The Night Season (20 page)

CHAPTER

41

“Wipe your feet,”
Gloria Larson said. She looked regal. Not what Archie had expected at all. For one, she was white.

“This is my friend Archie,” Susan said. “He’s a police detective. Do you remember me?”

Gloria turned and padded back into her apartment, gesturing for them to follow her. “I’m making tea,” she said.

Archie wiped his feet, and Susan took off her rainbow rain boots and left them by the front door.

“Sit,” she said from the kitchen, and Archie and Susan took seats on a striped sofa in the apartment’s main room. “Chamomile or peppermint?” she asked.

He didn’t even like tea. “Chamomile,” he said.

“It will help clear your lungs,” she said. “I’ll add some honey.”

He wasn’t sure how she knew he was sick. He hadn’t even coughed.

“Peppermint, please,” Susan said. “Can I help you?”

“I’m fine, dear,” Gloria said.

The TV was on. They were running the clip of Archie at the press conference. “I will find him.” Then the screen showed a photograph of Patrick Lifton.

Gloria came around the kitchen bar with two pretty teacups on saucers. She set one in front of Archie and one in front of Susan. “Let it steep,” she said.

She went back into the kitchen and prepared her own cup.

Archie looked down at the coffee table. There was a half-eaten Jolly Rancher next to his teacup.

Susan saw it, too. She pried it off the table and put it in her mouth. “That’s mine,” she said.

Gloria returned, set her tea on an end table, and took a seat in a striped chair across from Archie.

“McBee’s first name, what is it, Elroy?” Susan asked.

“Elroy McBee,” Gloria said, but Archie couldn’t tell if she was confirming it or merely repeating it.

He sat forward a little. “What makes you think the skeleton in the slough is this person McBee?”

“There were three,” she said, peering into her teacup. “Only three men who went missing. It was children mostly.”

“The other two were black, weren’t they?” Susan said. “McBee was white.”

Gloria turned and looked at the TV. It was a different photograph of Patrick Lifton now. A snapshot of him with his arms wrapped around a black Labrador retriever.

Gloria looked concerned. “That poor boy. Did he drown?”

“No,” Archie said.

“Is he your son?” she asked.

The question startled Archie. “No,” he said. “He’s missing. We’re looking for him.”

She was twisting the bottom of her cardigan around her fingers. She stopped and folded her hands in her lap and looked off toward the door, like she was expecting someone.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Larson?” Susan asked.

Gloria looked at Susan and smiled. “I went to watch them float the Fremont Bridge in yesterday,” she said. “We packed a lunch and took the children. They floated the whole center piece down the river on a barge and lifted it into place. It was marvelous.”

“That was in 1973,” Archie said to Susan.

His phone rang. It was Flannigan. This exercise appeared to be about over anyway. “Excuse me,” he said, picking up the call.

“Hey,” Archie said to Flannigan. “What’s up?”

“It’s Carter,” Flannigan said. “That National Guard soldier. He’s dead.”

“Are you married?” Gloria asked him.

Archie plugged his free ear and turned away from her. Carter? Dead? They had just seen him, hadn’t they? “What happened?” he asked Flannigan.

Flannigan sighed. “He wasn’t responding to his radio, so they went looking for him. Found him facedown near the fire station on the east bank. There’s a mark. But not on his hands. It’s on his face.”

Archie should have closed down the waterfront. Screw the seawall. He should have gotten everyone out of there. Let the whole city flood. It was just property. “I’ll be right down,” Archie said.

He hung up.

Susan had paled. “What’s going on?”

“
I will find him
,” Archie said on the TV. “
I. Will. Find. Him
.”

They had taken separate cars.

“Carter’s dead,” Archie said. “You should go home.”

Susan’s brow knitted. She swallowed hard. “I have work to do,” she said. “I need more quotes. I have to fact-check.”

Archie caught her gaze. “Stay away from the river, okay?”

She nodded.

He stood. “I have to go,” he said to Gloria. “Thanks for the tea.” He had yet to take a sip.

“Are you?” Gloria asked again. “Married?”

“I’m divorced,” Archie said.

“Have you ever had an affair?”

“Only one,” Archie said.

Gloria lowered her chin girlishly, her white hair falling around her face. “I’ve had more than that,” she said.

CHAPTER

42

Carter had died
trying to radio for help. He was facedown on the concrete, one arm outstretched, his walkie-talkie a few feet away where it had landed as he fell. He had probably watched it for a while as his body shut down. Heard the radio calls. Watched the red light blink steadily.

The river lapped over the bank, sending a current washing over the fire station driveway where Carter lay, and leaving a sticky froth of residual pollution on the pavement. The water had shorted out the walkie-talkie’s batteries. It had still been working when they found him. It was what led the Guard soldiers who went looking for him to the body—they had heard the static of the radio. But it was dead, too, now.

Rain tickled the back of Archie’s neck. The sky was settling into dusk.

Carter’s eyes were open. Just slits. His eyelashes were beaded with water.

Flannigan glanced nervously at the river. “We need to move him out of here,” he said. He was the third person to say it since Archie had arrived. The fire station driveway was twenty feet above the river, protected by a steep foliage-covered bank that dropped to the river below. Today there was no bank. The spindly trees that grew at its top swayed and shimmered, one already snapped in half by the current.

The river sounded like thunder. Chopper blades beat overhead. And louder than all of that was the squawk of gulls. They danced at the driveway’s edge, taking flight a few feet in the air, but always returning, their eyes on Carter’s body.

