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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