No One Will Miss Her(35)

“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.