They were hungry.

“In a minute,” Archie said.

He squatted next to Carter and examined the pea-sized red lesion that marked his right cheekbone. The lesion was bigger than the others, but it was also on a more sensitive area. The killer had gotten the others to handle the blue-ring somehow. But not Carter. Carter had the thing thrown at him.

A film of water and foam washed over the pavement, causing the fingers of Carter’s outstretched hand to move slightly.

Carter had been found within the same time frame of being poisoned that Henry had been. But Henry was still alive, for now, and Carter wasn’t.

Archie glanced around the wet pavement. There was nothing there. Any potential evidence had been lifted and taken by the river. The kid’s face was all over the news. Something would turn up. He’d been out in public. At Oaks Park. People had seen him. Someone would spot him now.

“Hey.” Robbins stepped up beside Archie, the Tyvek suit he’d put on over the one he’d worn to the press conference already streaked with rain. “We need to move him out of here.”

“Okay,” Archie said.

Archie’s phone rang. He let it ring a few times before he checked the caller ID, but he snapped it to his cheek the second he saw who it was.

“It’s me,” Claire said. “You need to get to the hospital.”

CHAPTER

43

Susan stared at
her laptop screen. Now that she had her laptop, she didn’t need Archie’s computer, so she’d decided to work in the conference room. She could spread out in there, and the chairs were more comfortable. Also, she’d managed to find a leftover burrito in the fridge, which didn’t seem to be working anyway.

She’d updated the editor at the
Times
about Carter. They were sending the paper’s Northwest Bureau chief down from Seattle. The story was now too big for a stringer, he said.

The cursor in front of her blinked. Crap. She couldn’t even figure out how to finish the story she’d pitched. She’d never sweated over thirty column inches so hard in her life.

Heil came in, saw Susan, and stopped.

“You’re still here?” he asked.

“You’re still here, too,” she pointed out.

His forehead creased. “I work here,” he said.

Good point. “I’m almost done,” she said. He was wearing a jacket. Not the police windbreaker this time—a black jacket that zipped up the front. “Are you going home?” she asked.

“I finally got in touch with some local aquarium supply shop employees.” He held up a list. “Aquarium nerds. I’ve got interviews with five of them.”

She saw the bottom address. Division and Twentieth. “That’s on my way home,” she said. “Want me to do it?”

Heil glanced at the list in his hand. “You can read that from there?”

“You write big, like a girl.”

He smirked and pocketed the list. “Go to the Academy,” he said. “Work patrol. Make detective. And then call me.” He walked to the fridge and opened it. After a few seconds he said, “Did you eat my burrito?”

Susan cringed. The foil was still in front of her. “I didn’t know that belonged to anyone,” she said.

“It was in a bag with my name on it,” Heil said. “Written big. Like a girl.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“I’ll get something while I’m out,” Heil said with a sigh. “Something’s got to be open.” He turned and walked to the door, and then turned back.

“You okay?” he said. “About Carter?”

“Sure,” Susan said, turning away so he couldn’t see her face. “It’s not like I knew him.”

Heil left, and she tried to get back to her story, but her mind kept returning to Carter. The
Times
wanted news. A National Guard soldier murdered. But it didn’t do him justice.

She opened Safari and went to eBay to check on the key. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular. It was just something to do. But as soon as the key appeared on her screen, she unplugged her laptop and went searching for Ngyun.

She found him at his desk typing a message on an octopus fan chat board.

“That key on eBay?” she said, turning her laptop so he could see the screen. “Someone just bid ten dollars for it.”

He took her laptop and set it on his desk, and she came around behind his chair and looked over his shoulder.

“Doesn’t really mean anything,” Ngyun said. “Except he really wants the key.”

“Check out the user name,” Susan said, pointing at the screen.

Vanport48.

“He’s willing to spend ten bucks on an old key,” Ngyun said. “I think it’s clear he’s interested in Vanport.”

“Can you find out who it is?” she asked.

“Like contact eBay and have them tell me the guy’s real name and contact info?” Ngyun said.

“Exactly,” Susan said.

“Nope.”

“Really?” Susan said.

“Not without a warrant,” Ngyun said. “And reckless financial decisions aren’t probable cause.”

“I thought the government had access to all our online accounts.”

“Homeland Security, maybe,” Ngyun said. “Not us. And you’re not supposed to know about that.”

She saw his eyes flick back to his own monitor.

“Come on,” Susan said. “There’s something you can do.”

Ngyun hesitated. “Okay,” he said. “A lot of people have a user name and stick with it for all their accounts. I, for instance, am huggybearxp for almost everything not work-related. This guy probably uses Vanport48 for other things. I can keep an eye out for it. If I see him in any of the cephalopod-related chat rooms, we might have probable cause.” He started typing on his keyboard. The noise his fingers made tapping the keys sounded a lot like rain. “I rock at this,” he said.

Susan was satisfied.

She took her laptop back to the conference room, plugged it back in, and resumed staring. Carter was dead. And now he just lay there on the page. She had written that he’d been instrumental in the river rescue, that he’d recovered the body of Dennis Keller. But his personality was missing. Then something occurred to her.

After a few minutes of browsing, she had what she needed. “Alex Paul Carter grew up in Pendleton, Oregon, where he was a lifeguard, varsity swimmer, and Boy Scout. He won a gold belt buckle for calf roping at the State 4-H rodeo competition.”

She stared at the screen some more.

Then she clicked send, packed up, and headed home.