“I’ll start over there,” the cop added. “We’ll meet in the middle.”

He could not believe his luck as the cop trotted away into the darkness, leaving him with Susan.

The trill in his chest started.

“So I bet that homeless guy is long gone by now,” Susan said.

The cop was gone, the only sign of her a bobbing flashlight beam.

He moved forward, catching up to Susan, pressing his feet, heel to toe, oh so gently on the grass. His blood pulsed in rhythm with the river.

“I handcuffed him to the bench,” the cop said from the other end of the plaza.

“Should we go back for him?” Susan asked.

“Let him get wet,” the cop said.

He was just two steps behind the reporter now—they were completely in sync. Susan moved the penlight in a grid pattern on the ground in front of her. Each search pattern took eons and he reveled in their secret closeness.

He could kill her. In a heartbeat. He would not even break a sweat doing it.

“You know, the plaza was dedicated in 1990, dedicated to the memory of those who were deported to internment camps during World War II,” she said. She seemed nervous now, busying herself with chatter. He wanted to believe that she sensed he was there, that animal instinct kicking in, the peripheral anxiety of prey. “There was a thriving Japantown in Portland before the war,” she said. “But then residents were sent to camps and most of them lost everything. Their businesses were closed. When they got out, there weren’t very many reasons to stick around.”

The cop didn’t answer.

“Did you know that the original state constitution made it illegal for a black person to step foot into Oregon?” Susan asked. Her head turned down, another grid pattern. “It’s no wonder people thought the Vanport flood was some sort of conspiracy.”

He stiffened at the word.

Vanport.

Susan stopped and her head lifted. He could see her breathing quicken and her shoulders draw back.

“Keep looking, Susan,” said the cop from the darkness.

“I am,” groaned Susan, shining her penlight on the stone embankment to her left. “What are we looking for exactly?”

“A clue,” the cop said. “Signs of a struggle. That sort of thing.”

Vanport.

Her leather purse was open, and she wore it across her shoulder so the purse itself rested against her hip.

He cupped his hand over the edge of it and let the item drop from his fingers.

Then he took a step back, and then another.

Chapter 11

CHAPTER

11

Susan paused at the stone. It was about four feet tall, jagged and flat, and flecked with minerals.

She shone the penlight that Claire had given her over the last two lines of the poem carved on its surface:

Why complain when it rains?
This is what it means to be free.