The Empress File

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 pushedher 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…”

“W E ’ 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.”
    W E 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.
    T HERE 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