Our eyes hooked up for a moment. Her grin slowly faded, and a tear started down her cheek. “Fucking men,” she said. She turned away, banged into the bathroom, and stayed there for half an hour.

When she came back out, we both were struggling to get back to normal.

“So what do you want me to do?” she asked brightly.

“I’ve got to pound on the computers. Bobby’s shipping me more data than I can handle. While I do that, I want you to start looking for a boat. Something we can rent for a month or so.”

“A boat?”

“Yeah. You know, one of those white plastic things with a pointed end? They hold out the water when you-“

“OK, OK,” she said, waving me off. “What kind of boat? How big? What are we going to do with it?”

“A houseboat. Good-size. Air-conditioned. Something you’d tend to notice.”

“You’re going to live on it?” LuEllen has an oval face with dark hair, big, interesting eyes, and a few freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose.

“We’re going to live on it.”

“Down in Longstreet?”

“Yeah. Down in Longstreet.”

I spent two weeks compiling Bobby’s raw data into economic and psychological profiles of the individual city council members - the same kind of work I often do for politicians. Hill, the dogcatcher-enforcer, was a gambler and probably a loser. Dessusdelit and Ballem, though, were hoarders. I couldn’t yet tell how much money they were taking out of Longstreet, but it was substantial. They couldn’t invest it legally, because then they’d have to explain where they got it; none of it showed up on their IRS returns. Neither Dessusdelit nor Ballem had a passport, so they weren’t personally taking it out of the country. They had to be stashing it.

Marvel talked to a man who worked for Ballem’s lawn service and heard a story that Ballem collected stamps and maybe coins. Dessusdelit had been seen by another man in a Memphis jewelry store, and she’d been looking at unset stones

“Stamps are great inflation hedges,” LuEllen said. “Coins are not so good, but they’re OK. Gold sucks, but it gives you some protection. Stones aren’t so good either. But all of it stores value, and all of it is easy to move.”

She knows what she’s talking about.

Besides the research, I put in three hard hours at the Ramsey County Law Library. Every night I talked to John, Bobby, or Marvel.

“How much clout do you have with the black caucus of the state Democratic party down there?” I asked Marvel.

“Me? Not much. But Harold does.”

“We may need their help. I’ll get back to you. For now I just needed to know if you had any clout with them. Have you made any progress on finding the machine’s books?”