The Empress File

this.”
    I packed my machine and followed her into the back. There was a small loading dock at the rear of the building, with a pulldown door, like a small garage door. Built into the wall opposite the door were two cubicles, four-by-four-by-four feet, with heavy Plexiglas doors. There was a grille in the wall of each, and the doors had thick rubber seals.
    “Gas chambers?” she asked. “For the animals?”
    I looked at the seals and then at a pump apparatus off to the side. “No. It’s a vacuum system. They put the dogs in the chamber and suck the air out. That’s the way they do it most places now.”
    “Christ, it sounds awful.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be humane.”
    We left it at that. LuEllen made a last check of the building, to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind, relocked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut after us.
    Ten minutes later we were on the river. We didn’t talk much as we pushed back upstream. LuEllen lay in the sunbathing well, looking up atthe stars, and the tension drained away with the current.
    B Y TWO O ’ CLOCK I knew I had the books. I didn’t know what they meant.
    “They’ve used codes for all the categories,” I told LuEllen. “The numbers are there, but I don’t know what the categories are.”
    “Marvel may be able to figure it out,” she said.
    “I hope.”
    While I worked on the books, LuEllen set up the enlarger in the head. She made four prints, fixed them, washed them, and let them dry. By the time I was sure about the books, she was looking at the enlargements under a high-intensity light.
    “We got three out of the four,” she said.
    She had enlarged the images of the safe dial to the size of an old-fashioned alarm-clock face. The numbers were clear enough in the first three. In the fourth, Wells’s index finger covered the critical digit.
    “So it’s seventy-four, forty-four, twelve, and something between… say, fifty-five and seventy.”
    “Hang on.” I got my drawing box, dug around, and came up with a compass and a set of dividers. Using the compass, I drew the missing portion of the dial over Wells’s intruding finger. With the dividers, I measured the intervals betweenthe visible numbers and marked them off around the rim of the dial.
    “If this is the centerline,” I said, indicating the line with a ruler and a sharp pencil, “then the digit is… sixty-six. Give or take a digit.”
    LuEllen looked at me and grinned. “You
do
have your uses. Other than sexual, I mean.”

I T WAS ALL coming together. Smoothly. Too smoothly, LuEllen said. She was born and raised in Minnesota and was automatically suspicious of pleasantness. No matter how nice the summer is, winter always comes…
    With the printouts of the Longstreet books in hand, I called John and Marvel. We agreed to drive to Greenville, where we could meet in a motel without dodging the Longstreet locals.
    LuEllen stayed with the boat. There’d be new people in Greenville, and she was paranoid about her face becoming known. At two o’clock Marvel let me into her room at the Sea-B Motel. John was there with Harold and a man I hadn’t met before.
    “This is Brooking Davis,” Marvel said, nodding at the stranger. Davis was a slender, bird-boned man with a square chin, a dark mustache, and the liquid eyes of an Arab. “He’s a lawyer and does appraisal work for the county assessor’soffice. Brooking will be our first appointment on the council. If Harold and I don’t know where the bodies are buried, Brooking will.”
    “Well, we found you some grave sites,” I said, handing over the printouts. “It looks simple enough, but I don’t know how it breaks down.”
    Davis had two boxes full of city budgets, memos, and reports. He unloaded them on a credenza, and Marvel and Harold pulled chairs up to the bed. In two minutes the three of them were in deep discussion, comparing numbers on printouts with expenditures and collections in the city reports.
    “How’d it go with Brown?” I asked John.
    John smiled. “He was a little surprised when I turned out to be black, looking like I did—and driving that BMW—but we’re all set,” he said. He stepped over to a black nylon briefcase, unzipped it, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “I gave him a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars for a thirteen-week option on six hundred acres, at nine hundred and twenty dollars an acre. He was asking a thousand, but I dickered a little. I still