The woman who answered the phone at Ethan Richards’s home sounded out of breath, as though she’d had to run to pick up the receiver.
Or been caught right in the middle of a little down-and-dirty with her married, murdering, wanted boyfriend, Bird thought, an idea that seemed ludicrous even as he entertained it. But if Richards’s car had been in Copper Falls last night, and Richards’s wife was at home in Boston right now, then . . .
Then I have no idea. Even with an affair in the mix, there was no obvious explanation. A Bonnie-and-Clyde situation, with an “Uptown Girl” twist? Or was Ethan Richards involved, too, somehow, making this the world’s most unlikely throuple?
Bird listened as the woman cleared her throat. “Hello?” she said again. “Is anyone there?”
Then he hung up. The only way to find out the truth was to follow the lead. He threw the car into gear and pulled out of the Strangler’s parking lot, driving back the way he’d come. He passed the auto-body shop, the gas station, the grocery, the main street, where houses with warmly lit windows sat like beacons between the gray, overgrown properties where nobody lived. He continued through town until he reached its central intersection, where a single stoplight was strung above the darkened street. The county road veered left here, heading north into the wilderness. Bird turned right and drove south out of town. The state medical examiner and Lizzie Ouellette’s to-be-autopsied body lay in this direction, seventy-five miles downstate in Augusta, but Bird wouldn’t be stopping there. He punched in Brady’s number at troop headquarters as the lights of Copper Falls disappeared behind him.
The supervisor answered on the first ring, grunting, “Brady.”
“It’s Bird, checking in.”
“Hiya there, Bird,” Brady said. It was a nice thing about the boss: no matter how shitty the case or how little you had to report, he always sounded happy to hear from you. “You wrap up with the locals? They’ll be waiting on you to start the postmortem.”
“Actually, that’s why I’m calling,” Bird said. “I’ve got a lead. Our guy, Cleaves, might’ve had a mistress. One of the renters at the lake house.”
“You got a name?”
“You won’t believe it. You know Ethan Richards? That finance guy who—”
“I know who he is,” Brady interrupted.
“Well, it’s his wife,” Bird said, and was rewarded with the sound of Brady whistling under his breath.
“That’s interesting,” he said.
“It is,” Bird said. “And apparently, she was in Copper Falls last night.”
“She was?”
“Well, her vehicle. Their vehicle, I should say. It’s registered to the husband. Mercedes GLE. Not something you see a lot around here, so people remember it.”
Brady exhaled. “Well, that’s something. And where’s the vehicle now?”
“I don’t know about the Mercedes, but the mistress is at home in Boston.” Bird glanced at the dashboard. “I’ve gotta stop to fuel up, but I should be there in under four hours.”
“Hmm,” Brady said, and fell silent. Bird waited. He was used to these pauses; they meant Brady was thinking. On the other end of the line, Brady cleared his throat and asked, “You think she was an accomplice?”
“Maybe,” Bird said, then quickly added, “I don’t know. Really. I’m back and forth on it. If she wasn’t in on it, it’s a weird damn coincidence. Maybe she just drove the car?”
“What about a hostage situation? He tells her to pick him up, maybe he doesn’t mention he killed his wife—”
“I don’t think so,” Bird said slowly. “She’s at home now, she picked up the phone, and she sure didn’t sound like she was doing it at gunpoint. But I don’t know that she’d run away with him, either. Slumming it with the guy is one thing, but committing to him? Or helping him kill his wife? That’s a whole other level.”
“People do crazy shit for love,” Brady said.
“Or for money,” Bird replied, and found himself nodding along to his own words. “Yeah. If Cleaves is trying to run, he’ll need cash, and he doesn’t know many people who can get it to him. If he’s with her now, or headed there—”
“Right, I’ll call Boston PD,” Brady said, picking up the thread. “Have them do a drive-by. If Cleaves is there, they’ll grab him. If not, they can watch the place till you get there.”
“And the autopsy—”
Brady jumped in. “Don’t worry about it. Chase your lead. The local guy, what’s his name? Ryan? He can send someone, or we will. I’ll call him, too.”
“Thanks, Brady,” Bird said.
“That it?”
Bird thought for a moment. “One more thing. When you talk to Ryan, do me a favor: ask him about a guy named Jake Cutter.”
“That’s your source on the mistress?”
“Yeah,” said Bird. “Twitchy little bastard. I’d like to know who he is, you know, locally speaking. And I’d like to know if there’s a reason why Ed down at Strangler’s wants him arrested.”
Brady chuckled.
“I’ll be in touch.”
Bird hung up, tossed the phone aside, and let his foot come down heavy on the accelerator. Outside, the headlights flashed on two bright copper points by the side of the road, the eyes of a deer lifting its head to watch him pass. Bird flicked on the cruiser’s rooftop strobe lights, even though there was no traffic ahead. Better for him and Bambi both if the wildlife saw him coming.
