Susan smiled resplendently. “A plucky girl journalist with a chip on her shoulder and a recovering Vicodin-addicted cop with a dark secret who solve crimes together.”

“You’re writing a book about you and Archie Sheridan?”

“My agent says it’s very marketable.”

Derek lifted his hand and laughed into it until his eyes watered. “What does that make you?” He cackled some more, already pleased with what he was about to say. “Dr. Watson?”

Susan gave him a hard look.

His hand dropped and he cleared his throat. “Seriously. What if nothing exciting happens?”

Susan reached up and touched the pea-sized scar on her cheek where a crazy masked murderer had stabbed her with a piercing needle. When she didn’t cover it with makeup, it looked like a huge zit.

“Something exciting always happens,” she said.

And then, as if Susan had willed it, her phone rang.

Chapter 5

CHAPTER

5

Stephanie Towner had been murdered. This was the only fact that Archie had been able to make out when Lorenzo Robbins had called him. It wasn’t even a fact; it was conjecture. But Robbins liked to be dramatic. Once, he had announced that an eight-year-old boy had been murdered by his ten-year-old sister. When he got everyone’s attention, he went on to explain that the sister had unwittingly passed along the parasite that had spread to the boy’s brain and killed him. So when Robbins reported this news about Stephanie Towner, Archie knew to follow up.

“Define ‘murdered,’” Archie said, holding his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder. He unlocked the door to his apartment, walked inside, tossed that day’s mail in a pile of other unopened envelopes, and took off his coat. He’d left the lights on. It was something he did now. He hadn’t mentioned it to Rosenberg.

There was noise on the phone line: voices, what sounded like furniture scraping. “I don’t have time to talk on the phone,” Robbins said, “just get down here as soon as you can.”

The line went dead.

Archie’s windows looked north, toward industrial Portland, where ships loaded with grain from the Midwest set off for Asia and then returned loaded with Toyotas. The port hadn’t flooded yet. That was something.

Farther north was the Columbia River, and across it, Vancouver, Washington, where his family lived. “The ’Couve, as it was known, was one-third the size of Portland, and seemed even smaller. A lot of Portlanders had never been to Vancouver, except to drive through it on the way north to Seattle, or to chaperone a school field trip to historic Fort Vancouver. It was twenty minutes from Archie’s apartment to Debbie’s house, but it felt like another country.

His kids liked Debbie’s new boyfriend. He worked in the wind industry. He’d gotten the kids composting. He probably recycled his used Q-tips.

Archie punched Henry’s name on his autodialer.

It rang once.