“Carl, I don’t want to say who this is ‘cause I could get in trouble myself. But you know me, and I know you, and I’m here to tell you, those state boys have got more than some money shuffled around. Somebody’s got themself hurt. I don’t know who, but they got homicide investigators comin’ in. If I was you, I’d go have a talk with them state folks. Maybe you can get out while the gettin’ is good

“

“What-” he started, but I hung up.

“There,” I said drunkenly, “that’ll fix things.”

“You need another gin and tonic,” LuEllen said, and we fell around the inside of the cabin, laughing about Rebeck.

At four o’clock Bobby dumped to the computer and tapped the alarm. By that time we were sobering up, and the call to Rebeck no longer seemed like such a good idea.

“What the fuck were we doing?” LuEllen moaned.

“Shit, it’ll be OK,” I said, grimacing. I hadn’t gotten loaded in two years.

When I brought up Bobby’s file, I found a series of calculations based on current, channel shape, and flow that suggested that the bodies would be anywhere from three to twenty-five miles downstream. He listed a series of probabilities for each location but warned that “the bodies could have gotten hung up on something two minutes after they went in the water and maybe went nowhere.”

On the other thing, he said, “I did Dessusdelit.”

“Fuck it,” I said to LuEllen as I crawled back up the ladder. “Let’s go out on the water.”

The marina operator was reseating planks at the end of the dock, working with a power drill, a couple of crescent wrenches, and a stack of two-by-sixes. LuEllen waved to him, glass in hand, as we went out, and he waved back with his own beer bottle.

We headed south past the warehouses, elevators, and the tank field, past animal control. There was nobody in sight at the complex, and at the revetment, where Hill and St. Thomas had dumped the bodies in the water, I put LuEllen ashore. She jogged up the levee path, watching the weeds for snakes, and peeked at animal control. Nobody home.

She came back, and we examined the last of the murder photos, the shot of Hill throwing the pistol into the river. I had no idea how much the lazy current would deflect something as heavy as a pistol, so we anchored ten feet above where it had gone in the water and began working with the magnet. LuEllen didn’t have a great deal of faith in the possibility of finding it. I thought it was mostly a matter of patience.