The Night Season (3 page)

CHAPTER

3

“Any nightmares?” Sarah
Rosenberg asked.

A curtain of water fell outside her office window. Archie’s socks were sodden, his pants damp almost to the knees. More coffee would have been good. But Rosenberg only had tea.

“I’m okay,” he said. His gun pressed into his hip.

“Really?” she said. Her dark hair was knotted in back and held in place with a pencil, and she was wearing sweats. No makeup. She’d been thinking he wouldn’t show.

“No nightmares,” he said.

She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

After what he’d been through, he could see why she didn’t believe him. “I know this is hard to fathom,” he said, “but I’ve actually been doing pretty well.”

It had been three months since his last appointment with Rosenberg, six months since Gretchen Lowell had gone to prison the second time. He was back at work. He’d stayed off painkillers. His physical wounds had healed.

“You haven’t been in touch with her?” Rosenberg asked, leveling her gaze at him.

“No,” Archie said. “From what I hear, she hasn’t spoken a word since she was booked.” He glanced away from Rosenberg, out the window, where a gnarled plum tree glistened dark and wet, its last handful of yellow leaves a miracle against the wind. “She just lies there.”

“Is she trying for an insanity defense?” Rosenberg asked.

Archie shrugged, and returned his attention to the room. “She’s not crazy. She just likes killing people. She’ll get the death penalty this time.”

A gust of wind shook the old house, and the windows rattled. Rosenberg’s mouth tightened. She reached out and centered the tissue box on the coffee table. Archie was no psychiatrist, but he’d been a cop long enough to know the heebie-jeebies when he saw them.

“It’s just the wind,” he said.

Rosenberg’s eyes flicked up. “What’s it like out there?” she asked.

“Bad,” Archie said. It was only going to get worse.

“I was surprised you came.”

He hadn’t even considered canceling. He’d made a commitment. “We had an appointment.”

He could see something shift in her shoulders, a glance at the clock on her desk. Their fifty minutes were up. “That’s it,” Archie said. Rosenberg nodded and followed him as he walked from the office to the front hall, where his rain boots sat dripping on the Oriental rug Rosenberg used as a front mat. He pulled them on, the rubber pressing the wet wool to his feet. They were useless anyway.

“How’s Susan?”

Archie glanced up, startled. “Why ask about her?”

Rosenberg frowned innocently. “I read her column.”

Archie knew Rosenberg never asked anything casually. He looked at her for a moment, then answered the question. “Working on her book, scrambling for stories. Same old thing.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

Archie cleared his throat. “I’ll see you in three months, Sarah.”

She held out her hand and he shook it. “You can come sooner, if you like,” she said.

“Stay off the roads.”

Rosenberg opened the heavy front door for him. “Henry said you moved,” she said.

So Henry was still checking in on him. “I did.”

“Where to?”

Archie looked out at the rain and smiled. “Higher ground,” he said.

CHAPTER

4

Susan’s desk at
the
Herald
was on the fifth floor and if she got up and walked thirty feet and really squinted she had a view of The Heathman Hotel across the street. It wasn’t really worth the effort. Mostly Susan stayed in her seat, where she pounded out her quirky crime roundup column, in between searching for a new job on Monster.com and looking on eBay for the red velvet blazer that Tom Ford designed for Gucci in 1995. She’d agreed to write the column in a rare moment of job insecurity, and had been disheartened at how quickly it had taken off. It turned out that Oregonians loved themselves some gore, the weirder the better. Her first column was about a Ukrainian chemistry student who had a habit of dipping his gum in citric acid to make the flavor last longer, and then died after he accidentally dunked his bubble gum in the explosives he was using for his experiments. He blew off half his face. You couldn’t make this stuff up. She still got letters about that one.

It was an easy job. She got the international stories off the wire or the Internet, and turned up the local horror herself. An old skeleton in a slough, for instance.

Today’s headline?
THE DEAD GIRL ON THE OSTRICH
.

