The Empress File

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 clanktransmitted 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.”
    O N M ONDAY 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,