“It was, ah, sort of a joint effort,” said a blond man who Bird didn’t know. Johnson looked at the floor, biting his lip.
“A joint effort,” Bird said, and there was another beat, another set of looks, before Johnson stepped forward and extended a finger, pointing down at the body.
“It’s there,” he said. Bird followed the pointing finger, and saw. He’d missed it at a glance, amid all the blood and the dark, fat bodies of the buzzing flies. The dead woman’s shirt was bunched up toward her neck, and on the inner curve of a pale breast was a dark blob, the size of a housefly, but solid. And static. The flies rose in a hovering cloud; the spot stayed still. He squinted.
“Is that a mole?”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson said. “Identifying mark. That’s Lizzie Ouellette, no question.”
Bird blinked and frowned, not enjoying the sense of having missed something, enjoying the changed energy in the room even less.
“You’re sure about that,” he said, and noticed that Johnson wasn’t the only one nodding. He looked at the rest of the men. “All of you? You all know that well what Elizabeth Ouellette’s breast looks like?”
Johnson coughed and turned red. “Everyone knows, sir.”
“How?”
The question hung in the air, and Bird realized: the men were trying not to snicker. To snicker was an instinct, somehow, even now. He could see it, see them nearly quivering with the effort to hold it back.
Nobody wants to say it, he thought.
But incredibly, someone did. The blond cop, his mouth twisting just a little—not smiling, exactly; nobody could accuse him of smiling—met Bird’s eyes and replied.
“How do you think, man.”
It wasn’t a question.
Bird sighed and went to work.
Chapter 3
The City
It was just shy of ten o’clock, sunlight streaming through the wall of south-facing windows, when the couple in the multimillion-dollar town house on Pearl Street finally began to stir. She woke first, and all at once, which was unusual. All her life, Adrienne Richards had been a reluctant riser, fighting her way out of sleep in a long series of kicks and groans and false starts. Now, the woman lying cocooned in the king-sized bed came awake with a single blink. Eyes closed. Eyes open. Like Juliet, awakening in her tomb—only with Egyptian cotton sheets, minimum twelve hundred thread count, in lieu of a marble slab.
I do remember well where I should be,
And there I am.
Where is my Romeo?
She could have rolled over to see him, but she didn’t need to; she could feel him beside her, could hear the slow, even breaths that meant he wouldn’t wake for an hour yet, unless she shook him. Just one of the many things she knew by instinct, after nearly ten years of marriage. She knew the sound and shades of his breath better than her own.
She’d have to shake him, of course. Eventually. They couldn’t sleep all day. There were things to be done.
I do remember well where I should be.
She did.
She remembered everything.
There had been so much blood.
But for several long minutes, she lay awake and unmoving, contenting herself to let her gaze roam around the bedroom. It wasn’t hard to stay still; the cat, a big gray boy with green eyes and silky fur, had settled into the crook of her body overnight and was warm and purring against her, and the pillow where her cheek rested was soft and clean. The room was painted a lovely dark blue—Adrienne had gone through a color therapy phase, and this one was supposed to promote wellness, better sleep, and better sex—and curtained in the bargain, so that even now, in this last hour before morning gave way to midday, the shadows draped heavy as velvet in the corners and crevices, pooling underneath the furniture. The dress she’d worn last night was lying like a ponte pancake in the place where she’d unzipped and stepped out of it—a stupid mistake; it would probably need to be dry-cleaned—but otherwise, the room was perfect. Simple. Magazine-ready. The personal touches were confined to a nearby shelf: a brass figurine of a ballet dancer, a pair of sapphire earrings left in a saucer, and a photograph, framed, of the new-minted Mr. and Mrs. Richards on their wedding day. A memory from happier times. Adrienne was blond and slim and smiling in a white silk dress; Ethan was tall and broad-shouldered, already sporting a closely shorn haircut that masked a receding hairline. He had been thirty-four on their wedding day, twelve years older than she; it was her first marriage, his second.
Not that you’d know this from looking at the picture, she thought. They both looked radiantly happy, thrilled at the novelty of it all. Newlyweds at the start of their lifelong adventure, together, forever.