There was a commotion and soon a parade of firefighters appeared, coming down the stairs.

“It took them long enough,” Robbins said, and he went off to bark instructions at them.

Archie returned his gaze to the photographs.

The spots were all on their hands. It was an odd place for an injection point. Had they reached up to protect themselves, exposing their palms in the process? And then another scenario occurred to him. They had been holding it. That would explain the hand thing. They had been holding something that punctured them. Something booby-trapped? Something they had picked up?

Archie couldn’t keep people away from the river. Not when half the city was down there, sandbagging to save downtown.

The alarms stopped. All at once, like someone had thrown a switch. Archie had almost gotten used to the noise.

What time was it?

Archie felt a sudden gnawing in the pit of his stomach.

Where was Henry? He should have been there by now.

Archie hit the autodial. It rang and rang.

But Henry didn’t pick up.

Chapter 7

CHAPTER

7

There were fifteen hundred volunteers at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, filling and stacking sandbags in the rain. There were also a few hundred city employees, several dozen National Guard troops, and a few thousand people, give or take, just getting in the way. The goal was to build a four-foot-tall, mile-long temporary wall to keep the river from flooding downtown. This involved a lot of plywood, lumber, plastic, and concrete Jersey highway barriers. How it was going to hold, Susan had no idea.

But by the looks of the water level, they didn’t have a lot of time.

Bright construction lights augmented the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps that lined the park’s concrete promenade. The light illuminated the rain, which fell in a bleak drizzle.

A Coast Guard chopper thwapped by overhead.

Archie was on foot. The morgue was six short blocks away, and the streets were chaos. Susan hadn’t bothered asking if she could come. She had just loped after him. She zipped up her slicker and dug her hands in her pockets, finding coins and gum and lint.

The sandbagging stations were set up at intermittent points along the length of the park bordering the Willamette. On the other side of the park, just a hundred yards from the river, Portland’s downtown skyline stretched up into cloud cover.

“There’s Claire,” Archie said.

Detective Claire Masland, tiny to begin with, was dwarfed by a knee-length raincoat with the hood up over her short dark hair. Susan didn’t know how Archie had recognized her. But then, when you spent ten years working on a task force tracking a serial killer, you probably got to know each other’s silhouette. Henry and Claire had been an item for less than a year. But Henry, Archie, and Claire had worked together for ages.

“I found his car,” Claire said.