“What does that mean?”
“We’re a close-knit community here. Most folks with places on Copperbrook like to do things by word of mouth, you know. Family, family friends. People with a connection to the community. The Ouellette girl listed this place on some website, so anyone could rent it out. Like I said, it didn’t go over. We had some trouble, some neighbors upset.”
Bird raised his eyebrows, cocking his head in the direction of the bedroom, the blood, the body. “How upset?”
The sheriff caught his tone and stiffened. “Not like you’re thinking. I’m saying, some of the folks she had up here, we don’t know who they were or what they might have been into. You’ll want to look into that.”
There was a long silence as the men stared at each other. Bird broke eye contact first, looking down at his phone. When he spoke again, he kept his tone mild.
“I’ll be looking into anything relevant, Sheriff. You mentioned the victim’s father. He lives in town?”
“The junkyard. He has a trailer there, or did. I doubt it survived the fire. Christ, I can’t even imagine . . .” The sheriff shook his head, and Myles Johnson stared down at his hands, twisting and twisting the dishrag. Bird thought the thing would rip in half soon.
“The fire,” he said. “That’s the father’s place? That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“That’s why I was here. The wind picked up, and I came around to tell folks to evacuate,” said Johnson. “But the door—”
“Bird?” A forensic tech poked his head out of the bedroom, gestured with a gloved finger. Bird nodded, and made the same motion at Johnson.
“Let’s have a look at her. Run me through it.”
A moment later, he stood beside the corpse, reading aloud from the preliminary, scribbled notes someone had passed over for his perusal.
“Elizabeth Ouellette, twenty-eight years old . . .” He looked from the pad to the body, grimacing. The name was written in neat print, but the face was unrecognizable. The woman was lying on her side, her eyes half-lidded and dull beneath the blood-soaked hanks of gingery hair. They were the only part that still looked like what they had been; everything below was shredded, the kind of wound that some of the guys in the barracks referred to as “cherry pie.” The missing nose was the least of it. Whoever had killed Lizzie Ouellette had put the barrel of something big under her chin—perhaps a shotgun, the one registered to and missing from the home she’d shared with Dwayne Cleaves—and pulled the trigger. The bullet had sheared her jaw away, obliterating her teeth and blowing the structure of the skull apart before exiting through the back of her head. A single pearlescent molar winked out from the mess, impossibly white and perfectly intact.
Bird grimaced, looking away, focusing on the rest of the room. There was a spatter on the wall, bone shards and brain, but he was still struck by the look of the place. Someone—the woman lying dead a few feet away, he guessed—had taken care with the decor. There was a threadbare but stylish oriental rug on the floor at the end of the bed, in a shade of faded blue that was echoed by the curtains that framed the picture window and the quilt, now stained with blood, that had covered the body. A pair of nice-looking lamps, brass or something like it, on matching bedside tables. A stack of old books artfully arranged on the dresser. Lake houses had a way of becoming a repository for mismatched furniture, old hunting trophies, novelty pillows with phrases like gone fishing emblazoned on them—Bird’s own family had once rented a place up near the border that seemed to have a deer’s head sprouting from every vertical surface. But this place was like something out of a magazine. He’d need to locate whatever website Ouellette had listed it on, but even now, he could imagine how enticing it must have looked to the city people browsing for a vacation getaway.
He turned back, bent toward the body. Cherry pie, he thought again. The dead woman’s wallet, credit cards, and driver’s license had been found in a purse on the dresser, but the face was a problem. And a question. He lifted his gaze to look around the room, from the techs to the sheriff to Johnson, who was now whispering quietly with two other, younger men who must also be local police.
“Who made the ID?” Bird asked, and in that moment, the energy in the room underwent a sudden, subtle shift. A stillness filled with uncomfortable fidgeting, the quick exchange of looks from man to man. The silence drew out a beat too long, and he stood, annoyed.
“Johnson? Sheriff? Who made the ID?” he repeated.