looks up, sees a man in plain clothes staring down at him.
“Where is she?” Slater asks.
There’s no point in playing dumb.
“Inside,” Nicholas says. “But she ain’t who you think she is.”