No One Will Miss Her(61)

That’s what happens when you hit your target in the heart.





Chapter 23

Bird




Bird had gotten back on the road just shy of eleven o’clock, and just in time to hear the Sox nearly blow a four-to-one lead in the ninth inning. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, the lights of the city fading behind him, the smooth, dark highway opening up ahead. In New York, a sold-out crowd roared their approval as the Yankees closed in.

He was only a few miles up the interstate when Kimbrel, who was supposed to close, for fuck’s sake, clocked a batter with the bases loaded and forced in a run. He wondered if the Sox would somehow manage to lose in spite of themselves, clutching defeat from the jaws of victory—and when the Yanks scored again, bringing the lead to a single run, he allowed himself to briefly consider that a loss might be some sort of bad omen. Not just for the Sox, but for him, personally. Speeding back to Copper Falls with his tail between his legs, cursing the waste of time that the long drive to Boston had been. Adrienne Richards: a promising lead–turned–wild-goose chase in the span of a single text message.

Bird grimaced. He should have known. The fire at the junkyard was just too weird to be a coincidence, and yet he’d almost come around to accepting that a weird coincidence was all it was. Junkyards burned down all the time, after all. It was just his luck that Earl Ouellette, surveilling the wreckage with a flashlight in hand, had spotted Dwayne Cleaves’s truck partially buried by a pile of scrap. The truck was a burned-out husk, practically unrecognizable unless you knew, as Earl did, that he’d never had a pickup parked in that particular part of the yard. The driver’s-side door had fallen open, and the high-pressure blast of the fire hoses had washed out what was in the cab, including a piece of the charred body that had been perched inside. When Earl walked up to investigate, something crunched in the ashes under his feet; he told the police he thought it was glass, only all the glass had melted, and when he turned the flashlight toward the sound, he found himself standing on the snapped pieces of a human femur.

How the fuck do you like that? Bird thought. He’d spent a full day of hunting for Lizzie Ouellette’s murderer, conducted dozens of interviews, logged hundreds of miles on his vehicle, and was fast approaching the halfway point of what was shaping up to be a solid forty-eight hours without sleep. And all that time, it appeared that the son of a bitch had been sitting pretty right there in Copper Falls, already dead, transformed by his own hand into a fully crisped hunk of human barbecue. Just waiting to be skewered. It was a lucky break; if not for Earl choosing that particular moment to explore the ruins of his livelihood, it might have been months before they found the body.

And then Gleyber Torres grounded out, stranding the winning runs on base, and all Bird’s worries about baseball and bad omens were drowned out by the outraged groans of the New York crowd and the sporadic, courageous cheering of the Boston fans in attendance. Alone in his car, illuminated by the glow of the dashboard lights, Bird pumped a fist and pressed the accelerator. The cruiser soared into the night.

By the time the Sox finished soaking their locker room in champagne, the start of a celebration that would rage until dawn, Bird was crossing the Maine state line and feeling ready for what came next. Dwayne Cleaves’s death meant closure, if not justice. Cops tended to prefer the latter, but families often felt differently, and Bird thought that Earl Ouellette might be happier with this outcome. A trial had its downsides. Plea bargains, parole, the specter of a killer someday being forgiven and set free, not to mention having to hear in graphic detail just how badly and brutally your loved one’s life had ended. Lizzie’s father didn’t need to sit in a courtroom, to hear a forensic expert describe the mess that Cleaves and a shotgun had made of his daughter’s face. And even if suicide was a better, cleaner fate than the fucker deserved, at least Earl could take comfort that he no longer had to share a world with his daughter’s killer.



It was three o’clock in the morning, the cruiser eating up the last few miles of county road en route to Copper Falls, when Bird’s phone began to buzz.

“This is Bird.”

“Hiya there, Bird,” said Brady. “Still on the road?”

“Nearly there.” Bird stifled a yawn.

“You might want to pull over.”

“Nah, I’m good. I just want to get there. Check out the scene while it’s still fresh.”

“I’m not talking about taking a nap,” said Brady drily, and Bird felt a familiar tickle of foreboding at the back of his neck. He’d experienced the same sensation hours earlier, as he drove away from his unproductive interview with Adrienne Richards, but he thought he’d left it behind. Now it was back, stronger than ever. It was something about Brady’s voice; he sounded almost apologetic.

“What, then?”

“I just got off the phone with Boston PD,” Brady said. “An Officer Murray?”

Bird instinctively lifted his foot from the accelerator. The cruiser began to coast.

“Tell me,” he said.

“There’s been a shooting at the Richards residence. One deceased at the scene. Murray says it’s our suspect.”

Bird hit the brakes and pulled the car to a stop, parking it at a half straddle across the faded white line where shoulder met road, its headlights beaming into the empty night.