She’d just e-mailed it to her editor when the flowers came.

Technically, the receptionists downstairs were supposed to call before they sent up a visitor. But they never did. Receptionists always hated Susan. She didn’t know why.

Susan heard Derek Rogers cluck his disapproval from a few desks down before she even saw the flower shop guy.

The
Herald
was that quiet—it was like working in a museum. Especially since all the buyouts and layoffs started. The city was flooding and the newsroom was so quiet that Susan could hear the toilet flush in the men’s room all the way over in editorial. Derek sat a few desks over from her, and she swore she could hear him when he swallowed. There was something about the acoustics of that place, that huge open floor plan, all that carpet. Miles of carpet. There were over a thousand chemicals used in the manufacture of carpet. Between the central nervous system damage from the fumes and the radiation from all the cell phones on that floor, Susan was waiting for the day they’d all start bleeding out their eyes.

She straightened up and spun her task chair around.

Don, the flower shop guy, looked like he’d just gotten off an Alaskan crab fishing boat: black fisherman bibs, rubber boots, and a yellow rain slicker. He had one of those full beards that all the men in Portland decided to grow about a year ago, and he was a giant, so he could sort of sell the fisherman thing. But Susan was still pretty sure he’d never been on a boat.

His boots squeaked on the carpet.

“It’s getting bad out there,” he said, wiping rain from a ruddy cheek. “No more deliveries.”

“Your shop is across the street,” Susan said.

He handed her the wet bouquet he was holding. There had been more ceremony the first few times he’d come.

Susan looked down at the bouquet. It was prettily arranged in a square glass vase. Purple calla lilies, red berries, surrounding a few fist-sized balls of leaves. For a guy with fingers like sausages, he had a way with floral design. “Is that cabbage?” she asked.

“Decorative winter kale,” he said with a sigh.

“Oh.”

“Seriously,” he said. “Tell your admirer to take a break until after the rain stops. The governor declared a state of emergency today.” He looked around at their sad, empty office. “Don’t you watch TV?” he said.

“I read the
Herald
,” Susan said pointedly. Someone had to.

He shook his head and trudged off toward the elevator, leaving a wet spot on the carpet where he’d been standing.

Derek rolled his task chair next to Susan’s. The musk of his aftershave was overpowering. Stetson. He was the only guy in his twenties Susan knew who even used aftershave. “Leo Reynolds is bad news,” he said, pumping a finger toward the flowers.

True,
she thought.
But I bet he doesn’t use Stetson.

Leo Reynolds had sent Susan a bouquet at work every week for six months. The cards all said the same thing:
To Susan, From Leo.
A real formalist. The flower shop guy said that Leo placed the order by phone. He probably had an account at every flower shop in town. Leo’s family money had been made importing massive amounts of drugs into the West Coast, but Susan had to admit she liked the attention.

“You never sent me flowers,” she said to Derek.

“He’s rich,” Derek said. He lowered his voice and glanced around at the twenty or so people still in the office, all wearing headphones and staring blankly at their computer screens. “I make thirty-two thousand dollars a year,” he said.

“Oh,” Susan said.

“Oh?”

“Just, oh.”

Derek squinted at her. “How much do you make?”

Susan made forty-two thousand. And the advance for her soon-to-be-released book about weird ways people die had been a hundred thousand. She shrugged. No point making him feel bad. “About that,” she said.

“How’s the Gretchen Lowell book?” he asked. Susan’s skin prickled. He knew she’d given up on the Beauty Killer book. He was just being catty.

“I’m kicking a new idea around,” she said.

“About?”

“Fighting crime in Portland, Oregon.”

“So, true crime?”

Susan felt a twinge of embarrassment. “More like a detective story.”

He blinked at her. He’d played college football. And those concussions add up. “So, fiction?” he said.

“Creative nonfiction,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes. “Who are the main characters?”

Susan smiled resplendently. “A plucky girl journalist with a chip on her shoulder and a recovering Vicodin-addicted cop with a dark secret who solve crimes together.”

