Bird perked up. “Pullen,” he said, as his mind’s eye conjured the image of the grainy newspaper photograph from the case file. It was the only photo anyone had of George Pullen, and he was almost out of frame; the only reason you’d notice him at all was that he was the only one looking at the camera, a moon-faced man in late middle age, standing in a group of onlookers who had gathered to watch the police dredge a quarry for the body of a missing woman named Laurie Richter. George Pullen had called the police twice, claiming he might know something about the case, but was inexplicably never interviewed. He fell through the cracks in 1983; by 1985, he’d fallen off the radar entirely. It was the kind of mistake you hated to see; by the time Bird started looking for Pullen, it was with the understanding that the likeliest place to find the man was in a graveyard. But now—
“Pullen,” Brady repeated. “Right, that’s it. You’ll love this: he’s a local celebrity down east. The oldest resident of the senior home in Stonington.”
“No kidding,” Bird said. “He’s been in state all this time.”
“Yep, and if you want to interview him, you might want to get down there sooner rather than later. You know what they say about people who hold the record for seniority.”
“They never hold it very long,” Bird replied, chuckling. “Yeah. Good point. I’ll get down there.”
“I think that’s a good plan,” Brady said. “And look, not for nothing, unless you turn up something ironclad—and I mean ironclad—we’d probably have a hell of a time convincing a judge to let us go on a fishing expedition to build a case against Adrienne Richards. She’s loaded; she’s connected. People are paying attention to this one, and one of our state troopers harassing a grieving widow who just survived a home invasion? That’s what they call ‘bad optics.’”
Bird sighed. “Understood. Just out of curiosity, when you say ‘ironclad’ . . .”
“You didn’t happen to pull a severed dick and balls out of her garbage disposal, by any chance?”
Bird laughed, hard, and then felt bad for laughing even as he struggled to stop. Poor Lizzie. Dead, disfigured, and now a punch line for the kinds of jokes you know you shouldn’t make, let alone laugh at—the kinds of jokes cops tell because sometimes it’s the only way to keep yourself getting up and doing the job, staring into the hellmouth of humanity’s worst, day in and day out. She deserved better.
But it was too late for Lizzie. She was dead, and for better or worse, so was the man who killed her. The man who’d killed Laurie Richter, on the other hand—he might still be out there. After forty years, at that, and this too seemed too poetic to be a coincidence. Back in 1983, the Richter case stank of the same small-town New England bullshit that hung over this one: locals who knew something but wouldn’t talk, or lied to cover up secrets of their own. There were whispers about a boyfriend, or maybe multiple boyfriends, phantom leads that went poof and vanished every time someone tried to examine them. Rumors that Laurie’s car was sunk in a quarry somewhere up near Greenville, the Forks, maybe even as far west as Rangeley; the dredging that George Pullen had attended was one of several that took place the summer she vanished. But back then, there were too many quarries and too many rumors, too many closed mouths and closed doors. To know now that justice might be served, and relief brought to a family who had been waiting far too long for answers . . .
He lifted a thumb and forefinger to either side of his nose, massaging his sinuses. Down east, then. If he worked efficiently, he could be on his way to the coast by the day after next. He’d see if George Pullen still remembered what he’d wanted to tell the cops back in 1983. Maybe stop outside Bucksport on the way back. There was a place he used to go with his folks back in the day. They had good seafood that was always best in the off-season, the tourists long gone and never knowing what they were missing. The lobsters were so much sweeter in the winter.
On the other end of the line, Brady finished chuckling at his own terrible joke. There was a long, comfortable pause. Then Brady coughed.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said.
“What?”
“That Richards woman,” Brady said. “How much you want to bet she ends up writing a fucking book?”
Chapter 26
Lizzie
All this time, I thought I knew Adrienne Richards pretty well. Well enough to anticipate her needs, well enough to covet her life for myself. Well enough, obviously, to step into that life and walk around in it like it belonged to me. And I thought, I thought, that I knew about the bad as well as the good. The loneliness. The resentment. The yearning—for attention, acceptance, security. For a baby that her husband admitted too late they would never have.