Susan’s desk at the Herald was on the fifth floor and if she got up and walked thirty feet and really squinted she had a view of The Heathman Hotel across the street. It wasn’t really worth the effort. Mostly Susan stayed in her seat, where she pounded out her quirky crime roundup column, in between searching for a new job on Monster.com and looking on eBay for the red velvet blazer that Tom Ford designed for Gucci in 1995. She’d agreed to write the column in a rare moment of job insecurity, and had been disheartened at how quickly it had taken off. It turned out that Oregonians loved themselves some gore, the weirder the better. Her first column was about a Ukrainian chemistry student who had a habit of dipping his gum in citric acid to make the flavor last longer, and then died after he accidentally dunked his bubble gum in the explosives he was using for his experiments. He blew off half his face. You couldn’t make this stuff up. She still got letters about that one.

It was an easy job. She got the international stories off the wire or the Internet, and turned up the local horror herself. An old skeleton in a slough, for instance.

Today’s headline? THE DEAD GIRL ON THE OSTRICH.

She’d just e-mailed it to her editor when the flowers came.

Technically, the receptionists downstairs were supposed to call before they sent up a visitor. But they never did. Receptionists always hated Susan. She didn’t know why.

Susan heard Derek Rogers cluck his disapproval from a few desks down before she even saw the flower shop guy.

The Herald was that quiet—it was like working in a museum. Especially since all the buyouts and layoffs started. The city was flooding and the newsroom was so quiet that Susan could hear the toilet flush in the men’s room all the way over in editorial. Derek sat a few desks over from her, and she swore she could hear him when he swallowed. There was something about the acoustics of that place, that huge open floor plan, all that carpet. Miles of carpet. There were over a thousand chemicals used in the manufacture of carpet. Between the central nervous system damage from the fumes and the radiation from all the cell phones on that floor, Susan was waiting for the day they’d all start bleeding out their eyes.

She straightened up and spun her task chair around.

Don, the flower shop guy, looked like he’d just gotten off an Alaskan crab fishing boat: black fisherman bibs, rubber boots, and a yellow rain slicker. He had one of those full beards that all the men in Portland decided to grow about a year ago, and he was a giant, so he could sort of sell the fisherman thing. But Susan was still pretty sure he’d never been on a boat.