The Night Season

by Chelsea Cain

  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.

  Robbins nodded. “Foam is a sign a person was alive when they went in the water, sure,” he said. “But it can also be caused by a heart attack before a person went in the water.” He leaned over the corpse’s head and tenderly peeled back one eyelid, revealing a vacant, bloodshot eye, the white of it peppered with tiny scarlet dots. “Petechial hemorrhages,” he said. “Rare in drowning. But common in other asphyxial deaths. Respiratory paralysis, for instance. That would cause a heart attack.”

  “Stage five,” Susan said. “Of drowning.”

  “The order is important,” Robbins said.

  “Puncture wound,” Archie said. “Heart attack. River.”

  Robbins nodded slowly.

  “Something or someone punctured her,” Archie said. He knew what Robbins was driving at. “You think she was poisoned? Based on a dot on her palm?”

  “Based on these.” He produced two printed digital photographs from his pants pocket and placed them on Stephanie Towner’s pimpled thigh. “They’re autopsy photos of Megan Parr and Zak Korber.”

  Two other people who’d drowned in Portland that week. Each had been swept away. No witnesses.

  Both photographs featured a hand, palm up, a yellow arrow pointing to a small brown dot. It looked like a freckle.

  “It’s the same mark,” Archie said.

  “I missed it the first time around,” Robbins said.

  “What’s going on?” Susan asked.

  Someone was poisoning people and pushing them in the river.

  Archie looked over at her. “Off the record,” he reminded her. “Remember that.”

  She nodded, and the skull made a tinny noise as it slid an inch in the aluminum pan and settled against the rim.

  Archie turned back to Robbins. “Tox screen?” he asked.

  “My morgue is underwater,” Robbins reminded him. “But I’ll farm it out pronto.”

  There was a commotion and soon a parade of firefighters appeared, coming down the stairs.

  “It took them long enough,” Robbins said, and he went off to bark instructions at them.

  Archie returned his gaze to the photographs.

  The spots were all on their hands. It was an odd place for an injection point. Had they reached up to protect themselves, exposing their palms in the process? And then another scenario occurred to him. They had been holding it. That would explain the hand thing. They had been holding something that punctured them. Something booby-trapped? Something they had picked up?

  Archie couldn’t keep people away from the river. Not when half the city was down there, sandbagging to save downtown.

  The alarms stopped. All at once, like someone had thrown a switch. Archie had almost gotten used to the noise.

  What time was it?

  Archie felt a sudden gnawing in the pit of his stomach.

  Where was Henry? He should have been there by now.

  Archie hit the autodial. It rang and rang.

  But Henry didn’t pick up.

  CHAPTER

  7

  There were fifteen hundred volunteers at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, filling and stacking sandbags in the rain. There were also a few hundred city employees, several dozen National Guard troops, and a few thousand people, give or take, just getting in the way. The goal was to build a four-foot-tall, mile-long temporary wall to keep the river from flooding downtown. This involved a lot of plywood, lumber, plastic, and concrete Jersey highway barriers. How it was going to hold, Susan had no idea.

  But by the looks of the water level, they didn’t have a lot of time.

  Bright construction lights augmented the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps that lined the park’s concrete promenade. The light illuminated the rain, which fell in a bleak drizzle.

  A Coast Guard chopper thwapped by overhead.

  Archie was on foot. The morgue was six short blocks away, and the streets were chaos. Susan hadn’t bothered asking if she could come. She had just loped after him. She zipped up her slicker and dug her hands in her pockets, finding coins and gum and lint.

  The sandbagging stations were set up at intermittent points along the length of the park bordering the Willamette. On the other side of the park, just a hundred yards from the river, Portland’s downtown skyline stretched up into cloud cover.

  “There’s Claire,” Archie said.

  Detective Claire Masland, tiny to begin with, was dwarfed by a knee-length raincoat with the hood up over her short dark hair. Susan didn’t know how Archie had recognized her. But then, when you spent ten years working on a task force tracking a serial killer, you probably got to know each other’s silhouette. Henry and Claire had been an item for less than a year. But Henry, Archie, and Claire had worked together for ages.

  “I found his car,” Claire said.

  Henry still hadn’t answered his phone. Now it appeared he’d never left the waterfront.

  “Something’s happened to him,” Claire said. Only a small tremble in the corners of her mouth gave away that Henry was more than just a colleague to her.

  Susan turned away from them and toward the river. There were too many people along the water, all of them moving around, everyone wearing soggy hats or hoods—Henry could be there and they wouldn’t be able to see him. Maybe he’d gotten caught up in the seawall project and had decided to keep working. He could be filling sandbags thirty feet from them right now.

  But Susan knew this wasn’t true. Henry would do almost anything for Archie. If he’d said he’d meet him at the morgue, he would have been there. Henry didn’t just not show up.

  The rain-beaded plastic sheeting over the seawall flapped in the wind where it hadn’t been secured. The people working on the wall were right on the edge of the river. Usually it was a twenty-foot drop from the promenade to the water, but now what was it? A foot? One misstep and you were in the water, in a fast-moving current. Stage one, Robbins had said. People didn’t cry out. They didn’t wave their arms and shout.

