So a report of a drowning in Lake Oswego did not generate the sort of media excitement of a bona fide homicide. There were no helicopters. No news vans. No telephoto lenses aimed from passing boats. Just two LO cops, in their head-to-toe navy-blue uniforms, and someone in street clothes Archie assumed was a crime tech or medical examiner hunched over the corpse.

The two LO cops headed over toward them.

“Major Case,” Henry said, showing them his badge. Archie didn’t move to show his badge. In situations like this, he let Henry do the talking.

The two cops were both men. They recognized Archie. He could always tell. There was that jerk of surprise and the awkward half attempt at hiding it. The cops were both in their early thirties, a decade younger than Archie, and still swaggering with the confidence of youth. Their silver shirt pins read E. LEONARD and S. VITELLO.

“What’s Major Case want with this?” Leonard asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Henry said with an impatient smile. He pocketed his badge and he and Archie bypassed the two cops and started down the grassy slope to the lake.

“Careful of the dock,” Leonard called. “The leaves are slippery.”

He was right. The leaves had coated the dock and begun the process of entropy, forming a primordial sludge. Archie walked with Henry, moving along the wooden slats gingerly, like an old man, aware of the cops standing in the yard watching him. He wondered fleetingly if he had disappointed them. In the flesh, Archie had the feeling that he was not so heroic-seeming as the papers sometimes made him out to be.

The woman kneeling next to the body didn’t glance up. She was a decade older than Archie, and had her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair in a ponytail, tucked under a black watch cap. She was wearing jeans and rubber-soled duck-hunting boots and a wool red-checked lumberjack shirt over a thick cable-knit sweater. Dr. L.L.Bean.