John Sandford - The Empress File

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."

"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."