It turned out that you could live without a spleen just fine. But the fist-sized organs weren’t exactly useless. Spleens cleaned old red blood cells from the blood supply and produced and stored white blood cells. Those white blood cells produced antibodies when your body needed to fight an infection. If you happened to lose your spleen to a beautiful psychopath, the liver was expected to help take over some of this duty. Unless, of course, your liver happened to be damaged from a two-year-plus addiction to painkillers.

He could feel her still looking at him.

He needed to go, to get to the Mission, he needed her out of the car.

He broke, and turned back to her. “I’m a little busy, Anne.”

Anne picked up her purse and put it on her lap, and reached for the door handle. “You’re a stubborn martyr with a white knight complex,” she said, opening the door. “You know that, right?”

“I want a profile by two,” Archie said as she closed the door.

“You call your doctor if you get any worse,” he heard Anne call as he pulled away.

Chapter 34

CHAPTER

34

There were two Portland Mission buildings on Burnside, three blocks apart. The old mission, founded in 1949, was in a nineteenth-century brick structure with a neon sign in the shape of a lighthouse out front. The new building, the result of a fund-raising campaign, was steel and glass. Mary Riley’s office was in the old building, which was usually used as an emergency shelter for men, but had been opened to all comers during the flood watch.

It was where they had put up Nick and his friends. Mary Riley had them waiting in her office. “Don’t touch anything,” she told Archie before she left him, and he wasn’t sure why, since the office was a tornado of files and books and chipped mugs ringed with coffee sludge.

Nick and his friends—minus the kid who was by now rolling into the hospital morgue—sat on an old couch that looked like it belonged on a porch. Archie took a seat in Mary Riley’s desk chair. One of the plastic armrests was split jaggedly down the middle as though the chair had been heaved against the wall at some point.

Archie was the only one in the room who hadn’t showered and changed in the last twenty-four hours. He almost didn’t recognize the women without their soaked shrouds. He could see now that, in fact, they didn’t look anything alike. One had dark hair and bright, even features, the other had bleached-out hair and was clearly older and more street-weary.

Archie took down all their names this time, writing them in a notebook open on his thigh.