No One Will Miss Her(30)

And then, Bird thought, there was the weird curveball: a guest with a criminal record. The answer to Deborah Cleaves’s question was that yes, they’d dusted for prints. The house was full of them, sets on top of sets, about what you’d expect for a property that had so many people coming and going. Lizzie and Dwayne and a rotating series of guests, plus probably a few fresh smudges from local law enforcement who either didn’t know or didn’t care about preserving the scene. They hadn’t had time to run them through the criminal database, but thanks to the recently disclosed rental records, Bird now knew that at least one would be an immediate match.

Ethan Richards.

That Ethan Richards.

It stood to reason that Richards and his wife were the couple Jennifer Wellstood had talked about, the rich city folks who came from the internet and rented out Lizzie Ouellette’s house for an entire month at a time. He was on the roster two years in a row, arrival date in mid-July, with a bunch of surcharges for additional cleaning and weekly deliveries; it looked like Lizzie had squeezed some extra cash out of the deal by doing their grocery shopping. Of course, nobody thought Ethan Richards had something to do with the murder. His crimes were the kind you pull off with a calculator, not a shotgun. Still, just seeing the man’s name made Bird’s stomach turn and his hands automatically clench into fists. He’d seen it right up close, the chaos and despair that Richards’s corporate greed had wrought. His own parents lost their life savings when their financial advisor turned out to be one of many who’d invested in Richards’s bullshit funds. An absolute goddamn catastrophe. The guy had invested a good deal of his own money, too, and couldn’t even remember afterward where he’d gotten the tip. So many lives ruined. What Bird remembered best was his mother’s voice when she called to tell him what had happened.

“I don’t understand! Gary’s a good man! He said it was ‘risk-free arbitrage’!” she kept saying, over and over, until the words dissolved into a wail.

What he remembered second-best was the hunch of his father’s shoulders at the table that Christmas. It was all over by then. The DA had declined to indict, and Ethan Richards and the rest had walked free. A lawyer might be able to help them recover some of what was lost, Joseph Bird told his son, but they couldn’t afford one, and when Bird said he’d pay for an attorney, his father waved the offer away.

“Nah, son. It’s all right,” he said, smiling. “The way I see it, there’s time. Worst-case scenario, I’ll just work until I die.”

Bird gritted his teeth at the memory. Dad had been close to a well-deserved retirement when his assets all but disappeared. When he made that crack at Christmas, he’d probably assumed he had another ten good years in him, maybe more.

Eleven months later, he dropped dead of a heart attack, and Amelia Bird had to sell the house just to pay for her husband’s funeral.

It was a weird coincidence for that white-collar scam artist to be somehow connected to a case that Bird was working, but a coincidence was probably all it was. It was too bad; he wouldn’t have minded a little trip to the city, a surprise knock on the door of Ethan Richards’s billion-dollar mansion, a flash of the badge followed by a few needling, borderline antagonistic questions about his relationship with Lizzie and Dwayne. Nobody liked getting a visit from the police, no matter how wealthy they were, and he would have enjoyed the opportunity to make Richards’s life just a little bit unpleasant.

Instead, Bird’s next stop would be the hospital in the next county over, where he’d have the distasteful responsibility of watching the medical examiner perform Lizzie Ouellette’s autopsy. He’d crack her sternum, pull the organs out of her body, weigh them, and finally state the blatantly obvious.

Manner of death: homicide.

Cause: single gunshot to the head.

Time: Sunday evening, which meant that at least twelve hours had passed before Myles Johnson discovered her body. Now the critical forty-eight-hour period following the crime was halfway gone, maybe even more than, with very little to show for it.

There were a dozen cars parked outside Strangler’s, trucks and beat-up sedans, mostly American, and all with in-state plates. He pulled into a spot away from the rest and strode across the parking lot. The door squealed as he opened it, and the abrupt silence as he entered gave Bird a sudden flashback to eighth grade, the first day of school, and the paranoid sense of having walked into a room where everyone had just been talking about him. For a second, every pair of eyes in the bar seemed to be aimed his way. Then the moment passed, the stares stopped, and the buzz of conversation filled the room again. Bird found a seat at the far end of the bar and ordered a Budweiser from the man behind it, a craggy fellow with big, bushy brows who wrenched the cap off the beer like he was wringing its neck.

“You’re that cop,” said the bartender.

“That’s right.”

“You here to talk, or to eat?”

“Both. I’ll take whatever’s quickest,” Bird said.

“Burger?”

“Sounds good.”

“It comes with fries.”

“Great.”

Bird drank his beer and casually observed the rest of the bar’s occupants. There was one younger couple in a corner, heads bent together, their eyes periodically flicking in his direction. Otherwise the patrons were all men, in work shirts or T-shirts, hands clasped around bottles of Bud or Molson with several empties collected on the table in front of them. No cops, although Bird recognized one man with a dark, sooty smudge above his brow as a member of the volunteer fire department who’d offered to drive Earl Ouellette to the morgue to identify his daughter’s body. He wondered where Earl was now. Staying with friends, hopefully.