The Night Season (4 page)

CHAPTER

6

The Multnomah County
morgue was downtown, just across the Willamette from Archie’s apartment. Portland had a pretty downtown, with restored brick and sandstone storefronts, lots of public art, and bike racks and coffee shops on every corner. In the summer flower baskets were hung from the lampposts, in the winter the trees were strung with white lights.

Most of the inner west side was laid out on a grid, numerical avenues parallel to the river, and alphabetical streets perpendicular. The blocks were short—dollhouse blocks, they called them—so the city founders could sell plenty of corner lots. The morgue was on Fourth Avenue, which meant it was four dollhouse blocks west of the river, uphill, well above flood stage.

But it was also, as morgues tended to be, in a basement.

It had flooded.

Archie knew it the moment he arrived. The first-floor hallway was already filled with equipment and gurneys, boxes and computers. Two morgue employees, pathology assistants, red-faced and puffing, lugged a heavy steel device that looked like it had been stolen from a butcher shop. A bone saw sat next to a drinking fountain. An organ scale sat in front of an elevator. The hallway was tracked with wet footprints.

“Where’s Robbins?” Archie asked the pathology assistants as they squeezed by him.

“Downstairs,” one of them said. “Follow the screaming. And take the stairs, the elevator’s shorted out.”

Archie worked his way through the obstacle course of hallway debris and found the stairs, where a dozen people had formed a chain to pass up contents from the morgue. Archie couldn’t help wondering what was sloshing around in the Tupperware containers that were being stacked at the top of the line. Someone’s lunch? Or someone’s stomach?

Robbins bellowed up at him from below. “Get down here!” he said.

Archie flashed his badge and ducked past the people on the stairs. Robbins was at the bottom, standing in a foot of water.

“Can you believe this shit?” Robbins said.

The lights must have shorted out, because the overhead emergency lights flickered, giving everything a sci-fi-green tint. Several alarms pulsed from various directions. Robbins was in his civilian clothes, no lab coat, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest. Sweat stained his pits. His pants were tucked into the tall black rubber boots that Archie had seen him wear at crime scenes. His dreadlocks, which he usually wore tied back with a rubber band, dangled loose against shoulders. The light made him look like he was vibrating.

“Where are the bodies?” Archie asked.

“I was thinking I’d stack them upstairs in the hall,” Robbins said, wiping his dark brow with a latex-gloved hand, “and then I remembered that thing about decomposition I learned in medical examiner school. We’ve got to keep them refrigerated. Gets real stinky otherwise. Emanuel and OHSU have offered to take them. We’re still figuring out the best way to transport them. Did you drive?”

Archie thought of his police-issue Cutlass upstairs, and wondered if he could fit a corpse in the backseat. “Could I use the carpool lane?” he asked.

Robbins smirked. Then his eyes flicked down to Archie’s feet, and he was all business. “Good, you’re wearing boots. Don’t touch the water.” He headed off, beckoning for Archie to follow him. “C’mon.” The water throbbed as Robbins plodded through it.

A young man in a lab coat walked past carrying an aluminum roasting pan with a human skull in it. The skull was stained with age, almost the color of tea.

Robbins took the pan out of his hands. “I’ll take that,” Robbins said. “Get the computers. The equipment. Biohazards. And make sure you get the TV out of my office.” He leaned in to Archie. “Flat-screen,” he explained.

They heard a splash and both turned to see Susan Ward appear at the bottom of the stairs. She was wearing rainbow-striped rubber boots tucked into jeans and a knee-length yellow rain slicker. It was unzipped, revealing a blue T-shirt with white bubbly writing that read
CONSERVE WATER
,
SHOWER TOGETHER
. She kicked at the water like a kid in a wading pool and grinned at them. Her lipstick was the same bright berry color as her hair. “Whoa,” she said. “Cool.”

Robbins lifted his fingertips to his temple. “This is still a secure area, people,” he hollered up the stairs. He gave Archie a tired look. “You told her Stephanie Towner was murdered?”

“Stephanie Towner was murdered?” Susan said. There was a series of splashes as she sloshed over to them. Her face glowed pink under her freckles.

Archie hadn’t told her anything. She just had a way of showing up. Sometimes Archie wondered if she ever went to the
Herald
offices at all.

Robbins stared at Archie, waiting for an answer, still holding the pan with the skull.

Archie shrugged. “I didn’t tell her,” he said.

“I came because I heard the morgue was flooding,” Susan said. She leaned close to Archie and said out of the side of her berry-red mouth, “I got a tip from someone I know at Emanuel.”

Then something seemed to occur to Susan and she glanced down at the water they were all standing in. “Are we going to get electrocuted?”

“Probably not,” Robbins said.

“Electrocution is the second leading cause of fatalities during floods,” Susan said.

“We’re not going to get electrocuted,” Robbins insisted. “Power’s shorted out. The emergency lights run on batteries.”

Archie wondered why so many alarms were going off, if there wasn’t any power.

Robbins seemed to read his mind. “The alarms all are coming from very expensive equipment that doesn’t like getting unplugged.”

Susan opened her mouth to ask another question, but then Archie saw her eyes travel to the aluminum pan. She did a double take. “Is that a skull?”

“Some dog walker found it in West Delta Park,” Robbins said.

“Oh,” Susan cried in recognition. “I wrote about him.” She bent her knees so her face was level with the skull. “I wrote about you,” she said to the skull.

Archie had read that column. No, Archie remembered—Henry had read the column to him. Susan had come up with some theory that the dog park skeleton had something to do with the Vanport flood. Henry had been irritated by it.

But that was not why they were here.

“Talk to me about Stephanie Towner,” Archie said.

Robbins jerked his head in Susan’s direction. “You okay with her listening in?”

