Henry still hadn’t answered his phone. Now it appeared he’d never left the waterfront.

“Something’s happened to him,” Claire said. Only a small tremble in the corners of her mouth gave away that Henry was more than just a colleague to her.

Susan turned away from them and toward the river. There were too many people along the water, all of them moving around, everyone wearing soggy hats or hoods—Henry could be there and they wouldn’t be able to see him. Maybe he’d gotten caught up in the seawall project and had decided to keep working. He could be filling sandbags thirty feet from them right now.

But Susan knew this wasn’t true. Henry would do almost anything for Archie. If he’d said he’d meet him at the morgue, he would have been there. Henry didn’t just not show up.

The rain-beaded plastic sheeting over the seawall flapped in the wind where it hadn’t been secured. The people working on the wall were right on the edge of the river. Usually it was a twenty-foot drop from the promenade to the water, but now what was it? A foot? One misstep and you were in the water, in a fast-moving current. Stage one, Robbins had said. People didn’t cry out. They didn’t wave their arms and shout.

Susan shook the thought from her mind.

Henry was strong and stubborn and big. He wouldn’t drown. Unless he’d been poisoned.

Stephanie Towner. Megan Parr. Zak Korber. They had all been murdered near the river.

A sandbag brigade, made up of men and women in wet coats, their hair plastered to their heads, passed sandbags to the wall. They talked in the hushed, serious tones of people who were working on deadline and could not waste a minute. So many people had turned out to help, it made Susan feel proud of her city.

If there was a killer loose down there, even the possibility of it, shouldn’t these people be warned?

She looked around at all of them. The slickers shiny in the construction lights. National Guard troops in black floppy rain hats. The old and the young. And that’s when the transient caught Susan’s eye. There were always transients at Waterfront Park. They sat on the benches at the north end by the Steel Bridge, and slept on the ribbon of grass in front of the Japanese American Historical Plaza.

This guy was sitting on a park bench, wrapped in a piece of wet plastic sheeting that looked like the stuff they were using for the seawall project. What caught Susan’s attention was the brief pale blue glow of an LCD screen. She took a step toward him and squinted. She couldn’t be sure. He was ensconced in plastic, like something out of the freezer. Maybe it was just a reflection?