No One Will Miss Her(67)
“Please,” I said, and as if on cue, like something out of a goddamn movie, both my eyes hit overload at the same time and spilled two perfect tears down my cheeks. Both men winced, and I knew I’d won.
Adrienne had an app on her phone that could summon a car for you. I thought it might be complicated, but by the time the elevator dinged at the ground floor, Adrienne’s phone had flashed a message, Where do you want to go? and I simply tapped the topmost option. An honest answer, even if it meant something different to the phone than it did to me. The little gray car on-screen tracked my path across the city, retracing my earlier route. Where did I want to go?
Home.
Whatever that meant.
I was afraid that the street would be blocked off, but it was quiet and nearly deserted. The coroner’s van and all the cop cars were gone. Only a single SUV remained, and a man and a woman in blue CSI jackets were leaning against it. She was smoking; he was laughing. They both looked at me curiously as I got out of the car. I brandished my keys.
“It’s my house.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Yeah, okay. We’re done. You can go on in.”
“Okay,” I said. In my hand, the phone vibrated, inviting me to review my ride. Pushy. It made me think of the cops, needling me to talk before Dwayne’s corpse was even cold. It’ll be best for everyone if we can get your side of the story right away, while it’s still fresh. I started up the front steps, fitting the key into the lock.
“Hey,” the man in the CSI jacket said. “You know how it’s gonna be in there, right?”
I turned, just in time to see the woman throw an elbow into his ribs and hiss at him to shush. The man winced.
“What?” I said warily.
“I mean,” the man said, stepping away to avoid a repeat elbow, “we just bag stuff. You know. We don’t clean.”
“Oh.” I nodded like I understood, and twisted the key. The door swung open, then shut behind me. I watched through the glass as the woman stubbed her cigarette out and the two climbed into the SUV, started the motor, pulled away. I climbed the stairs in the dark.
It wasn’t until a few minutes later, pausing in the doorway to Ethan Richards’s office, that I realized what the CSI tech meant. The body was gone, of course—I’d watched them wheeling it out—but there were still bits of Dwayne here in the room. A smear on the corner of the mahogany desk, a small, almost perfectly circular spot of red on the carpeted floor. The cat padded out of the dark and began twining around my legs as I stood there, looking at all that was left of my husband. Blood drying to a rust-colored stain on the carpet. The last mess he ever made.
Of course I would have to be the one to clean it up.
Or maybe—Adrienne’s voice yawned in my head—you’ll pay someone to do the scrubbing for you. Or burn it. Toss it. Whatever. I always said that wall-to-wall was tacky, anyway.
At my feet, the cat rose up on his hind legs, meowing, begging for attention. I bent, scooped him into my arms, snuggled him close, and pulled the office door shut. The sun would be coming up in only a few hours, and when it did, I would have work to do. But down the hall, in that dark blue bedroom, there was nothing to do but sleep, and I did. Deeply. Dreamless. Dead.
Chapter 25
Bird
The fire had consumed the man in the way that fires did: from the outside in, starting at the extremities. The smallest bits were always the first to go, swallowed whole by the flames. Ears, nose, toes, fingers. All of them, gone. The body in Dwayne Cleaves’s truck had burned uninterrupted for a long time, and had no feet, no hands, and most unsettling of all, no face, just a featureless mass of charcoal with two slight indentations where the eyes had been. By the time the sun crept over the tops of the pines at the junkyard’s eastern border, there was nothing left for the techs to do but stir the ashes around in search of any pieces they might have missed, their fingers numb with cold. Mostly, they found nothing. Just ashes on top of ashes, everything sodden and stinking of smoke, tar, melted rubber. The state’s forensic team kept their eyes on their work; the local cops glanced their sidelong discomfort at each other over the tops of the masks they’d been told to wear to keep toxic particles out of their lungs. The mood at the lake the previous morning had been practically jovial by comparison, that blond jackass all but snickering about the mole and how they all knew about it, about what a tramp poor, dead Lizzie Ouellette had been. That same man was here now; Bird could recognize him by his beady eyes alone, and the little slice of his face visible above his mask and below the brim of his hat looked pale and sweaty. Not laughing now, eh, chief?
It was hard to know what was making the locals more uncomfortable: the fact that the body wasn’t one of their own, or the fact that their good friend Dwayne Cleaves was officially a multiple murderer, and now lying dead in a city morgue. Bird had told Sheriff Ryan, Ryan had told the rest, and the news had gone over like a sack of bricks as the cops of Copper Falls realized what it meant, and what was still to come. The press hadn’t gotten wind of it yet, but it was only a matter of time. When they did, they’d descend on Copper Falls like vultures, scrapping and snarling until they’d plucked the last scrap of meat off the bones of the town’s tragedy. The coroner told Bird that there might be some teeth still left for an ID, clenched shut behind the mottled black mask that used to be a man’s face. The medical examiner would need to get his hands on dental records, but as far as Bird was concerned, it was just a formality. The folks in Augusta would only confirm what he already knew: this charred body, its handless arms curled up in death like it was still trying to ward off the oncoming flames, was Ethan Richards.