Free The Empress File by John Sandford Page B

and we sat, listening, and heard the phone. "Let's go."
    Ballem was not like Dessusdelit. Dessusdelit kept her wealth hidden, and we didn't know where. Ballem put it on the walls - some of it anyway.
    "Jesus," I said when we stepped into the living room. The floors were wood parquet, covered with rich maroon carpets. A floor-to-ceiling bookcase held knickknacks and books and framed a group of black-and-white prints. "Those are real."
    LuEllen squinted at the signature on a lithograph of a young girl in a bonnet. "Cassatt?"
    "Yeah." I took one off the wall and turned it over. A framer's tag was glued on the back panel, dated 1972. "Ballem would've gotten a great price on them way back then. Now they'd cost you an arm and a leg."
    "Take them." She was in motion, headed for the basement. "Women hide stuff in the bedroom and kitchen; men hide it in the basement," she said simply.
    I took the etchings. They all were American, by Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and even Stuart Davis and Mauricio Lasansky, which suggested that Ballem had either a catholic taste or an art investment consultant, I don't much care for black-and-white prints, but they all were good, and any one of them would pay for a year at Harvard. I was stashing the last of them in the car when LuEllen came back up. "We got a box," she said. "Come look."
    The basement was half finished, with tile floors and painted cement-block walls. The ceilings were open.
    "Over here," she said, and led me into a nook behind the furnace.
    "It's not exactly a safe," she said, nodding at a foot-square steel door set into the concrete wall. A serious-looking combination dial protruded from the front of the door. "It's more of a fireproof box."
    "Can you open it?"
    "I don't know." She glanced at her watch. "We're at two minutes, forty-five." She walked away from the lockbox, looking at the tools hung on Ballem's basement wall, then around the basement in general. A moment later she ran back up the stairs. I followed, but by the time I got to the top, she was already coming back. She was carrying a maul and a wood-splitting wedge. "From the garage. I saw that firewood around to the side."
    I followed her back down and said, "What?"
    "Stand back." LuEllen lined up with the maul and gave the box a full-swing whack with the sharp edge. The blade didn't cut through, but it put a dent in it. The impact sounded like the end of the world, like a blacksmith pounding on an anvil.
    "Jesus Christ," I whispered. "Somebody'll hear..."
    "Not in this neighborhood," she grunted, pivoting for another swing. "Everybody's got air-conditioning, and all the windows are closed."
    She took another whack, put another dent in the box. "You do it," she said. "You're a big strong man."
    "Fuck, LuEllen..." Now I really was sweating.
    "Hit it," she said.
    I hit it. A half dozen blows distorted the door enough to see into it. LuEllen fitted the wedge into the seam of the door just above the lock, handed me the maul, and said, "One more time."
    I hit it, and the door popped open. Breathing hard, I looked at LuEllen. She was standing with her arms crossed, waiting, not bored but not nervous either.
    Inside the safe we found a leather-bound book of stamps, a freezer bag full of currency, and a metal box filled with American gold coins in sealed packages. The stamp collection wasn't much to look at - a few dozen fading squares of red, blue, and green, each in its own archival envelope. We took it all.
    "Upstairs," LuEllen said. She looked at her watch. "Seven minutes, thirty-five seconds."
    Ballem had an aging computer setup almost identical to Dessusdelit's. While I checked that, LuEllen tore apart the rest of the house. In the bedroom she found a collection of bondage and discipline magazines, both hetero- and homosexual, a new gun, a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum, fully loaded, and a flat metal box, like a safe-deposit box. Inside were a dozen gold Rolex watches, old