She could tell by Anne’s shift in posture that Anne knew it, too. “What happened?” Anne asked.

“National Guard called in another body,” Archie said.

An e-mail popped up on the computer screen—a response from the Times editor.

“Let’s go take a look,” Anne said.

Susan glanced at the e-mail’s subject line. “Need more detail,” it read.

Susan stood up, knocking her knees on Archie’s desk. “Can I come?” she said.

Archie hesitated.

“I’d like to stick with you,” Susan said. She tried to look vulnerable and a little scared. It wasn’t hard.

Archie’s shoulders dropped. “Fine,” he said.

Susan set about gathering up all her personal items—phone, cigarettes, notebook—and then hurried around the desk after them.

“How are you doing?” Anne asked Archie.

“How do I look?” Archie said.

Anne took a step back and looked him up and down. “Better,” she said. “Bad for most people. But good for you.”

Chapter 32

CHAPTER

32

The river was a monster. The break in the rain had done nothing to calm it. If anything, it seemed even fiercer. The water churned with eddies and whirlpools, and ribbons of debris bumped along on the surface.

“So tell me,” Anne said. “What is it you people have done to piss off the good Lord?”

Archie parked next to the patrol car on the east side of the Burnside Bridge. He had filled Anne in on the case en route. Susan had been weirdly quiet, scribbling notes in the backseat.

Heil, who’d followed them from headquarters, pulled up beside them in a green Nissan Cube. It wasn’t police-issue. But it was new, and Heil insisted on driving it.

The bridge was up, always a strange sight, four lanes of road and sidewalk, all at nearly a ninety-degree angle, streetlights almost parallel to the earth. It was closed to traffic, but the caution sawhorses had been blown over and were easy to drive around.

The rain had slowed to a light drizzle—the kind of rain you couldn’t see fall if you looked out a window from inside.

Archie was silent. He didn’t know what to say. Both Anne and Susan occasionally looked at him a little too closely for comfort.

They took the staircase that jackknifed down from the bridge’s pedestrian walkway to the esplanade below, where Officer Chuck Whatley was unspooling yellow plastic crime scene tape with the help of a National Guard soldier.

The sky was the texture and color of freshly poured concrete. This part of the esplanade was high enough that the river lapped at it, but didn’t overflow. The body was under a blanket on the dry side of the pavement. The blanket was the same gray as the sky.