Bird sighed. It had been a frustrating day. Dwayne’s friends and family swore up and down that they didn’t know where he was. An APB on Dwayne’s truck had gotten no hits so far, which was disappointing but not a surprise. There simply weren’t enough men to monitor the hundreds of miles of country road that surrounded Copper Falls, not when Dwayne could be traveling in any direction, and was staying off the highways if he had a shred of sense. No LoJack in the truck, either. For all they knew, he wasn’t even driving it. He could have just as easily ditched the vehicle somewhere in the woods off any of a hundred random dirt roads, where it could sit undiscovered until the following spring. But it wasn’t just that they had no real idea where Dwayne might have gone; they also couldn’t figure out where he’d been. The couple’s movements in the days preceding the murder were infuriatingly vague. People remembered seeing both Lizzie and Dwayne around town within the past week, and every week previous, but all they could say was that everything seemed normal. Lizzie was back and forth to the lake, managing a rotating calendar of renters. Dwayne and his landscaping equipment had been in the woods all summer, clearing brush and downed trees on one of his buddy’s ATV trails. If the couple had been fighting, nobody saw, or was willing to say so.
Then, the phone records: Lizzie’s cell phone, a basic flip model, had been found at the lake house in the same handbag that held her wallet and ID. Dwayne’s phone, the same as his wife’s, had last pinged the only nearby tower around ten o’clock on Sunday night, then nothing. Discarded or dead, most likely. Because the area’s cell coverage was so unreliable, most people in Copper Falls still had landlines. Dwayne and Lizzie had two, one at their house and a second at the lake; those records showed a call from the latter to the former just before three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. The call had lasted two minutes, but it was impossible to know who had made it, who had answered, or what was discussed. Basic maintenance, maybe. The summer was over, and people tended to close up their properties for the winter by the end of September, defrosting the fridge, draining the pipes, filling the toilets with antifreeze so that there would be no damage when the temperature dropped. But even though the last renter on Lizzie Ouellette’s books had left after Labor Day, the house was still set up for guests, and there was a small note on Lizzie’s calendar for that Sunday, the day she was killed. It said, AR 7?—just like that, with the question mark. One of the old-timers on the local police force thought it was a reference to the vintage firearm, especially since both Lizzie and Dwayne had been registered gun owners and competent if not avid hunters; Lizzie had sometimes made extra cash during the season by dressing small game for people who didn’t want to do the messy work themselves. But the AR-7 wasn’t a hunting rifle, and there was no evidence that either member of the couple had been interested in collecting guns.
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.