  Susan shook the thought from her mind.

  Henry was strong and stubborn and big. He wouldn’t drown. Unless he’d been poisoned.

  Stephanie Towner. Megan Parr. Zak Korber. They had all been murdered near the river.

  A sandbag brigade, made up of men and women in wet coats, their hair plastered to their heads, passed sandbags to the wall. They talked in the hushed, serious tones of people who were working on deadline and could not waste a minute. So many people had turned out to help, it made Susan feel proud of her city.

  If there was a killer loose down there, even the possibility of it, shouldn’t these people be warned?

  She looked around at all of them. The slickers shiny in the construction lights. National Guard troops in black floppy rain hats. The old and the young. And that’s when the transient caught Susan’s eye. There were always transients at Waterfront Park. They sat on the benches at the north end by the Steel Bridge, and slept on the ribbon of grass in front of the Japanese American Historical Plaza.

  This guy was sitting on a park bench, wrapped in a piece of wet plastic sheeting that looked like the stuff they were using for the seawall project. What caught Susan’s attention was the brief pale blue glow of an LCD screen. She took a step toward him and squinted. She couldn’t be sure. He was ensconced in plastic, like som
ething out of the freezer. Maybe it was just a reflection?

  She hurried back to Archie and Claire. Claire was just dropping her phone in her jacket pocket. “I just tried him again,” Claire said. She gave Archie a steely look. “We need to call in backup. This isn’t like him.”

  Susan grabbed Archie by the elbow and motioned for them to follow her. She led them around the crowd to the park bench. Then, to give them a reason to stand there, she pretended to throw something away in the trash bin between where they stood and the bench.

  “Try Henry now,” she said to Claire.

  Claire looked confused, but pulled her phone out again, and, with a doubtful glance at Susan, tapped a button.

  “Wait,” Susan said.

  And then they heard it. The sound of a phone ringing. Mere feet away.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The man in the plastic wasn’t talking. Archie had him by the shoulders, the plastic slippery and crinkling under his hands. The man just stared at him, lids peeled back, nostrils quivering, his few yellowed teeth exposed behind bared, chapped lips.

  “Where did you get the phone?” Archie asked again.

  Nothing.

  Archie wanted to shake him, to wrestle the truth from him. Archie knew how to hurt someone. Gretchen had taught him a thousand ways to hurt someone.

  The phone had fallen off the man’s lap when Archie had lifted him from his seat, skidding along the concrete. Claire had scrambled after it and now was scrolling through the call log.

  “The only recent activity is the conversation with you, and then when we all started phoning to find him,” she said.

  Archie bunched the plastic tightly in his fists and pulled his hands closer together, so that the plastic sheeting was wrapped firmly around the man’s torso, squeezing him. The man’s upper lip twitched but he still said nothing. Did he not speak English? What, then? They didn’t have time to find a translator. Archie needed to get a reaction out of him.

  “The phone belongs to a cop,” Archie said. The man’s eyes widened further, revealing two things. One, he spoke English. Two, he hadn’t known Henry was a cop. The man glanced over Archie’s shoulder, north. He was on the verge of breaking. “If anything has happened to him, you will be in a world of hurt.”

  “Mighty Willamette,” the man said gruffly. “Beautiful friend. I am learning. I am practicing. To say your name.”

  “What the fuck?” said Claire.

  “It’s carved onto one of the stones at the Japanese American Plaza,” Susan said. “At the north end of the park, by the Steel Bridge.”

  “The phone was on the sacred ground,” the man said. “There was no one attached.”

  Archie heard Susan say his name.

  He turned. Susan was standing, arms at her sides, staring at the crowd by the river. The sandbag brigade had disbanded and joined a huddled group pressed against the seawall, straining to see over it into the river. The sandbags lay where they’d dropped them, getting splattered with rain. There were maybe twenty backsides, more joining by the moment.

  “There’s something going on,” Susan said.

  Archie let go of the plastic and the man slid out of his hands back onto the bench.

  People were pointing now, hollering for help. There was something in the river.

  Archie ran. He got out his badge as he did, raising it up to show people as he elbowed them aside.

  “There’s someone in the water,” a woman shouted.

  A National Guard soldier, probably just out of high school, was at the center of the crowd, frantically scanning the dark river. Archie could see the anxiety in his face, the panic in the angle of his shoulders. Uniforms had a way of fooling people into thinking the wearer had a plan. Never mind that the kid was nineteen. He was probably terrified.

  Besides, they’d never spot anyone in the dark.

  Archie took control. He made his way to the soldier. “I’m a cop,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Carter, sir,” the soldier said.

  Archie pointed out a nearby construction light. “Get that light over here.”

  Carter nodded quickly and moved to reposition the light.

  “Who saw this person?” Archie asked the crowd.

  A woman in a nylon ski jacket raised her hand.

  Archie could feel Susan at his shoulder. He wondered where Claire was, and hoped that she had secured the man in plastic. Archie didn’t want him to run.

