A dead body had been found on the carousel.

Susan smiled. Sometimes this stuff just wrote itself.

She finished slogging down the hill and made her way through the pretty white wooden archway to the fairway.

The cops standing around the carousel looked miserable. Hunched over, their black rain ponchos lifting in the wind, they reminded Susan of crows loitering around a carcass.

All but Detective Archie Sheridan.

He was standing away from the others, wearing one of those coats with fur-trimmed hoods that you get at army surplus stores before expeditions to the Arctic.

It was fifty degrees. Practically tropical for January, but he had his hood up. She only knew it was Archie because of how he was holding himself perfectly still, one hand in his pocket, the other around a huge paper cup of coffee, just watching. And because he was alone.

He looked over and saw her and held up the coffee cup in a sort of absentminded wave. His hangdog face was as creased as ever, crooked nose, heavy lids, but he had color to his skin again, and his eyes had more life. A green scarf covered up the horizontal scar on his neck. His brown curls poked in odd angles around his forehead.

“Is it her?” Susan asked him.

“Looks like it,” he said. “Robbins will issue an official ID from the ME’s office.”

Stephanie Towner had been reported missing two days before. The cops had found her car in the parking lot at the Bishop’s Close, an estate garden along thirteen acres of high river bluffs on the west side. Portlanders liked to take peaceful walks there when they weren’t crouching to take pictures of plants with their iPhones. The cops had found Towner’s purse at the top of a slick of mud where it appeared someone had taken a header down the riverbank. You could blame Darwinism. Or you could blame the bottle of wine her husband had reported that she’d had before she left. Maybe a little of both.

“I thought she drowned,” Susan said.

The corners of Archie’s mouth went up slightly. It had taken Susan a year to recognize the expression as a smile. “I think she did,” he said.

She followed his gaze to the carousel. It was housed in an octagonal-roofed pavilion that was open on all sides. Fifteen or twenty seagulls fought for space on the roof. They shifted their weight from one foot to another and squawked nervously. The iron fence that ringed the ride was open and Susan walked inside. One of the poncho-wearing cops put a hand out to stop her. “Not on the platform,” he said, jerking his head toward the muddy footprints on the carousel’s oak flooring.