Susan had no business being there. If this was actually a homicide investigation, which Archie wasn’t sure it was—if it was just Robbins wanting to show off, then what did it matter? “It’s off the record until I say it isn’t,” Archie told her.

Susan bounced her chin up and down.

“You trust her?” Robbins asked dubiously.

“I do,” Archie said. He surprised himself at how easily he said it.

Susan beamed. The bleeping of alarms continued all around them. There was a vague smell of decomp in the air. Archie wondered bleakly if it was the water.

Robbins sighed and shook his head. “This way.” He led them down the green shimmering hallway, past an office where two morgue employees were rescuing a flat-screen TV, and into the autopsy room.

The water was deeper in there, only a few inches below the top of Archie’s boots. It bubbled and gurgled at four distinct points in the center of the room.

“Water’s coming up through the floor drains,” Robbins explained.

Archie had seen what went into those floor drains. He could only imagine what might come back up. “Along with what?”

“A whole host of biohazards,” Robbins said. “I told you not to touch the water.” He held the skull out in Susan’s direction. “Here, hold this.”

Susan took the pan. “Where’s the rest of him?” she asked.

“Around,” Robbins said.

Susan lifted the skull so she could look him in the eye sockets. “I think I’ll call him Ralph,” she said.

“I’m glad you made a new friend,” Archie said. “But could we get back to Stephanie Towner?”

Robbins adjusted his posture, straightening up like he was about to give a lecture. “What do you know about drowning?” he asked.
Here we go
, thought Archie. Water continued to gurgle up from below the floor.

“We’re listening,” Archie said.

Robbins crossed his arms and leaned one shoulder against the morgue cooler. “Stage one is fear. Most people, they don’t flail around and holler. They’re focused on breathing. Stage two, they go under. Take a lungful of water, choke on it, which makes them breathe in more water, which causes their larynx or vocal cords to constrict and seal the airway. That’s called ‘laryngospasm.’ It’s involuntary. Now they’re underwater. Stage three. They’re unconscious and in respiratory arrest.

“Stage four,” he continued. “Hello, hypoxic convulsions. Some jerking. They start turning blue.”

Robbins turned to Susan. “You getting all this?”

“Blue,” she said. “Got it.” She tossed Archie an amused glance. “This is really going to come in handy next time I’m at the pool.”

She was clearly enjoying antagonizing him. “Continue,” Archie said to Robbins.

“Stage five. My old friend, clinical death. Heart attack. Breathing and circulation stop.”

“So what’s stage six?” Susan asked dryly. “Heaven?”

This was all going somewhere, Archie told himself. It had to be going somewhere.

Robbins waved a gloved finger at her. “Aha. That’s where it gets interesting. Stage six is biological death.”

“What’s the difference between clinical and biological death?” Susan asked.

“About four minutes,” Robbins said. “That’s how long you have to start CPR and defibrillation before your brain gets all mushy and there’s no going back.”

He cranked a lever on the morgue cooler drawer he’d been leaning on, and slid Stephanie Towner’s corpse out on a conveyor tray.

As corpses go, she looked better than she had at the park that morning. Her hair was wet and combed back from her face; her flesh was clean of mud and debris. But she was still a disturbing sight. Her face, neck, and upper chest were blotchy with the telltale dusky bruising of lividity. She looked like she’d been punched around. But looks could be deceiving. Bodies floated facedown, the head lower than the rest of the body. What looked like bruising was most likely just where her blood had settled once her heart had stopped pumping. A slight trace of pink foam circled her nostrils. A brutal Y-incision, sealed with industrial-looking staples, marked where Robbins had opened her chest up for autopsy.

Archie checked in on Susan. She was staring at the corpse’s thighs. The flesh was pimply. Goose-skin, Archie had heard coroners call it. That was fine. As long as she wasn’t fixed on the face. As long as you didn’t look at the face, you could pretend that what you were looking at wasn’t human.

Archie knew she tried to seem tough. But the rattling skull in her hands told a different story.

“Here’s the thing,” Robbins continued. “Most people, once they’re unconscious, their larynx relaxes and their lungs fill with water. Your vic? No water in her stomach. No hemorrhages in the middle ears. No water in her lungs. This can happen. Some people keep that seal. Drowning is tricky when it comes to cause of death. But it got me thinking, and I took a real close look at her. And I found this.”

He gestured to the woman like a waiter presenting the catch of the day. Then gently folded open her fingers to expose her palm. Her finger pads were blanched and wrinkled, like she’d been in the tub too long.

Archie and Susan both leaned forward from opposite sides of the conveyor tray, nearly bumping heads. Robbins indicated a tiny brown spot near the center of the palm. It looked like someone had marked her with the tip of a brown felt-tipped pen.

This was Robbins’s big evidence? “What is it?” Archie asked.

“A freckle?” Susan guessed.

“It’s a puncture wound,” Robbins said.

Susan didn’t seem convinced. “It looks like a freckle.”

Archie had to admit, it did look like a freckle. Or a thousand other things. “She was in the water awhile, beaten up,” Archie said. In fact, the body was covered with scratches and lesions where she’d run into who knows what on her way downriver. She’d been lucky she hadn’t ended up in the propeller of a boat. Then there were the fish who’d been feasting on her.

Archie glanced down at the floor. The water was almost to the top of his boots. A sealed Tupperware container bobbed by.

“There was nothing under her fingernails when they brought her in,” Robbins said. “No injuries to her fingertips. She would have grasped at something. If she slid down that bank, she would have clawed to save herself. There are scratches on the back of the hand. But not the palms.”

Archie was still having trouble seeing how all this added up. “You think she was dead when she went in the water. That someone rolled her into the river.” But he’d seen pink froth around her mouth and nose, both at the park and in the morgue, a common indication of drowning. “What about the frothing?” he said.