Free The Empress File by John Sandford Page A

driveway. When we were still a hundred feet down the street, I pointed the zapper at the garage door and pulled the trigger. After a few seconds the door started up, and LuEllen barely had to slow down before we were inside. I dropped the door behind us, she killed the engine, and we sat in silence.
    “Listen,” LuEllen said. She was trembling with intensity. I listened and, after a second, picked out the faint ringing of the telephone.
    The door to the interior was unlocked. Small towns. Lots of crime but not on the streets. LuEllen led the way in and then quickly through the house, stopping to answer and hang up the phone. There were three bedrooms. One had a queen-size bed, a couple of chests of drawers with jewelry boxes on top, and an antique oval mirror. Neat but lived in. Another was obviously a spare bedroom, with twin beds covered with decorative quilts. The third bedroom had been converted into a small home office with an IBM computer.
    The living room was a double-jointed affair with two levels and a big brick fireplace, perfect for political soirees. The kitchen was ample, and there was a small first-floor utility room with a washer and dryer just off the kitchen. A quicktour of the unfinished basement turned up nothing of interest.
    LuEllen started with the bedroom while I went back out to the car for my laptop and a stripper program. I was a little surprised that Dessusdelit had a computer at all; women of her age and status don’t usually mess with them. Along with the computer were a slow modem, a desperately outmoded printer, and two double-drawer filing cabinets.
    I loaded the stripper program into her machine, stripped her floppies and the hard disk, looking for data. I came up empty. There were two application programs, a word processor, and a spreadsheet, but no data.
    I dumped the cabinets and again came up empty. Nothing but routine business letters. I carried the laptop back to the car and started working through the kitchen.
    There was nothing subtle about what we were doing; we were tearing Dessusdelit’s house apart. I dumped the cupboards onto the floor, shook each can and bottle before I tossed it aside, tore the drawers out of the refrigerator, checked the ice cube trays. Halfway through, there was a noisy crash from the bedroom, and I stopped to look. LuEllen had broken the bed apart.
    “Loud,” I said.
    “Go work,” she said coldly.
    When I finished the kitchen, LuEllen was tearingthrough the living room. She had cut open the living room furniture and was tearing through a bookcase when I came out. “Where’s the circuit probe?” she asked.
    “Here.” I patted my breast pocket. We’d been in for a while, and I was starting to sweat. LuEllen looked frozen, focused.
    “Check the bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen. I’m going downstairs.… I don’t know, it should have been in the bedroom.” She checked her watch again. “Seven minutes.”
    We didn’t know what we were looking for. We did know that Dessusdelit had taken a lot of money out of the city over the years and that Bobby couldn’t find it: couldn’t find money, investments, long-distance trips that might point to a foreign money laundry. Nothing. She could have been buying land in some backwoods town under an assumed name, but that didn’t feel right. She’d want it where she could see it. She did have a safe-deposit box at the Longstreet State Bank, but Bobby went into the bank records and found that she visited the box only once or twice a year.
    Wherever she was putting the money, there should have been some sign of it in the house. There wasn’t. The furnishings were good but not great; she hadn’t stashed the money in antiques or art. I’d feared the possibility that she’d put it in antiques; we didn’t have a moving van.
    We hadn’t yet found a safe. That’s what the probe was for.
    A circuit probe is simply a lamp the size of a pencil. There’s a plug at one end, a light in the middle,