Archie had to admit, it did look like a freckle. Or a thousand other things. “She was in the water awhile, beaten up,” Archie said. In fact, the body was covered with scratches and lesions where she’d run into who knows what on her way downriver. She’d been lucky she hadn’t ended up in the propeller of a boat. Then there were the fish who’d been feasting on her.

Archie glanced down at the floor. The water was almost to the top of his boots. A sealed Tupperware container bobbed by.

“There was nothing under her fingernails when they brought her in,” Robbins said. “No injuries to her fingertips. She would have grasped at something. If she slid down that bank, she would have clawed to save herself. There are scratches on the back of the hand. But not the palms.”

Archie was still having trouble seeing how all this added up. “You think she was dead when she went in the water. That someone rolled her into the river.” But he’d seen pink froth around her mouth and nose, both at the park and in the morgue, a common indication of drowning. “What about the frothing?” he said.

Robbins nodded. “Foam is a sign a person was alive when they went in the water, sure,” he said. “But it can also be caused by a heart attack before a person went in the water.” He leaned over the corpse’s head and tenderly peeled back one eyelid, revealing a vacant, bloodshot eye, the white of it peppered with tiny scarlet dots. “Petechial hemorrhages,” he said. “Rare in drowning. But common in other asphyxial deaths. Respiratory paralysis, for instance. That would cause a heart attack.”

“Stage five,” Susan said. “Of drowning.”

“The order is important,” Robbins said.

“Puncture wound,” Archie said. “Heart attack. River.”

Robbins nodded slowly.

“Something or someone punctured her,” Archie said. He knew what Robbins was driving at. “You think she was poisoned? Based on a dot on her palm?”

“Based on these.” He produced two printed digital photographs from his pants pocket and placed them on Stephanie Towner’s pimpled thigh. “They’re autopsy photos of Megan Parr and Zak Korber.”

Two other people who’d drowned in Portland that week. Each had been swept away. No witnesses.

Both photographs featured a hand, palm up, a yellow arrow pointing to a small brown dot. It looked like a freckle.

“It’s the same mark,” Archie said.

“I missed it the first time around,” Robbins said.

“What’s going on?” Susan asked.

Someone was poisoning people and pushing them in the river.

Archie looked over at her. “Off the record,” he reminded her. “Remember that.”

She nodded, and the skull made a tinny noise as it slid an inch in the aluminum pan and settled against the rim.

Archie turned back to Robbins. “Tox screen?” he asked.

“My morgue is underwater,” Robbins reminded him. “But I’ll farm it out pronto.”