Again, Archie spun slowly around. After a few minutes, he turned to Henry. “What do you think?”

“I think he was on foot.” Henry pointed to a thick laurel hedge that framed the yard of a house just behind the point where the dogs had lost Lee Robinson’s scent. “I think he was waiting for her behind there.”

“It would be risky,” Archie said doubtfully. He walked over to behind the hedge. “This about how thick the foliage was?”

“It’s evergreen.”

Archie considered this. “So he waited for her behind the hedge,” he said tracing his hand along the thick leaves of the bushes. “Appeared. Then what? Talked her into a nearby vehicle?”

“A guy pops out from behind a bush and she gets into his car? Not when I was a teenager,” Susan said.

“No,” Henry said. “He doesn’t pop out.”

Archie nodded, thinking. “He sees her. He comes out on the other side of the hedge. Over here.” He walked along the hedge to the far side, almost around the corner. “Then he makes like he was just turning the corner,” he says, reenacting it. “Happens upon her.”

“He knows her,” said Henry.

“He knows her,” agreed Archie. They were quiet for a moment. “Or”-Archie shrugged-“maybe he popped out and held a knife to her throat and forced her into the back of a van.”

“Or maybe that,” said Henry.

“You look for fibers on the leaves?”

“Four days of rain too late.”

Archie spun around to Susan. “Did you walk home from school?”

“Just the first two years. Until I got a car.”

“Yeah,” Archie mused, his eyes on the hedge. “That’s when you walk, isn’t it? The first two years.” He cocked his head. “Did you like Cleveland?”

“I already told you, I hated Cleveland,” Susan said.

“No. You said you hated high school. Would you have hated high school anywhere, or was there something about Cleveland?”

Susan groaned. “I don’t know. There were some things I liked. I was in drama club. And, if you must know, I was on the Knowledge Bowl team. But only my freshman year. Before I ungeeked.”

“The drama teacher’s been there awhile,” said Henry. “ Reston.”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “I had him.”

“You ever go by?” asked Henry. “Say hello?”

“Drop in on my old high school teachers?” asked Susan incredulously. “I have a life, thanks.” Then a terrible thought struck her. “He’s not a suspect, is he?”

Henry shook his head. “Not unless he got nine teenagers to lie for him. He was rehearsing a school play each of the evenings a girl was taken. So you don’t have to take your apple back. How about the physics teacher, Dan McCallum? You have him?”

Susan opened her mouth to answer but was interrupted by Archie’s cell phone ringing. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket, snapped it opened, and turned and walked a few steps away. “Yeah?” he said. He listened for a minute. Henry and Susan watched him with rapt attention. Susan felt some almost unperceivable shift. She wasn’t sure if it was in Archie’s body language or a charge in the air, or maybe just a projection of her own mind, but she knew for certain that something had changed. Archie nodded several times. “Okay. We’re on our way.” He snapped the phone shut, dropped it carefully back into his pocket, and slowly rotated back toward them.

“They find her?” asked Henry, his face impassive.

Archie nodded.

“Where?” asked Henry.

“ Sauvie Island.”

Henry rolled his eyes toward Susan. “You want to drop her off back at the bank?”

Susan stared at Archie, willing him to let her come along. She can come. She can come. She can come. She longed for his lips to form the words. Her first crime scene. A first-person account. It would make a great lead for the first story. What was it like to look at a murder victim? The stench of a corpse. The legion of investigators examining the scene. Yellow crime tape. She smiled, feeling that familiar hum in her belly again. Then caught herself and quickly forced the pleasure out of her face. But Archie had already seen it.

She looked at him, her eyes pleading, but his face showed nothing.

He started walking toward the car. Fuck. She’d blown it. Her first fucking day with him and he already thought she was some sort of blood hungry asshole.

“She can come,” he said, still walking. He turned and glanced purposefully back at Susan. “But don’t expect her to look like her photo.”

You know, there are actually tons of dead bodies on Sauvie Island,” Susan said from the backseat. “A lot of the gay guys who used to go to the nude beach died of AIDS and had their ashes scattered there. The upper beach? Above the tide line? All bone chips and charcoal.” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “Sunbathers oil up and lie down and end up with tiny fragments of dead guy in their crevices.” She waited. “I did a story about it. Maybe you read it?”

No one answered. Henry, she realized, had tuned her out about ten miles ago. Archie was on the phone.

She crossed her arms and tried not to yammer. It was the curse of the feature writer. Useless facts. And she had done plenty of stories about Sauvie Island: organic farmers, the cornfield maze, the nude beach, bicyclist clubs, eagles’ nests, u-pick berry fields. Herald readers loved all that crap. Consequently, Susan knew more about the island than most of the people living on it. It was 24,000 acres. A so-called agricultural oasis flanked by the Columbia and the polluted Multnomah Channel, and about a twenty-minute drive from downtown Portland. To preserve the island’s natural wilderness, the state had set aside twelve thousand acres as the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It was there, far from the farmhouses that made the island seem like a slice of Iowa, that the dead girl was found. Susan had never liked the place. There were too many open spaces.

The road turned to gravel. “Yes,” Archie said into his phone. “When?…Where?…Yes.” It didn’t make for sensational note taking. “No…We don’t know yet… I’ll find out.” The gravel made for excruciatingly slow going and the steady spray of grit on the car was punctuated only by the occasional small rock that bounced off the windshield. Archie was still on the phone. “Are you there now?…About five minutes.” Every time he hung the thing up, it rang. Susan let her gaze fall on the roadside, a thick wall of blackberry bushes, backed by river oaks. It blinked by like a zoetrope. Finally, Susan could see a cluster of police cruisers, an old pickup, and an ambulance already parked along the side of the road up ahead. A Sheriff ’s Department vehicle was blocking the road, and a young state cop was stopping traffic. Susan craned her head to see more, her notebook open on her lap. Henry pulled to a stop and flashed a badge at the cop. The cop nodded and waved them through.

Henry pulled the car next to a police cruiser and with one fluid motion he and Archie were out of the vehicle, leaving Susan to scurry after them, wishing that she had worn more practical shoes. She reached into her purse and dug out some lipstick. Nothing dramatic. Just a little natural color. She put some on as she walked and immediately felt like a jerk for it. Beyond the police cruiser, a bearded young man in a terry-cloth robe stood with a patrol cop. He was barefoot. Susan smiled. He flashed her a peace sign.

The path to the beach had been trampled over time through a natural part in the brambles and it cut diagonally through the tall dead grass down to the sand below. The sand was loose, and Archie had to secure his footing with each step. All bone chips and charcoal. Ahead lay the Columbia, still and brown, and, on the other side, Washington State. He could see a group of state patrol cops standing about a quarter mile down the beach on the clay flats.