No One Will Miss Her(10)

“She had her own room. I tried . . .” Earl paused so long that Bird thought that might be it, the whole sentence. I tried. But the older man coughed, retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket, spat a thick gob of brown mucus into it. “I tried to give her space,” he said.

Earl’s thumb passed back and forth over the soot stain. Working it.

“Have they figured out how the fire started?” Bird peered at him. Earl shrugged. “Haven’t heard. Could be anything.”

“You had insurance, I’m guessing.” He tried to keep his tone casual, but the man’s shoulders stiffened all the same.

“Ayuh.”

Bird didn’t press; the fire was a strange coincidence, but it wasn’t his to investigate. And anyway, Earl Ouellette had been dead asleep behind the wheel of his truck in the parking lot at Strangler’s for most of the previous night, as was apparently his weekly habit. Half a dozen people had seen him—or heard him snoring—which meant that Earl was officially off the hook for arson and murder alike. For several seconds, the men sat in silence. Bird was considering his next question when Earl Ouellette suddenly turned and stared directly at him. The old man’s eyes were an unsettling shade of blue, like an old pair of jeans bleached nearly colorless by years of wear.

“They asked where she went to the dentist,” Earl said.

“The dentist,” Bird repeated, then shook his head as the realization clicked. Shit. “Oh. To make an ID. They didn’t tell you . . . ?”

Earl’s gaze stayed steady, puzzled but no less piercing.

Goddammit, Bird thought.

“The police identified your daughter at the scene by a distinguishing mark on her, ah, upper rib cage.” Bird watched as the blue eyes narrowed, the wiry brows knit together. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ouellete, there’s no good way to say it. Your daughter was shot. Her face was badly damaged.”

Some men would have broken down at this moment. Bird was grateful that Earl Ouellette did not. Instead, the older man fished a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it, ignoring the posted no smoking signs and a gray-haired receptionist who turned and glared at the first whiff of tobacco.

“It would be a help to have medical records,” Bird said. “Any records. Dentist, or—do you know which doctor your daughter went to?”

“Can’t say that I do. She saw Doc Chadbourne for that business ten years ago.” He paused. “You’ll have heard about that.”

Bird had. He nodded, and Earl did, too.

“Chadbourne passed away, though. Maybe four years back. Nobody to replace him, so most folks go to the clinic down in Hunstville, if they go anywhere.”

Bird scribbled a note to himself as Earl dragged deep on the cigarette. He was gazing into the distance now, working his jaw. He cleared his throat.

“A distinguishing mark, you said.”

Bird nodded. “A mole. I assume . . .” Earl cut him off with a curt nod.

“Had it since she was a kid. They said she could get it took off with a laser, but I never had the money.”

“I understand. Sir, I know this is a difficult time, but as a family member—what I mean to say is, if we showed you a photograph of the mark, would you recognize it?”

Earl nodded again, his one-word reply coming out on a cloud of smoke.

“Ayuh.”



Ten minutes later, Bird turned off the cruiser’s engine and glanced in the rearview mirror, running a hand through his hair. It was shaggier than he liked it—miles from the no-fuss buzz cuts he used to give himself back in his early days on the force—but the longer it got, the more you could see the early grays coming in at his temples, and so he’d put the clippers away and started letting it grow. It made him look a little older, a little graver. Not a bad thing for a cop, and especially not on a day like this. Although if he really wanted a trim, he supposed he was in the right place.

The building in front of him was a trailer, with a canvas awning mounted over the door and a custom paint job. Bright purple, the same shade as the hand-lettered sign that stood close to the road. In keeping with small-town tradition, the salon’s name was an atrocious pun: this one was called Hairs 2 U. The paint was fresh and well-maintained. The parking lot, cracked and pocked with jagged potholes, was not, which squared with what Bird had heard and observed about Copper Falls overall: people were doing their best, and the summer people were a help, but not even the yearly influx of tourists could reverse the town’s protracted death from neglect. The roads crumbling, storefronts shuttered and cloaked with dust, the Victorian farmhouses standing vacant at the edges of unplowed fields, their walls beginning to buckle under the repeated weight of the winter snows. The carcasses of roadkilled deer were left to decay by the side of the county highway, because there was no budget anymore for the guy whose minimum-wage job it had once been to drive out in his pickup and scrape them up with a shovel.

Every year, the population of Copper Falls shrank just a little bit more as people gave up, lost hope, fled south in search of easier lives—or didn’t, and died where they sat. Bird had taken a glance at the numbers. Even before Lizzie Ouellette turned up with her face blown off in the house beside Copperbrook Lake, life expectancy in this rural county was well below average, for the usual reasons. Accidents. Suicides. Opioids.

He got out of the car and mounted the steps below the awning, the door squealing on its hinges as he pushed it open. The junkyard was still burning, the air still faintly acrid, even here at the edge of town. The scents inside the trailer—shampoo, peroxide, something vaguely, chemically grapefruity—were pleasant by comparison.