“You’re writing a book about you and Archie Sheridan?”

“My agent says it’s very marketable.”

Derek lifted his hand and laughed into it until his eyes watered. “What does that make you?” He cackled some more, already pleased with what he was about to say. “Dr. Watson?”

Susan gave him a hard look.

His hand dropped and he cleared his throat. “Seriously. What if nothing exciting happens?”

Susan reached up and touched the pea-sized scar on her cheek where a crazy masked murderer had stabbed her with a piercing needle. When she didn’t cover it with makeup, it looked like a huge zit.

“Something exciting always happens,” she said.

And then, as if Susan had willed it, her phone rang.

CHAPTER

5

Stephanie Towner had
been murdered. This was the only fact that Archie had been able to make out when Lorenzo Robbins had called him. It wasn’t even a fact; it was conjecture. But Robbins liked to be dramatic. Once, he had announced that an eight-year-old boy had been murdered by his ten-year-old sister. When he got everyone’s attention, he went on to explain that the sister had unwittingly passed along the parasite that had spread to the boy’s brain and killed him. So when Robbins reported this news about Stephanie Towner, Archie knew to follow up.

“Define ‘murdered,’” Archie said, holding his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder. He unlocked the door to his apartment, walked inside, tossed that day’s mail in a pile of other unopened envelopes, and took off his coat. He’d left the lights on. It was something he did now. He hadn’t mentioned it to Rosenberg.

There was noise on the phone line: voices, what sounded like furniture scraping. “I don’t have time to talk on the phone,” Robbins said, “just get down here as soon as you can.”

The line went dead.

Archie’s windows looked north, toward industrial Portland, where ships loaded with grain from the Midwest set off for Asia and then returned loaded with Toyotas. The port hadn’t flooded yet. That was something.

Farther north was the Columbia River, and across it, Vancouver, Washington, where his family lived. “The ’Couve, as it was known, was one-third the size of Portland, and seemed even smaller. A lot of Portlanders had never been to Vancouver, except to drive through it on the way north to Seattle, or to chaperone a school field trip to historic Fort Vancouver. It was twenty minutes from Archie’s apartment to Debbie’s house, but it felt like another country.

His kids liked Debbie’s new boyfriend. He worked in the wind industry. He’d gotten the kids composting. He probably recycled his used Q-tips.

Archie punched Henry’s name on his autodialer.

It rang once.

“Yeah?” Henry said. There was always a trace of panic in his voice when Archie called, like it could only be bad news.

“Robbins thinks Stephanie Towner was murdered,” Archie said.

“The girl on the ostrich? She drowned. They found the skid mark. Open-and-shut.”

“Except for the ostrich thing,” Archie said.

“I’ll meet you down there.”

Archie took off his sweater. It smelled like a wet dog. That’s what happened when wool got wet. It stank. Some people thought it smelled like a drenched sheep, some people thought barnyard, urine, mold. Archie liked the smell. It reminded him of when he was a kid, when that’s what Oregon had smelled like in the winter—one big wet dog. Now, with the advent of Polarfleece, everything had changed.

He had a button-down shirt on under the sweater. He’d put it on ten hours earlier and its smell was not as pleasant as the wet wool. He unbuttoned it and tossed it in the laundry hamper that Debbie had bought him when he’d moved out. Then he got another button-down out of the drawer and put it on. He didn’t examine himself in the mirror anymore. His scars were as much a part of him as his eye color. The heart-shaped scar that Gretchen Lowell had left on his chest nearly three years before served only as a reminder of his failings. If he didn’t look at it, he could pretend it wasn’t there. He could avoid thinking about her. It was the only way he could function.

He buttoned the second shirt as quickly as he could and pulled the sweater back on. He hadn’t eaten all day, but there was nothing to grab to go, and no time to make anything.

Rain splattered the window, causing rivulets of seagull shit to run like white threads down the glass.

Archie put his coat back on. He left the lights on when he went out.