The Empress File (19 page)

"What-" he started, but I hung up.

"There," I said drunkenly, "that'll fix things."

"You need another gin and tonic," LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.

At four o'clock Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.

"What the fuck were we doing?" LuEllen moaned.

"Shit, it'll be OK," I said, grimacing. I hadn't gotten loaded in two years.

When I brought up Bobby's file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that "the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere."

On the other thing, he said, "I did Dessusdelit."

"Fuck it," I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. "Let's go out on the water."

The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.

We headed south past the warehouses, elevators, and the tank field, past animal control. There was nobody in sight at the complex, and at the revetment, where Hill and St. Thomas had dumped the bodies in the water, I put LuEllen ashore. She jogged up the levee path, watching the weeds for snakes, and peeked at animal control. Nobody home.

She came back, and we examined the last of the murder photos, the shot of Hill throwing the pistol into the river. I had no idea how much the lazy current would deflect something as heavy as a pistol, so we anchored ten feet above where it had gone in the water and began working with the magnet. LuEllen didn't have a great deal of faith in the possibility of finding it. I thought it was mostly a matter of patience.

I was using a muskie rod to cast with, with the magnet tied on instead of a lure. The magnet was heavy, but if I got my shoulders into it, I could toss it twenty-five or thirty feet downstream and then crank it back upstream to the boat.

And I found the pistol, just about the time my arms started to tighten up. There was a clank transmitted through the rod, and I said, "Whoops," and gave the rod to LuEllen and went back and eased up on the anchor. When we had the line running pretty much straight up and down, I slowly retrieved it. It was a .45. A good old government model from Colt. I detached the gun from the magnet, cut the magnet from the line, and threw it overboard.

"Why'd you do that?" LuEllen asked.

"I hate magnets. Damn dangerous things, around computers and software."

We spent another hour poking along to the south, scanning the banks for any sign of a shirt. Bobby's note said the shirt was what we'd see, since the decomposition gases gathered in the abdominal and chest cavities.

Nothing. I cleaned the gun as we went along, lubricated it with some WD-40, and put it back together. Good as ever. Some people like guns, some people don't, but you can't deny their quality as machines.

We hid the pistol with the money bag, down in the engine compartment; as the sun went down, we turned the Fanny's nose upstream and headed back. Five minutes after we arrived at the marina, Marvel called.

"They're going to quit," she exulted. "It's all over town. They had a meeting at Dessusdelit's house, and St. Thomas went home and told his wife. They're out of here."

On Monday Dessusdelit called at nine-fifteen. I was still asleep, and LuEllen crawled over me to answer the phone, then handed it over.

"I'm... I really need... some help. Would it be... could you come to the City Hall, my office? And bring your tarot?" She sounded ragged, desperate.

"Now?"

"Yes. Right away. You'll have to hurry. I've got a meeting at ten."

We took quick showers, then grabbed my tarot and LuEllen's crystal ball and drove up to the City Hall. Dessusdelit's office was in the city council suite. There was a secretary's desk in an outer office, a conference room, then a series of four closet-size offices for the councilmen, and a double-size closet for the mayor. A dozen people milled around the ground floor, outside the council meeting chambers, and a couple more slouched against the walls in the council's outer office.

The harried secretary said, "Mr. Kidd?" as soon as we walked in, and ushered us through to Dessusdelit's office. Dessusdelit was with one of those young-old people you find in corners around city halls, a guy maybe twenty-five, who'd seen fifty years' worth of corruption and showed it in the weary, overly wise crinkles around his eyes.

As tired as he looked, Dessusdelit looked worse. She'd aged ten years in two days. She'd tried to cover her distress with makeup, but now she looked like a painted puppet.

"Could you excuse us for a minute, Robert?" she asked the young-old guy. "I have to talk to these folks privately for a few minutes."

"What's happening?" I asked. "I saw the papers..."

"There's been a serious problem," she answered. She glanced at her watch. "I have a question about your tarot. Must I ask you a question? Explicitly? Or can I just hold the deck and think a question?"

"You can do it either way," I said. "A lot of tarot readers don't believe the question should ever be spoken. I think it clarifies a reading, but no, you don't have to speak it."

"I'd like to try it that way if we could."

We couldn't cold-deck her, so I simply took the deck out of its box, unwrapped it, shuffled a few times, passed it to her, and had her go through the routine. She might be asking any of a number of questions: Should I quit the council? Where did the hundred thousand go? Will the murders be found out?

"You know, stress can twist a reading," I said conversationally as she shuffled the cards. "Maybe we should wait until you're a little more relaxed..."

