Carter had died trying to radio for help. He was facedown on the concrete, one arm outstretched, his walkie-talkie a few feet away where it had landed as he fell. He had probably watched it for a while as his body shut down. Heard the radio calls. Watched the red light blink steadily.

The river lapped over the bank, sending a current washing over the fire station driveway where Carter lay, and leaving a sticky froth of residual pollution on the pavement. The water had shorted out the walkie-talkie’s batteries. It had still been working when they found him. It was what led the Guard soldiers who went looking for him to the body—they had heard the static of the radio. But it was dead, too, now.

Rain tickled the back of Archie’s neck. The sky was settling into dusk.

Carter’s eyes were open. Just slits. His eyelashes were beaded with water.

Flannigan glanced nervously at the river. “We need to move him out of here,” he said. He was the third person to say it since Archie had arrived. The fire station driveway was twenty feet above the river, protected by a steep foliage-covered bank that dropped to the river below. Today there was no bank. The spindly trees that grew at its top swayed and shimmered, one already snapped in half by the current.

The river sounded like thunder. Chopper blades beat overhead. And louder than all of that was the squawk of gulls. They danced at the driveway’s edge, taking flight a few feet in the air, but always returning, their eyes on Carter’s body.

They were hungry.

“In a minute,” Archie said.

He squatted next to Carter and examined the pea-sized red lesion that marked his right cheekbone. The lesion was bigger than the others, but it was also on a more sensitive area. The killer had gotten the others to handle the blue-ring somehow. But not Carter. Carter had the thing thrown at him.

A film of water and foam washed over the pavement, causing the fingers of Carter’s outstretched hand to move slightly.

Carter had been found within the same time frame of being poisoned that Henry had been. But Henry was still alive, for now, and Carter wasn’t.

Archie glanced around the wet pavement. There was nothing there. Any potential evidence had been lifted and taken by the river. The kid’s face was all over the news. Something would turn up. He’d been out in public. At Oaks Park. People had seen him. Someone would spot him now.

“Hey.” Robbins stepped up beside Archie, the Tyvek suit he’d put on over the one he’d worn to the press conference already streaked with rain. “We need to move him out of here.”

“Okay,” Archie said.