Sweetheart (4 page)

She rolled over—a complicated maneuver that caused the hammock to swing perilously—and in a few minutes she was rocked back to sleep.

She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but she felt her mother at her side. She squirmed and tried to pull a blanket over her head. She could hear the recycling truck out front so knew it was about seven
A.M.
The plastic bin of glass bottles and jars shattered against the thick metal bed of the truck. It was an awful, violent sound, like someone smashing the windshield of a car. Susan never got used to it. “Knock,” she said to her mother. “Remember?”

Her mother pressed her hand gently into her upper arm. The hammock rocked. It was something about the touch that made her know something was wrong. It was too firm, too precise. She pulled herself up on her elbows, threading her fingers into the hammock weave for leverage. Bliss’s face was pinched. Someone had died.

Susan’s heart banged in her chest. Who? Susan thought of the city beat reporter she’d gone on a few dates with two months ago. “Derek?” she asked.

Bliss smoothed a piece of Susan’s hair. “It’s Parker, sweetie,” she said. “And Senator Castle. They were in a car. It swerved off the Fremont Bridge this morning.”

Susan clambered out of the hammock and huddled naked on the tatami mat below. “What?”

Bliss sat on her bare heels facing Susan, her face full of sadness. “They’re both dead, sweetie.”

“What?” Susan said again, the word barely more than a whisper.

“Ian called from the paper,” Bliss said softly. “They’re dead.”

Parker. Susan started to fold in on herself. In a flash she was fourteen and in the hospital room with her father, helpless, alone, furious. She pushed the helplessness and loneliness aside and let the fury take her.

“He fucking died?” she said. “The senator fucking died before my story could run? Two months I’ve spent on it.” She could feel her face flush, a prickly sensation rising in her chest.
Not Parker,
she thought.
Please, not Parker.
“Two months.”

Bliss just sat on her heels on the tatami mat, waiting.

Susan snorted in a flood of snot. “Parker’s dead?” she asked, her voice tiny.

Her mother nodded.

It didn’t make sense. What was Parker doing in a car with Castle? It was a mistake. She looked up at Bliss.

It wasn’t a mistake.

Her face wrinkled. “Crap.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a minute, trying to absorb the hot tears that threatened to spill, and then stood and began sorting through the cardboard box of clothes that sat in the corner.

“What are you doing?” Bliss asked.

Susan found a long black cotton dress and wiggled into it. “I’m going down there.”

“To the paper?” Bliss asked.

“To the bridge. I’m going to find out what happened.” She dug her phone out of her purse and began to punch in a number.

Bliss stood up, her cotton caftan fluttering in the breeze of the fan. “Who are you calling?”

Susan wiped a tear off her cheek with the back of her wrist and lifted the phone to her ear. “Archie Sheridan,” she said.

She touched her hair, bringing a lock of turquoise to her nose. The smell of popcorn was gone.

A
rchie stood on the Fremont Bridge. It was the newest of Portland’s ten bridges, a two-layer, four-lane, seventies concrete highway that arced high above the Willamette, connecting the east and west sides of the city. Most Portlanders would admit to a favorite bridge: the Hawthorne, the Steel Bridge, the St. Johns. Few would have cited the Fremont. It was inelegant, functional; the pale blue paint peeling from the gray concrete, like skin sloughing off a sunburn. But Archie had always liked it. If you were driving west, it was the best view of the city, a wide-open vista north, south, and ahead of you, the glittering downtown skyline, the lush west hills, Forest Park, the river snaking lazily north, all of it dusted in a pink glow. Portland could be so beautiful sometimes Archie thought his heart might stop just looking at it.

“Ugly, isn’t it?” a voice said behind him.

Archie turned a quarter step to see Raul Sanchez. He was a compact man with a neat gray beard and strong arms and a face that looked like it had been whittled out of driftwood. He was wearing a dark blue baseball cap that read
FBI
in big white letters, and a windbreaker that read
FBI
in small white letters on the chest and in big white letters on the back.

