The Empress File

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    This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
    THE EMPRESS FILE
    A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Henry Holt Company, Inc.
    PRINTING HISTORY
    Henry Holt edition published 1991
    Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited
    Berkley mass-market edition / November 1992
    Copyright © 1991 by John Camp.
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    ISBN: 978-1-101-64580-2
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For Roswell S. and Anne B.

Prologue
    T HE HEAT WAS ferocious.
    The odor of melting blacktop was thick in the air, like the stink of an oil slick, and the rare night walkers glistened with sweat. A time-and-temperature sign outside the state bank poked scarlet digits down the dark streets: 91, it said, and 11:04. Three doors north of the bank, a janitor at the Paramount Theater vacuumed the lobby in slow motion. The theater was air-conditioned. His home was not.
    Across the street from the Paramount, a window dresser at Trent’s fussed with an abattoir of dismembered mannequins. He worked only nights, after curfew for children twelve and under. He was setting up the annual bathing suit display, and modern mannequins, the city council observed, had nipples.
    In the window lights even the dummies looked hot.
    W ITH NIGHTFALL an army of insects marched out of the Mississippi river bottoms. Coffee brown beetles, some as long as a man’s thumb, scuttled through the gutters. Hard-shelled June bugs ricocheted like stones off the storefront windows. Fuzzy-winged moths fluttered in the headlights of passing cars. They made yellow smears when they hit the windshields; the biggest ones had guts like baby birds, and blood.
    The moths and the delicate green lacewings were the tragic stars of the night. By the hundreds of thousands they burned in the eerie violet halos of electronic insect traps. The lucky ones made it past the traps and found heaven in the parking lot lights at the E-Z Way. Under the brilliant floods they danced and died in midnight ecstasy. Their bodies littered the pavement like confetti.
    E LVIS C OULTIER LIKED the bugs. They made intricate patterns in the boring nightscape, like a living kaleidoscope. In some dumb way they brought him a breath of drama. Once a night, or sometimes twice, a luna moth would appear, huge, green, fragile. He would watch as it circled and climbed, danced, courting the light, and finally burned, fluttering like an autumn maple leaf to the parking lot.
    He loved the bugs, but the heat was killing him. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs felt as if they were packed with