She hurried back to Archie and Claire. Claire was just dropping her phone in her jacket pocket. “I just tried him again,” Claire said. She gave Archie a steely look. “We need to call in backup. This isn’t like him.”

Susan grabbed Archie by the elbow and motioned for them to follow her. She led them around the crowd to the park bench. Then, to give them a reason to stand there, she pretended to throw something away in the trash bin between where they stood and the bench.

“Try Henry now,” she said to Claire.

Claire looked confused, but pulled her phone out again, and, with a doubtful glance at Susan, tapped a button.

“Wait,” Susan said.

And then they heard it. The sound of a phone ringing. Mere feet away.

Chapter 8

CHAPTER

8

The man in the plastic wasn’t talking. Archie had him by the shoulders, the plastic slippery and crinkling under his hands. The man just stared at him, lids peeled back, nostrils quivering, his few yellowed teeth exposed behind bared, chapped lips.

“Where did you get the phone?” Archie asked again.

Nothing.

Archie wanted to shake him, to wrestle the truth from him. Archie knew how to hurt someone. Gretchen had taught him a thousand ways to hurt someone.

The phone had fallen off the man’s lap when Archie had lifted him from his seat, skidding along the concrete. Claire had scrambled after it and now was scrolling through the call log.

“The only recent activity is the conversation with you, and then when we all started phoning to find him,” she said.

Archie bunched the plastic tightly in his fists and pulled his hands closer together, so that the plastic sheeting was wrapped firmly around the man’s torso, squeezing him. The man’s upper lip twitched but he still said nothing. Did he not speak English? What, then? They didn’t have time to find a translator. Archie needed to get a reaction out of him.

“The phone belongs to a cop,” Archie said. The man’s eyes widened further, revealing two things. One, he spoke English. Two, he hadn’t known Henry was a cop. The man glanced over Archie’s shoulder, north. He was on the verge of breaking. “If anything has happened to him, you will be in a world of hurt.”

“Mighty Willamette,” the man said gruffly. “Beautiful friend. I am learning. I am practicing. To say your name.”

“What the fuck?” said Claire.

“It’s carved onto one of the stones at the Japanese American Plaza,” Susan said. “At the north end of the park, by the Steel Bridge.”

“The phone was on the sacred ground,” the man said. “There was no one attached.”

Archie heard Susan say his name.