“Excuse me,” said Archie. “Are you with the FBI?”

Sanchez smiled. “They like us to identify ourselves,” he said, his Mexican accent wrapping delicately around the consonants. “So the citizens don’t mistake us for the assholes at the CIA.” He stepped up beside Archie. Behind them, a parking lot’s worth of emergency vehicles sat on the now-closed bridge, their lights flashing red, white, blue, and orange.

“Look at that,” Sanchez said, pushing his chin out toward the blinking red lights on the cell phone towers that looked like birthday candles rising out of the west hills, and the tall construction cranes that marked the current boom of condo projects and mixed-use developments. “It’ll look like L.A. in ten years.” He gave Archie a wicked grin. “Californians streaming over our borders. You know they’re lazy. Don’t even mow their own lawns.”

“I’ve heard that,” said Archie.

Sanchez stuffed his hands into his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “Been a while since we had a car go over a bridge,” he said. The colored light from the emergency vehicles refracted on the cement behind him, so it looked like he was standing on a disco floor.

“Two in ten years,” Archie said. “One suicide off the Mar-quam. One hydroplane off the Morrison.”

Sanchez looked up at the clear morning sky. “Well, it wasn’t hydroplaning,” he said.

Archie looked up, too. A swarm of news helicopters hovered overhead, like ravens circling something dying in the woods. “Yeah,” he said. He knew what Sanchez was thinking. It was harder than it looked to drive a car off a bridge. You had to defeat the efforts of several dozen engineering safety gaps: a three-foot cement bumper, a chain-link fence. You had to be profoundly unlucky. Or trying.

Claire appeared beside him. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a bulldog on the chest. Her short hair was tucked into a Greek fisherman’s cap. “Susan Ward’s here,” she said. “She said she called you.”

Archie turned and squinted over at the east side of the bridge where the growing legion of press was kept at bay with crime tape and a phalanx of motorcycle cops.

“They pull the car up yet?” Archie asked Claire.

“Soon,” she said. “There’s like a hundred years of shit down there the divers have to clear it from first.”

“Ah, the pristine Willamette,” Sanchez said.

It was a zoo. Susan hadn’t seen anything like it, except maybe the Oregon Country Fair outside Eugene. The fair was two hundred eighty acres of hippies and fire dancers and falafel stands, and this was a crush of cops, media, and onlookers. But people had the same excited looks on their faces. Like they were somewhere special.

Susan had parked seven blocks from the Kerby Street exit off the bridge and walked. She wore her
Herald
badge on a lanyard around her neck and talked her way through three separate police checkpoints. It was disconcerting to be on foot on the bridge. Unlike most of the other bridges in Portland, the Fremont was closed to pedestrians except for once a year when the city let a few thousand Portlanders pedal over it on bicycles. Susan, who inevitably forgot when the Bridge Pedal was coming and always found herself stuck in traffic, now saw the appeal. There was something otherworldly about being that far up above the city. And then she thought of the long seconds that the senator’s car was in freefall and her fists tightened. Parker was dead. Now she had to step up. She had to do something that countered every reporter instinct she had: risk her exclusive.

She had to tell Archie Sheridan what she knew.

She had elbowed her way past the TV crews, each wanting a live shot with the impressive fleet of emergency vehicles in the background. Claire had spotted her and said she’d track down Archie for her. But there were so many people that once Claire had disappeared into the crowd of uniforms, Susan immediately lost track of her. So she waited, watching the cops, eavesdropping on the other reporters, gathering as much information as she could. She couldn’t hear much. There was too much going on. And then it hit her: no skid marks. There were too many people, too many cars; if there had been skid marks, they would have taped them off. They’d have the crime scene unit all over them. No skid marks. No brakes.

