Free The Empress File by John Sandford

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 tearing through 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, and a screwdriver at the other end. The screwdriver fits the screw in the middle of common everyday home power outlets. Electricians use them to check the outlets to see if they're live.
    I checked the outlet next to her bedroom door, one under a window on an outside wall, one next to a closet. I got a light every time. The last outlet, the one behind the bed's headboard, came up dead. I turned the probe over and used the screwdriver to loosen the outlet plate.
    Lying on the floor, working, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest; we were getting long on time. I gave the screw a last turn and pried off the plate.
    Ah. A wall cache. Inside was a metal box, and I used the screwdriver to pull it out.
    "Find something?" LuEllen asked from the doorway.
    "Yeah, a cache... shit."
    "What?"
    "Money. Goddamn it." The cash was packed tightly into the metal box, fifties and hundreds. I pulled it out, a folded-over wad some four or five inches thick, and tossed it to LuEllen. In the bottom of the box was a small white envelope. I fished it out with my fingertips, squeezed it, and found three hard bumps like cherry pits.
    "Not more than a few thousand here," LuEllen said. "We've got to get going-what's that?"
    I tore open the folded envelope and poured a little stream of ice into the palm of my hand.
    "Diamonds," I said, holding my hand up to LuEllen.
    "Damn, those are nice if they're investment grade," she said. She took the stones and tucked them in a shirt pocket with the cash. "We're running late..."
    "Find anything in the basement?" I asked as we headed back toward the car.
    "No."
    "Goddamn it, we're not doing that good."
    "Get the paint."
    We had two gallons of paint in the car, red oil-based enamel. We popped open one can and started spreading it around the house.
    THIEF, I wrote on one