  “I saw someone,” the woman said. She pointed out at a spot ten yards from the edge of the river. “There.” Archie saw only blackness.

  “Are you sure?” Archie asked. How anyone could see anything out there, he didn’t know.

  “It was a person. I know it was a person.” Her voice was reedy with hysteria. Whatever she’d seen out there, she believed it was human.

  Carter had rolled the light closer to the river’s edge.

  Archie tried to calculate the speed of the current. If there was a person out there, he or she was probably under the Burnside Bridge by now. “Swing it over there,” he said.

  In the sudden silence, the rain seemed to get louder. It pelted the slickers and nylon jackets. It bounced on the concrete. It ran down the back of Archie’s neck. It fell into the river, more and more water—the Willamette seemed to rise even as he looked at it. Archie squinted. The river surged north, a blur of dark, roiling current.

  The Willamette in January was about forty-five degrees. In water that cold, you’d have maybe thirty minutes until you lost consciousness. An hour if you were strong and lucky.

  Had the woman really seen something?

  And then someone shouted:

  “There!”

  Archie snapped his head to follow her finger, and Carter swung the light to center on it.

  Something in the water. A bird? No, a buoy? No. A person. A child. Jesus Christ. A child.

  A child, moving north. Fast.

  Archie started to run along the seawall. You were never supposed to approach a drowning victim without a flotation device, a rope around your waist, something. Drowning victims panicked. They flailed. They took people down with them. The kid was alive. Conscious. If he weren’t, he’d have gone under. There was no time for flotation devices or ropes.

  Susan was right behind him, along with the growing crowd, everyone pointing and shouting. Archie looked for Claire but didn’t see her. He took his coat off and stuffed the pockets with his badge, wallet, and phone. Then he unclipped the gun from his belt, put it in the coat’s inside pocket, zipped the pocket, and handed the coat to Susan. “Call nine-one-one,” he told her. “And don’t lose my gun.”

  Then he looked for the light. Good. Carter had kept his cool, kept the light trained on the kid in the water.

  Archie climbed over the wall, got a bead on the kid, took a deep breath, and jumped into the dark, frigid river. His breath left his body as soon as he hit.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Susan had lost sight of Archie.

  She’d hung up with 911, and now she couldn’t find him in the water. It had only been a minute. But it seemed like longer. She realized she was hugging Archie’s coat to her chest.

  People who drowned in the Willamette were usually never seen again.

  There were more lights now. More National Guard soldiers. The mob was growing as they moved along the promenade, everyone at a slow jog, eyes on the water where the lights all met. A small head bobbed. Rubber boots smacked against the pavement. Wet slickers squeaked. Puddles splattered. The seawall was higher in some places, where the construction process was further along, and they all had to strain to see over it, their heads bobbing up and down at the wall’s edge like paparazzi.

  People already had their camera phones out, taking low-res video of the dancing light on the dark water. These days, everyone was a reporter.

  “Got ’em,” someone snapped.

  Susan’s throat swelled as she saw Archie in the light.

  The thro
ng burst into spontaneous applause.

  “He’s still gotta get him out,” the Guard soldier named Carter said under his breath.

  It was true. They all watched, riveted, as the shape that was Archie circled the shape that was the kid, two heads in the water. Susan couldn’t look, and at the same time she couldn’t look away. Archie was still an arm’s length from the kid, who seemed to be shrinking in the water, so much so that it was difficult to keep sight of him in the rough current.

  “Why doesn’t he just grab him?” Susan asked.

  “He’s trying to get him from behind, under the arms,” Carter said. And then, as if to explain his sudden authority, he added, “Lifeguard, all four years of high school.”

  Suddenly, the two forms joined. Archie had him. He had the boy.

  There was more applause and another soldier joined Carter and Susan. “They’re slowing down,” the new soldier said.

  Susan hadn’t noticed until he said it, but he was right. They weren’t moving nearly as fast. That was good, wasn’t it?

  “He’s swimming against the current, Captain,” Carter said.

  That didn’t make sense. He couldn’t fight it, couldn’t get back to them, couldn’t get to the seawall. And even if he did, what then? There were rusty metal ladders that led up the concrete from the water, but they were only every hundred feet or so. What were the odds he’d be able to get to one?

  “What’s he thinking?” the captain asked. “He’s going to exhaust himself.”

  Susan knew what that meant. If Archie lost strength, they’d go under. They’d drown.

  She saw Carter glance away from the light, upriver, then back at Archie and the kid. “The bridge,” he said. “Captain, I can get them from the bridge.”

  The captain hesitated.

  “I won the fifty-yard freestyle at State,” Carter said. “I’m six-foot-two. If someone holds on to me, I can reach them. We can pull them out of there. I can do this. Sir.” He bent his head toward Archie and the kid, who were now nearly holding ground. “He’s buying us time.”

  The Steel Bridge, built in 1912, was one of Portland’s oldest. It was a double-lift bridge, which meant that the whole middle of the structure could be lifted straight up to allow vessels to pass underneath. It was also a double-decker bridge, cars and light rail on the top deck, trains and pedestrians below, and the lower deck was only twenty-five feet from the river, at normal levels.