She pulled it away from him. “They haven’t sent me a stringer badge yet.”

“Ian’s pissed,” Derek said. “You should have come to us.”

“Ian fired me,” Susan said. She finished typing the sentence she was writing and clicked send.

“I have to go,” she said, snapping her laptop shut. She lifted her chin at Archie and Robbins, who were in conversation near the podium. “I have to talk to my vast array of insider sources.”

She left Derek and made a beeline for the front of the room, which required a lot of dodging and weaving. She tripped on one laptop cord, stepped on three feet, and beaned a kneeling KGW cameraman with her elbow. Archie and Robbins were leaning up against the wall. They stopped talking when they saw her. People did that a lot.

“Any news on Ralph?” she asked Robbins.

He squinted at her. “I really only understand about twenty percent of what you say.”

“The Vanport skeleton,” Archie said.

Robbins blinked. “Since when have we decided he had anything to do with Vanport?”

“Timing’s right,” Susan said. “Location’s right.”

“Give or take ten years and five miles,” Robbins said. “The age of the bones is an educated guess. I’ve been busy with the fresher bodies. There’s a nine-year-old boy missing, you know. Not sixty years ago. Right now.”

Susan’s face burned.

“I got a tip,” she said. “From a reader.”

Robbins crossed his arms. Archie was silent.

“She gave me a name,” Susan said. “McBee. Fifteen bodies were recovered after the Vanport flood. Fourteen more were reported missing and never found. Elroy McBee. He was a firefighter with the Vanport Fire Department. Last seen two hours before the dike broke. His body was never recovered.”

“Is this supposed to matter to me because I’m black?” Robbins asked.

Susan sputtered for a second. “No.” She dug around in her bag. “Look at this,” she said, holding out the page she’d printed in Archie’s office. “A lot of people wonder why it took so long to sound the alarm when the dike broke? I found this story.” She told them the story of W. E. Williams and the stockyards, and searched for a moral that would serve her purpose. “He didn’t have to call back. He’d done his part. But he went the extra mile.”

“Her source suffers from dementia,” Archie said.

Susan slid him a look. “It comes and goes,” she said.

“We have more important business right now,” Archie said. “This can wait.”

They still didn’t get it.

“Find out anything about those keys?” Susan asked.

“Flannigan is on it,” Archie said. “He showed some pictures to a locksmith, but didn’t turn up anything.”