She saw Archie then, and straightened up. He appeared from behind a police van, hands in the pockets of his sport coat, shoulders hunched against the vague morning chill. His hair was a thick mop of brown, but as he got close Susan could see a few strands of gray that had not been there the last time she’d seen him, two months before.

“I’m sorry,” Archie said when he reached her. “I know that you and Parker were close.”

Susan felt a black wave of tears in her throat and swallowed them. “What happened?” she said. Archie lifted the tape and Susan ducked under it and followed Archie as he spoke.

“It happened at about five this morning,” he explained. “The car was going fast and swerved off the bridge at the crest.” He motioned to where a large segment of the bridge’s cement bumper was clearly missing, the rebar frame exposed like a bone in a compound fracture. A ten-foot segment of chain-link fence was broken and hanging perilously off the side. “Two drivers stopped and called nine-one-one. Search and Rescue were down there in seven minutes.” The two stopped at the edge and stared down at the police barge and Search and Rescue boats that floated on the river below; a rainbow of gasoline shimmered on the water’s surface, marking where the car had gone under. “But both of them were dead,” Archie continued. “The senator and Parker. They pulled the bodies out about an hour ago.” He turned and looked at Susan, and raised an eyebrow. “It was Parker’s car, Susan. You know what the
Herald’s
crime-beat reporter was doing driving our state’s senior senator around at the crack of dawn?”

Susan’s stomach ached. Why hadn’t Parker told her he was going to meet with Castle? No skid marks. Christ.

“Susan?” Archie said, a slight warning in his voice. “You need to tell me now.”

Susan glanced around at the cops and press corps, none of whom seemed to actually be doing anything. “Somewhere private,” she said to Archie.

Archie raised his eyebrows and then motioned for her to follow him and he led her past two patrol cars and two police vans to a midnight-blue Crown Victoria, where Archie’s partner, Henry Sobol, sat in the driver’s seat scribbling in a notebook. The driver’s door was open, and Archie leaned in and said, “I need the car.”

Henry glanced up, smiling as he saw Susan. “Ms. Ward,” he said. “You’ve changed your hair.”

“It’s called Atomic Turquoise,” Susan said. “I considered Enchanted Forest but it seemed a little too punk.”

“You’re right,” Henry said, climbing out of the car. He hooked a thumb behind his large silver-and-turquoise belt buckle. “Turquoise is more professional.”

He didn’t ask why they needed the car.

Archie opened the rear door and held it for Susan as she slid onto the warm navy blue vinyl backseat of the Crown Vic. Then Archie got in next to her and closed the door.

“Did he drown?” Susan asked.

“It looks like it,” Archie said gently. “The car sank fast. Electric locks. They couldn’t get out.”

Susan twisted a piece of aqua hair into a tight rope. “I need this to be between us.”

Archie looked at her for a moment. “I can’t promise that. It’s not my case. It’s FBI. It’s not even local FBI. If you tell me something that I think is relevant to the case, I’m going to be compelled to share it.”

Susan let it all go in one breath. “Senator Castle had an affair with his children’s babysitter. Ten years ago. She was fourteen. He then conspired to cover it up.”

“Fourteen?” Archie said. “I thought she was older than that.”

Susan was dumbfounded. “You know about Molly Palmer?”

Archie shrugged. “I didn’t know her name. But there have been rumors.”

Susan knew that there had been rumors. There had been rumors for years. But either no one had believed them, or no one had wanted to believe them, because the rumors had never appeared in print. But she didn’t know that the police knew. “And the cops never investigated?” she asked.

“I was always assured that there was nothing to it,” Archie said.

Susan fidgeted out of her sandals and twisted her legs up under her, careful to modestly arrange her dress. “Well, there was something to it. I’ve got a mountain of evidence, including Molly Palmer. They paid her off. They paid off a teenager to keep quiet.” She pulled at her
Herald
lanyard. “The story was scheduled to run in two days. Parker and I met with Castle’s lawyer yesterday to see if he had a comment. He didn’t.”