The buzzing of his phone awakened him some time later—not enough time, Bird thought, and looked at the clock to discover that only twenty-five minutes had passed. It was an email: the preliminary autopsy report on Lizzie Ouellette was complete. He scrolled it quickly on the tiny screen. Mostly, it was a restatement of things he’d either known or guessed already. CAUSE OF DEATH: GUNSHOT WOUND, HEAD.
MANNER OF DEATH: HOMICIDE.
The information he was looking for was toward the end of the report, and he frowned as he read it.
There is a puncture wound on the inner left forearm consistent with injection.
Track marks. So Lizzie was using, then. Her and Dwayne both, probably—that was usually how it worked—but it made him unhappy to see it there on paper, made him feel almost disappointed in her. He tried to picture it: Lizzie in the bedroom, a needle in her arm. Dwayne, standing by the bed with a gun. And then, stumbling into the tableau like a human non sequitur, Ethan Richards. Bird groaned, rubbing his eyes. He still needed coffee, but he also didn’t need a coffee to know that once he had one, the story this case seemed to tell would still make no damn sense at all. He opened the car door and gave his thighs a couple thumps to get the blood moving, then walked stiffly into the municipal building. He found the men’s room first, taking a piss next to two men he recognized from the junkyard scene and who studiously avoided looking at or speaking to him as they zipped up and left the room. He followed them a moment later, finding the station quieter than he’d expected. Some of the guys had gone home to change, maybe, or wash off the stink from all those hours wading through the ashes. There was a pot of freshly brewed coffee in the break room, and he filled a cup to the brim. Then he returned to his car and called Brady. His gravelly voice came on the line after three rings.
“Hiya there, Bird.”
“Hey, boss. What were you, sleeping?”
“I’d never do a thing like that,” Brady said. “Just one second.” There was a clatter as the phone was put down, and Bird heard a toilet flush.
“You know there’s a mute button for moments like this,” he said when Brady picked up again.
Brady snorted. “Noted. What’ve you got?”
Bird gave him the rundown: the facts as they stood, his frustrated sense that he was missing something. He waited while the older man read through the forwarded M.E.’s report. He thought again about Lizzie, needle marks on her pale, dead arm, the baffled regret in her former boss’s voice as he said, “She didn’t seem like the type.”
The type, Bird thought. There was something to that, the idea of categories, what kind of woman Lizzie was, what kind of wife, what kind of victim. And then:
“Oh,” Bird said. “That’s it.”
“What’s it?” Brady sounded distracted. “In the report? I don’t see—”
“No, no. I just realized, I’ve still been approaching this like a domestic incident.”
“Well, sure,” Brady said. “Dead wife, missing husband. Makes sense.”
“If it were just the two of them involved, yeah. But if that’s Ethan Richards in the truck, and I’m pretty confident it is, then I’ve been looking at this wrong.”
“I’m not following.”
Bird set his coffee down, thinking hard. “Adrienne Richards said her husband didn’t know about the affair. I’m thinking, what if she was wrong about that? What if Richards knew, and he wanted to do something about it? Maybe this whole thing kicked off because he caught wind his wife was cheating, and came out here to confront Cleaves himself.”
“Huh,” Brady said. “Wasn’t this guy a banker or something? Seems a little in-your-face.”
“As someone recently reminded me, people do crazy shit for love,” Bird said, and Brady chuckled.
“Right. Or for money. There was a photograph of the wife somewhere, right? Nudie pic? Could be a blackmail thing. You go to the husband, say, give us a million bucks or we’ll send this naughty nudie picture of your wife to . . . uh . . .”
“TMZ?” Bird offered.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever. So Richards goes up there alone to handle things, shit gets out of hand.”
Bird nodded, the phone pressed to his ear. “That makes sense. But then . . . you think Lizzie was in on it, too.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed, Bird. No perfect victims, right? But no, not necessarily. Maybe she wandered into it. You saw the part in the M.E.’s report, about the track marks?”