"Stay with the program, goddamn it." She glanced at her watch. "It's time."

We took the Chrysler, as the less noticeable of the two cars. LuEllen drove downtown, taking the routes she'd scouted in her trip the week before. The city council was meeting, and two dozen cars were parked in the lot sideways across the street from City Hall.

"Chrysler," she said, nodding. The mayor's car was there, identical to the car we were driving. "I don't see Hill's pickup."

"And I don't see the Continental."

"May be on the street in front."

The Continental would be easy to recognize because it looked exactly like the one we'd left at the Wal-Mart. It belonged to Archie Ballem, the city attorney. We took a left, past the front of the City Hall. No pickup and no Continental.

"Ballem's got to be here for the bond hearing," I said. "Hill, we can't be sure."

"I thought he came to all these things."

"That's what Marvel said."

"I'd hate for her to be wrong this early," LuEllen said. We'd continued down the block past the City Hall. "Let's go around. Wait a minute. There he is. There. Ballem."

A man in a seersucker suit and a white straw hat was walking down the street toward us. He turned to look at our car as we rolled past. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Ninety-nine percent. I saw him last week, on the street. His office is down this way."

We found the Continental outside Ballem's office, three blocks from the City Hall.

"If we could find Hill."

"If we don't, we'll call it off," she said. "But we've got the other two."

"We go?" I asked.

"Yes."

The phone company was a little redbrick cubicle on a side street, with a lighted blue and white phone booth hung on the side wall. We knew Chenille Dessusdelit, the mayor, was at the meeting. And we knew she was a widow and lived alone. But there might be a guest. We called her home, but there was no answer. With the twentieth ring LuEllen nipped the receiver off the phone with a pair of compact bolt cutters. The phone would still be ringing at Dessusdelit's, and with the receiver gone, it was unlikely that anyone would come along and hang up our public phone.

"Get the portable," LuEllen said. I knelt on the passenger seat, leaned into the back, unzipped her suitcase, took out the cellular phone, sat down again, and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. Dessusdelit's line was still busy.

"Maybe we could get Bobby to kill the call records, so we could just use the cellular and not have to mess with public phones," I suggested after I had hung up.

LuEllen shook her head. "Too complicated. Something could get fucked up and we'd be on paper." She feared paper more than anything: tax records, agreements, leases, checks. Phone bills. Paper left a trail and couldn't be denied.

We cruised Dessusdelit's house just once. A well-kept rambler, it was stuck at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a yard heavy with shrubbery. Trees overhung the streets from both sides, but there were no sidewalks and nobody out for a stroll. Too hot, probably. One light burned in a window at the center of the house, a virtual advertisement that the place was empty. The house on the south side of Dessusdelit's showed a few lights, but the house on the other side was dark. We came out of the cul-de-sac, took a left past the country club, did a U-turn, and headed back. I dialed Dessusdelit's house again, and the phone was still busy. I was looking out the window when I heard LuEllen take the first hit of coke. She carries it in small plastic capsules, one long snort apiece.

"Jesus," I said.

"Don't give me any shit."

The coke was on her in a second, but her driving was rock-steady.

"Zapper," she said.

"LuEllen."

"Get the fuckin' zapper."

The zapper was a specialized scanning transmitter that looked like a long-nosed hair dryer. It came with its own batteries. I got it out and started hyperventilating. LuEllen likes this part, with the adrenaline. I don't. LuEllen took us into the cul-de-sac and, without hesitating, into Dessusdelit's 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 quick tour 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 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.