She stopped shuffling long enough to glance at her watch and shook her head. "No. It has to be before the meeting."

So. It had to do with the meeting. That most likely meant that she was asking whether she should quit, although I couldn't be sure how she would formulate the question.

"Don't try to formulate a precise question. Just let your mind settle on a situation, and let's see what the cards have to say about it. They're really not best for yes or no answers."

I rolled the cards out. We got a spread that could have meant a lot of things. Her eyes darted around like a bird's looking for a worm, past the Three of Swords, a deadly card, to the Nine of Pentacles, a card suggesting attainment, and finally settled on the Hanged Man. I tapped the card with my index finger.

"This is the key," I said in my most portentous voice. "It stands for sacrifice, giving up something held dear, to clear the way for greater gains in life. This is what I call a forked reading because you can see that the possible futures" - I tapped the Three of Swords and the Nine of Pentacles - "are wildly split. You're at the crux of a situation. If you make the sacrifice, the road leads to the Nine. If you don't, it leads to the Three."

The Three shows three swords driven through a red heart, a card of sorrow and loss.

"I see," she said softly. She swiveled in her chair and looked out the window. LuEllen rolled the crystal ball out of its velvet sack and passed it to her.

"Look inside, focus on yourself," LuEllen said.

Dessusdelit rolled the heavy ball in her hands, moving it into the light from the window. "So much inside," she said almost dreamily.

She sat like that for a moment, then turned and said, "Thank you."

We were dismissed. "Is this meeting open?" I asked as we went out.

"Yes. All meetings are open. But I'm afraid it won't be a happy one."

By the time we left Dessusdelit's office, a few minutes before ten o'clock, the council chambers were packed. We were standing in the hallway, looking over the heads of the crowd, when an argument blew up down the hallway. Carl Rebeck, wearing a suit and sunglasses and escorted by a state trooper, was standing nose to nose with Duane Hill. I hadn't seen Hill come in, but he had apparently been waiting for Rebeck.

"What the fuck are you doin', Carl?" Hill blurted. The trooper moved between the two men.

"I just wanna go vote and have it done with," Rebeck said, staying in the shadow of the cop. The cop had one hand on Hill's chest, but Hill kept peering around him.

"You gotta come talk to us, Carl. You don't wanna be listening to a bunch of bullshit put out by these piss-ant state jerk-offs," Hill said, his voice rising almost to a shout.

The state trooper, who wore mirrored glasses and had a face like the sharp side of a hatchet, said something to Hill and shoved. Hill gave a step, and Rebeck slid past with the cop.

"Maybe it wasn't a bad idea, calling Rebeck," LuEllen muttered.

The argument in the hall had pulled some of the crowd out of the meeting room, and we managed to push inside. Marvel and two men were sitting toward the back, to the right. We went to the left and stood against the wall. The meeting started twenty minutes later. Lucius Bell showed up right on time and took a seat, looking around expectantly. The Reverend Mr. Dodge, wearing a dark suit with an ecclesiastical collar, showed up a couple of minutes later, carrying a sheaf of papers, and sat at the opposite end of the curved council table. Even from where we were standing, you could see his collar was soaked with sweat.

Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and Rebeck came in a few moments later and settled behind the table. There was no talking. Dessusdelit pounded a gavel twice, called the meeting to order, told Mary Wells to turn on her tape recorder, and started.

Money was missing, she said, taken in the night from the City Hall safe. It had been withdrawn from the bank with the approval of herself, St. Thomas, and Rebeck as a test of the bank's and the city's accounting procedures. Now it was gone, and there was a state investigation. They were innocent of any wrongdoing and were sure that the state would find it so.

Further, she said, there were unfounded allegations that other funds had been diverted. Again, these were allegations from a small minority and had been given undue weight by state investigators. They also would be proved false.

"It now seems clear, however, that I, Mr. St. Thomas, and Mr. Rebeck will have a full schedule simply demonstrating to the state that these charges are incorrect. Therefore, we feel we have no option but to leave the council, at least for the time being. We all look forward to running again in the fall if, by the grace of our Lord, the state has realized the falseness of these allegations..."

Dessusdelit seemed to be holding up well, after the near breakdown we'd seen on the boat. I glanced over at Marvel; she was sitting forward, half smiling, watching with rapt attention. Dessusdelit first stepped down as mayor, and Lucius Bell was unanimously elected to succeed her. Bell took the gavel. Then Dessusdelit, St. Thomas, and a tight-lipped Rebeck, each asking to be recognized in turn, read short messages of resignation. When they were done, there wasn't a sound in the chamber until Dessusdelit pushed her chair back, and the leg scraped on the wooden floor.

