No One Will Miss Her(29)

“Regular is fine,” Bird said. “I’ll be up awhile yet.”

“Will you be staying here in town?”

“For the moment.”

She nodded. “Of course. I’m sorry to be meeting you so late. I drove out this morning to visit my sister and wasn’t checking my messages. If I’d known . . .” Her voice began to tremble, and she trailed off, shaking her head, and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “And you don’t have any idea where he is? Dwayne?”

“We were hoping you might,” Bird said, and Deborah Cleaves shook her head harder. She twisted the tissue between her hands.

“No, no, no. I couldn’t imagine, I can’t imagine. That w . . .” she started to say, and snapped her mouth shut, coughing to cover the faux pas, but Bird caught it. That woman, or maybe, that wife of his. Either way, he was guessing that Deborah’s tearful concern was reserved largely for her son, with very little love lost for her now-deceased daughter-in-law. He also guessed that she would be very careful not to slip up like that again.

“Excuse me,” Deborah said, recovering. “It’s just, I haven’t seen much of my son lately. He’s always so busy—he owns his own business, you know—and then there was quite a lot to do at the lake this summer, as I understand it. Of course I wished he would stop by more often, but once they’re grown, you know, it’s hard—it’s hard . . .” She broke off again, pressing her lips together, gathering herself. “But something must have happened. Dwayne wouldn’t just disappear. Can’t you do DNA? Or fingerprints, or something? Whoever did . . . that . . . to Elizabeth Ouellette, that person could have kidnapped him, or—”

The idea of Dwayne being kidnapped was absurd, but Bird nodded and broke in gently. “Did Dwayne have enemies? Someone who would want to hurt him?”

The tissue had started to disintegrate. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Could he have been in trouble? Money? Or drugs?”

Deborah Cleaves stiffened, her hands clenched into fists.

“My son doesn’t do drugs.” She glared at him. Her voice grew shrill. “Have you asked Earl Ouellette if his daughter did drugs?”

“We spoke to Earl,” Bird said mildly. He allowed the silence to stretch for another few beats, while Deborah fidgeted. There was no obvious reason to think that the murder was drug-related, but the vehemence of her reaction gave him pause. If nothing else, addiction could put a lot of stress on a marriage. If Lizzie had been using, and if her husband had been unhappy about it . . .

“Detective? I’m sorry, I want to help. I just don’t know what I can do. I don’t know where my son is,” Deborah said, breaking the silence.

“You can help by telling us right away if he calls you,” said Bird.

“Of course, but—”

Bird smiled. “We want him found just as much as you do.”



His conversation with Deborah Cleaves concluded, Bird drove back through town and turned right on the county road, crossing over the Copper Falls town line and into a no-man’s-land of loosely developed plots. There was an auto-body shop that seemed to double as a repository for broken-down farm equipment; the grocery store with its windows brightly lit, the evening’s last few shoppers pushing carts across the lot to their waiting cars; a gas station with a flagpole mounted on the roof, the Stars and Stripes hanging limply in the windless night, faintly lit by the streetlights below. Then, nothing. The lights faded behind him as the dark closed in and thick stands of pine trees rose up on either side of the road. A few minutes later, the bar called Strangler’s loomed ahead, the last stop before the county road widened from two lanes to four and the posted speed limit jumped from forty to fifty-five miles per hour. Bird spotted it at a distance, set back a hundred feet from the road. The building was lit by floodlights and advertised by a dingy fluorescent sign that looked like it was floating, unanchored in the dark: one word, bar, in red letters against a white background.

Bird sighed. It had been a frustrating day. Dwayne’s friends and family swore up and down that they didn’t know where he was. An APB on Dwayne’s truck had gotten no hits so far, which was disappointing but not a surprise. There simply weren’t enough men to monitor the hundreds of miles of country road that surrounded Copper Falls, not when Dwayne could be traveling in any direction, and was staying off the highways if he had a shred of sense. No LoJack in the truck, either. For all they knew, he wasn’t even driving it. He could have just as easily ditched the vehicle somewhere in the woods off any of a hundred random dirt roads, where it could sit undiscovered until the following spring. But it wasn’t just that they had no real idea where Dwayne might have gone; they also couldn’t figure out where he’d been. The couple’s movements in the days preceding the murder were infuriatingly vague. People remembered seeing both Lizzie and Dwayne around town within the past week, and every week previous, but all they could say was that everything seemed normal. Lizzie was back and forth to the lake, managing a rotating calendar of renters. Dwayne and his landscaping equipment had been in the woods all summer, clearing brush and downed trees on one of his buddy’s ATV trails. If the couple had been fighting, nobody saw, or was willing to say so.

Then, the phone records: Lizzie’s cell phone, a basic flip model, had been found at the lake house in the same handbag that held her wallet and ID. Dwayne’s phone, the same as his wife’s, had last pinged the only nearby tower around ten o’clock on Sunday night, then nothing. Discarded or dead, most likely. Because the area’s cell coverage was so unreliable, most people in Copper Falls still had landlines. Dwayne and Lizzie had two, one at their house and a second at the lake; those records showed a call from the latter to the former just before three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. The call had lasted two minutes, but it was impossible to know who had made it, who had answered, or what was discussed. Basic maintenance, maybe. The summer was over, and people tended to close up their properties for the winter by the end of September, defrosting the fridge, draining the pipes, filling the toilets with antifreeze so that there would be no damage when the temperature dropped. But even though the last renter on Lizzie Ouellette’s books had left after Labor Day, the house was still set up for guests, and there was a small note on Lizzie’s calendar for that Sunday, the day she was killed. It said, AR 7?—just like that, with the question mark. One of the old-timers on the local police force thought it was a reference to the vintage firearm, especially since both Lizzie and Dwayne had been registered gun owners and competent if not avid hunters; Lizzie had sometimes made extra cash during the season by dressing small game for people who didn’t want to do the messy work themselves. But the AR-7 wasn’t a hunting rifle, and there was no evidence that either member of the couple had been interested in collecting guns.