The exit for Augusta loomed ahead an hour later, white letters stark and reflective against the dark green of the interstate sign. Bird passed it at eighty miles per hour, sparing a thought for Lizzie’s corpse and the impatient medical examiner, who would have to wait just a little while longer to put the scalpel to work. A few miles ahead was a service plaza, where he pulled up to the fueling area and set the nozzle to fill the cruiser’s tank while he pulled out his phone. Before he showed up on her doorstep, he should get to know the woman he was on his way to see. Adrienne was probably best known for being the wife of one of the most despised men in America, but she was sort of interesting in her own right. She’d met Ethan Richards while doing an internship on Wall Street, then married him right out of college, a whirlwind affair—and a nasty surprise to Richards’s first wife, who was left in the lurch. It was quite a strategic series of moves for a girl barely into her twenties; it made it that much harder to believe Adrienne had been unaware of what her husband was doing. Bird scrolled her Wikipedia page—apparently she’d been in the running for one of those Real Housewives reality series before the accounting scandal broke—and then clicked over to her Instagram account. There was one new photo at the top, posted earlier that day: Adrienne with wide eyes and pinkish hair posed alongside a pumpkin spice latte. Bird looked at the hashtags and scowled.
“‘Fall hair don’t care,’” he muttered. “Jesus fucking Christ.” It was gratifying in a petty sort of way to see that the commenters on the picture largely agreed with him: Adrienne Richards was an asshole. The ridiculous hair, the latte, the idiotic hashtags; if she was trying to make people hate her, she was doing a good job. He scrolled down, past pictures of glossy manicures, expensive shoes, Adrienne in an evening gown at a fundraiser for a politician who was now on the verge of going to prison for fraud. Adrienne’s face was everywhere, too, right up close, her big blue eyes framed by a row of impossibly thick lashes, probably fake. It all looked familiar in a generic girly sort of way, but eventually, he came to a view he recognized for certain: the lake, seen from the deck of Lizzie Ouellette’s cabin, with Adrienne’s pink polished toenails in the foreground. #Latergram from Xanadu, the caption read. It took Bird a minute, but then it clicked: with no cell service at Copperbrook Lake, Adrienne Richards could only document her vacation after the fact. Like a normal person. Which probably drove her crazy, he thought, chuckling.
It wasn’t until he reached the next photo that the realization clicked. It was a shot of Adrienne with her back to the camera, hair tumbling over her shoulders, silhouetted against a peachy sunset. The light was low, the focus was soft; unless you knew to look for it, you wouldn’t even recognize that one of her hands was resting on a long wooden railing, the one that wrapped around the deck of a house he’d been at just that morning. But the picture itself was one he’d seen before—gathered by Lizzie Ouellette into a photo album titled, Dreams.
As he scrolled farther back, he found others like it. Adrienne’s outstretched hand with the fingernails painted cherry red. Adrienne’s feet in a pair of expensive leather boots. Adrienne’s martini, a sweating crystal glass on a dark wood bar. This was what passed for an ambitious fantasy in Lizzie Ouellette’s world: a picture of another woman standing on the deck of the house that she owned.
And all that time Lizzie was idolizing Adrienne, wistfully saving pictures of her fingernails like they represented a life she could never have, Adrienne had been sneaking behind her back to suck her husband’s dick.
He was wrong. Lizzie’s dreams weren’t banal. They were goddamn tragic. They were the saddest thing Bird had ever seen.
His thoughts were interrupted by the buzzing of the phone in his hand. He lifted it to his ear, tapping the screen to answer it.
“This is Bird,” he said.
Brady didn’t bother with formalities. “Boston PD says the lady is at home, evidently alone, drinking a glass of wine, and showing no signs of distress,” he said.
A glass of wine, Bird thought bitterly. After what he’d just seen, the idea of Adrienne Richards blithely sitting around with a beverage, while Lizzie Ouellette was about to be dissected, was practically obscene.
“They know all that without knocking?” he asked.
“Apparently, there’s a big glass window on the street side, second floor, with a good view in. She’s sitting right up in it.” Brady paused. “You know, I had a cat once who liked to do that.”
“Great,” Bird said.
“They’ve got one guy keeping an eye on the place until you show up. If Cleaves gets there first, they’re prepared. I told them armed and dangerous, but it’s only the shotgun that was missing, correct? No other weapons?”
“Not that we know of.”
“All right. Good. A gun that big will be easy to spot, if he’s dumb enough to walk around with it. And the other thing, your guy Cutter? You were right, he’s a known entity. Heroin dealer.”
“Huh,” Bird said.
“You can’t be surprised,” Brady replied. He was right: heroin was having a boom in small-town New England, tearing its way through communities from Cape Cod to Bar Harbor and beyond. A frantic play by the cartels, who had flooded the region with cheap product in an attempt to recoup their losses from the slow state-by-state creep of legalized cannabis. Bird wondered if that was why the people he’d talked to today hadn’t been more floored by Lizzie Ouellette’s tragic death at the age of twenty-eight. The violence aside, dying young in Copper Falls just wasn’t that unusual.
