“That’s it,” LuEllen whispered. We were trapped in a corner and were among the last to get out of the meeting room. Marvel was in the hallway, talking animatedly with another woman. As we passed, she suddenly, without thinking, reached out and squeezed my arm. I instinctively smiled but kept walking. When I turned away from her, I saw Hill standing on the steps going to the second floor, to Wells’s office.

He’d seen Marvel reach out to me and squeeze. His eyes narrowed, and he fixed on me. While I kept walking, swiveling my head as though I were simply interested in watching the crowd, the little man in the box at the back of my brain was chanting, “Damn, damn, damn

“

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

“We’ve got trouble,” I told LuEllen as we stepped out in the sunshine. A dozen people milled around on the sidewalk below us, as though they’d just come out of a church wedding.

“What?”

“Marvel squeezed my arm when we walked through the hall. Hill saw it. He knows

something. Or he’ll figure it out.”

“Shit,” she said. She raked her fingers through her hair in a gesture I recognized as one of mine. “Why now? We’re so close.”

“She’s not a pro. She wasn’t thinking.” I squinted up the street, into the sun. Longstreet looked hard and dusty, and more than that: priggish, self-righteous. I’ve been in a lot of river towns, some of them a shambles compared with Longstreet, all of them tough. But they were all more or less likable. Longstreet was not. It wasn’t so much tough as mean. “We’ve got a couple of more things to do, and then we go.”

We went back out on the river, hunting downstream. The river off Longstreet had been thoroughly contained by the Corps of Engineers, the banks stabilized, the current directed by submerged wing dams. For long stretches it was as much a canal as a river, and that was our best hope for finding the bodies. There just wasn’t a lot they could get hung up on.

We ran the hunt with a program-editing technique; computer programming teaches you things that often have nothing to do with computers. Searching for bodies was one of those things.

When you finish writing a computer program, there are always a few bugs - mistakes. Some are obvious and easily corrected. Some are not. Finding the hard ones can be a nightmare; imagine reading a phone book, looking for a number that should be 6966996 instead of 6996996, without knowing precisely what you are looking for.

There are two ways to go about debugging.

One is intuitive: You jump around the program, looking for spots where the trouble may be.

The other is logical: You start at the most likely place and methodically search every possibility until you find it.