No One Will Miss Her(78)

“No, no. It’s what I want. It’s all that I want.” She turned to look at him, studying him. “Detective Bird, what’s your first name?”

“Ian.”

“Ian. Ian, why are you here?”

“Tying up a loose end,” he said. He would not tell her about the knife, still in its bag, sitting in a lockbox in the cruiser’s trunk. She might even recognize it, he thought. According to the police report, she’d woken up around two o’clock in the morning to find Dwayne Cleaves in her bedroom, standing over her, the blade glinting silver in his hand.

“Something to do with—”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I guess you’re not allowed to talk about it.”

“Did you want to talk about it?”

“No.” She took a long drink. “I’d be happy never to talk about it again. Congratulations, by the way.”

Bird drained his beer. “Thanks. What for?”

“Laurie Richter? I read somewhere that you caught the guy. That case was . . .” She shook her head, trailing off. He wondered what she’d been about to say, how she’d even known about it. Adrienne Richards didn’t seem like the true-crime type, but maybe that was a failure of his own imagination. People see what they expect to see, he thought.

“Oh yeah. Well, thanks. I got lucky.”

She gave him a funny look. “I’d guess it was more than that. Do you want another beer?”

He looked at his watch, at her face.

“I will if you will,” he said.

The conversation grew easier as he talked about Laurie Richter, the series of lucky breaks—and yes, okay, the hours and hours of legwork—that had led him first to her body and then to the son of a bitch who’d killed her. He told her about the confession, about how the old man sat up just a little straighter as he unburdened himself, finally free of that weight, a young man’s terrible secret that he’d been keeping for much too long.

“Forty years,” Adrienne said. “Jesus.”

“Long time to carry something like that,” Bird said, nodding. “But what about you? I mean, how have you been doing with everything?”

“The lawyers handled most of it,” she said. “Ethan was pretty organized; he had everything all planned out for, you know, if something happened. Once they identified the body, all I had to do was sign things.”

“Was there a funeral?”

She shook her head. “Private service. Just me and the lawyers. It just seemed like, after what happened . . .”

“You don’t have to explain,” Bird said quickly, but she seemed not to hear him.

“It was so strange,” she said quietly. “There were all these condolence cards, so many flowers, but all from, like . . . corporations. People were sorry to lose Ethan’s money. I don’t think anyone cared at all that he was gone.”

Bird didn’t say anything, and she took a drink, setting the bottle down with a light clunk.

“Anyway, that’s all over. Or will be. The lawyers said it should be settled soon.”

“You do anything for the holidays?” Bird asked, hoping for a subject change, and Adrienne’s mouth twitched.

“I went south for a little while, actually,” she said. “I saw my mother. Not that she knows it. She’s in a home. Alzheimer’s.”

“Sorry to hear that. How’s she doing?”

“She’s okay,” she said. “But I think . . . I think I want to move her. She should be somewhere better. Somewhere nicer.”

Sometime later, Bird glanced outside and realized that the sun had fully set. The bar was buzzing now with the after-work crowd, the afternoon sports fans long gone after a disappointing loss for the Sox that neither he nor Adrienne had seen. There had been another round of beers, and another—at some point Adrienne had switched to water, while Bird threw caution to the wind and ordered a whiskey—and their chairs had somehow pivoted so that they were sitting very close now, so close that their knees kept brushing together, close enough that he could smell her perfume. What is this? What’s happening? Bird thought, and then wondered if he was only imagining things. Maybe nothing was happening at all. Maybe he was just buzzed, more than buzzed—“buzzed” was receding in the rearview mirror as he rounded the corner and entered the long home stretch toward drunk—but she was staring at him with her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted, and that was happening, and so was the tugging sensation low in his abdomen, that gut sense of something electric in the air. He lifted his hand, which was moving so slowly that seemed like it might belong to someone else, and watched it close the distance between them to gently touch her knee. She lowered her eyes, looked at the hand on her leg, looked back up at him. Her parted lips began to move.

She said, “Do you want to get out of here?”

What is happening? What is happening? What the actual fuck is happening? his brain said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

Her knee disappeared from beneath his hand as she stood up and pulled her jacket on. He followed her outside, the two of them pausing awkwardly in the parking lot as he realized that he had no idea where to go. There was a silence punctuated by the whooshing of traffic on the nearby road, the ticking of a streetlight from green to red.