“Not surprised. It just hasn’t come up,” Bird said, and then instantly thought, But that’s not true. There had been Deborah Cleaves’s furious denial, My son doesn’t do drugs, and then the follow-up question; it had seemed like nothing more than an angry retort at the time, but now . . .
“Actually, scratch that. It was suggested to me by Cleaves’s mother that Lizzie Ouellette might be using,” Bird added. “I thought she was being sarcastic, but maybe not.”
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” Brady said cheerfully. “If there was anything in her blood, the M.E. will find it. Let’s check back in after you interview the mistress.”
“Will do.”
Bird hung up the phone, only to have it immediately buzz again against his hand. He glanced at the screen and saw a mobile area code. Not troop headquarters. He tapped the screen and the speaker came to life.
“This is Bird.”
On the other end of the phone, a man’s deep baritone replied, “Detective Bird? This is Jonathan Hurley.”
The man’s name rang a bell. A former teacher?
Hurley’s voice came back again, answering the question for him. “I’m a veterinarian. Lizzie Ouellette was my employee, part-time.”
That’s it, Bird thought. Earl had told him that Lizzie worked as a veterinary assistant at Hurley’s clinic, a job she was good at, according to her father. Suited to it, that was how he’d put it. Earl couldn’t understand why she’d quit. Bird stepped out of the car, holding the phone to his ear as he replaced the fuel nozzle on the pump and twisted the cruiser’s gas cap back into place. He was anxious to get on the road and had half a mind to tell Hurley he’d call back some other time, but the Boston PD was already watching the house. He could spare a few minutes for research.
“I’m sorry,” Hurley was saying. “I was out toward Skowhegan with a sick horse, and I didn’t find out what happened until—”
“That’s all right,” Bird said. “So Lizzie Ouellette worked for you. For how long?”
Bird could hear the veterinarian’s breath: rapid, uncomfortable, like he was pacing back and forth.
“Two years. It was a while back. I think it’s been maybe two or three years since we let her go.”
Bird blinked. So Earl had misunderstood. “You fired her?”
“Listen,” Hurley said, his tone becoming fretful. “I really agonized about this. I don’t want to cause trouble for her family. I always liked Lizzie.”
“Let’s back up a minute. You hired her as an assistant? I thought you need schooling for that.”
“I’d have to double-check my records, but I think she’d taken a couple classes at the community college,” Hurley said. “For an assistant position, for what I needed, that was plenty. I only kept hours at the animal hospital a few days a week. My main business is large animals—you know, horses, cows.”
“Where was the animal hospital?”
“Dexter,” Hurley said, and Bird saw Cutter’s face in his mind’s eye. A little ways to the east. Was he lying? Had he known Lizzie after all?
“You know a guy named Cutter? Jake Cutter?”
“No,” Hurley said. He sounded confused, the syllable coming out like a question.
“Never mind,” Bird said. “So Lizzie was your assistant.”
“Right. Yes. I was saying, I did like her. She was smart, a quick learner, and good with the animals. Some people come in thinking, Oh, I’m an animal lover, I can do this job, but when a dog comes in that’s been run over by a snowmobile . . .” He sighed. “It’s not easy. You’ve gotta be able to keep it together. It takes some nerve. Lizzie was good. She didn’t balk at the sight of blood.”
“Okay,” Bird said. “So remind me, then—why’d you fire her, again?”
Hurley blew a frustrated exhalation into the receiver. “She really didn’t give me a choice, man. I was sorry to lose her. That’s why when I heard about what happened, I thought I should call.”
“Sure, I hear you. Walk me through it.”
“It was a bad situation. Basically, some medication went missing.” The veterinarian’s tone was perplexed, and Bird noted the phrasing: went missing, like the pills had wandered off on their own.
“Missing as in stolen?” he asked carefully.
“I still can’t make sense of it,” Hurley said. “Working around here, you know, you see a lot of that. You get to know people; you can tell who has a problem. Lizzie never seemed like the type. But only employees knew where we kept it, and whoever took it had a key. I knew it wasn’t me, obviously, so . . .”
“Process of elimination,” Bird said. “Right. What was the medication?”
Hurley’s tone shifted; talking shop was more comfortable for him than calling a dead woman a thief. “Tramadol. It’s an opiate, a painkiller. We give it to dogs, mostly, but it works on people.”
“Tramadol. Got it. So what happened?”
“The whole thing was just so strange,” he said, the regretful tone back in full force. “When I confronted her, she clammed up. Not even denying it—she just wouldn’t say anything. At all. I really tried, Detective. I told her we could forget the whole thing, if she’d just return the meds. I meant it, too. The last thing I wanted was to let her go.” He paused, sucking air through his teeth. “She didn’t argue. She just took off her smock and handed it to me, and then she walked out the door.”
“Did she say anything?” Bird asked.
“Yeah,” Hurley replied. “I’ll never forget it. She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘I really loved this. I should have known it couldn’t last.’”