Archie shuffled forward and stared down at the object on Susan’s palm. It was rusted metal and looked like a key, but it was tiny—the size of a tack. Like something that would open a very small door.

“What is it?” Archie asked.

“Search me,” Susan said.

Chapter 16

CHAPTER

16

The drizzle was relentless. It was the kind of rain that got in your eyes and streamed down your cheeks, so everyone always looked like they were crying. Archie had gone home and changed into corduroys. That was one of the things you learned living in Portland—avoid wet denim. The wicking action of the cotton carried the water upward so wet cuffs would bleed up to your knees. The denim leeched heat from your body like a cold bath. When they found missing people dead from hypothermia in the snow, and they were wearing jeans, they weren’t hikers. They were walkers. Tourists. Snow hikers didn’t wear jeans. They wore wool hats and thermal underwear and polypropylene.

It was two in the morning, and the crowd was still working on the seawall at Waterfront Park. The mild weather that had been causing the snowmelt had chilled, but only to the low forties, far above freezing. Gravity was pulling the runoff from every mountain stream straight down into the valley.

Archie was wearing brown leather shoes. He imagined his boots out in the river somewhere, floating next to the incongruous glut of crap that the flooding had knotted together: empty beer bottles, logs, lighters, condoms, plastic bottle caps, water jugs, and the occasional lost Croc. The leather shoes laced up to his ankles. Clarks. Debbie had told him once that they had gone out of style around 1980, but Archie had a soft spot for them.

The entire Japanese American Plaza was cordoned off with crime tape. Judging by the flashlight beams, there were fifty cops down there at least. Some of them knew Henry. Most probably didn’t. But that’s how it was. If one of your own was hurt, you showed up. Never mind that it was the middle of the night and a state of emergency had been declared. Fifty cops. Too many, Archie thought.

They all knew Archie. He tried not to think about that now. Gretchen Lowell had brought him more than his share of infamy. Within the ranks of the Portland Police Department, he was a ghost or a prophet. The ones who thought he was a phantom back from the dead avoided eye contact. The ones who thought he was some super cop, brimming with serial-killer know-how—they wouldn’t leave him alone. They thought he was smart and brave and lucky.

He was none of those things.

Not lucky, anyway. Certainly not that. Everyone around him suffered, one way or another.

Now Archie had to make up for that, had to find a way to save Henry. He couldn’t do it standing there alone in the rain.