Suddenly everybody was talking. A half dozen people gathered around Marvel, chattering at once. Bell remained seated, looking at the gavel in his hand, talking to Dodge. Dessusdelit said a few words to St. Thomas, ignored Rebeck, and walked out toward her office.

"That's it," LuEllen whispered. We were trapped in a corner and were among the last to get out of the meeting room. Marvel was in the hallway, talking animatedly with another woman. As we passed, she suddenly, without thinking, reached out and squeezed my arm. I instinctively smiled but kept walking. When I turned away from her, I saw Hill standing on the steps going to the second floor, to Wells's office.

He'd seen Marvel reach out to me and squeeze. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed on me. While I kept walking, swiveling my head as though I were simply interested in watching the crowd, the little man in the box at the back of my brain was chanting, "Damn, damn, damn..."

Chapter
15

"We've got trouble," I told LuEllen as we stepped out in the sunshine. A dozen people milled around on the sidewalk below us, as though they'd just come out of a church wedding.

"What?"

"Marvel squeezed my arm when we walked through the hall. Hill saw it. He knows... something. Or he'll figure it out."

"Shit," she said. She raked her fingers through her hair in a gesture I recognized as one of mine. "Why now? We're so close."

"She's not a pro. She wasn't thinking." I squinted up the street, into the sun. Longstreet looked hard and dusty, and more than that: priggish, self-righteous. I've been in a lot of river towns, some of them a shambles compared with Longstreet, all of them tough. But they were all more or less likable. Longstreet was not. It wasn't so much tough as mean. "We've got a couple of more things to do, and then we go."

We went back out on the river, hunting downstream. The river off Longstreet had been thoroughly contained by the Corps of Engineers, the banks stabilized, the current directed by submerged wing dams. For long stretches it was as much a canal as a river, and that was our best hope for finding the bodies. There just wasn't a lot they could get hung up on.

We ran the hunt with a program-editing technique; computer programming teaches you things that often have nothing to do with computers. Searching for bodies was one of those things.

When you finish writing a computer program, there are always a few bugs - mistakes. Some are obvious and easily corrected. Some are not. Finding the hard ones can be a nightmare; imagine reading a phone book, looking for a number that should be 6966996 instead of 6996996, without knowing precisely what you are looking for.

There are two ways to go about debugging.

One is intuitive: You jump around the program, looking for spots where the trouble may be.

The other is logical: You start at the most likely place and methodically search every possibility until you find it.

The intuitive approach has its proponents. You may find the problem very quickly. On the other hand, you may never find it; the mistake may not be where you think it must be. The logical approach gets the job done, but it's glacially slow.

I tend to go with the intuitive because the logical is boring. But to hunt for the bodies, where we couldn't fuck up and where intuition was blunted by a lack of knowledge of the river, the logical route was a necessity. We searched downstream from the point where the bodies had gone into the water, giving detailed attention to Bobby's highest-percentage areas.

"There's too much river," LuEllen said. "And if we keep looking at it in the sun, we're going to get... snow-blind, whatever you'd call it."

"If we find them, though, that'll be the last thing we need."

We never did find Harold.

The Bolivar County Sheriff's Department found him, in the river above Rosedale. Or rather a cat-fisherman did. The body was floating off a wing dam. The catfisherman called the sheriff, and the deputies pulled the body out, just about the time the city council was meeting. We got the word from Bobby that night, when we came off the river.

I'd put in the hookups and gone back for a shower when the phone rang; Bobby had been auto-dialing every minute or so, waiting for our return. I answered it, got the carrier tone, and punched up the computer. A block of newspaper text slid onto the screen:

ROSEDALE, MISS. (AP)-The body of an unidentified man was found in the Mississippi River near Victoria Bend above the city of Rosedale late Saturday, according to a spokesman for the Bolivar County Sheriff's Department.

The body was partially decomposed and apparently had been in the river for several days, the spokesman said. The dead man was black and was wearing a yellow dress shirt and gray dress slacks. No identification was found with the body.

An autopsy is scheduled for this week in Greenville. The sheriff's spokesman said there was no sign of foul play.

Appended to the story was a note from Bobby:

That's all. Could it be Harold?

It seemed likely. The body had been found in one of Bobby's high-probability areas. And if Harold's body had gotten there, maybe Sherrie's had, too. I called Bobby back.

Don't talk to Marvel or John about the body. We'll tell them later, OK?

There was a moment's hesitation as he thought it over, then: