I checked and found the Longstreet gang had used less than a tenth of the available disk space. Good. My program - a gem, if I do say so myself - simply made a second copy of everything on the disk and then hid it in the free space. The copy would never show up on directories or in any other routine transaction unless the right code phrase was entered at the prompt. I made the code phrase redneck. And fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

If these were the books, and the Longstreet gang got nervous and tried to erase them, there was an excellent chance that there’d still be a set left on the machine, hidden under the code. A set available to the state cops

After LuEllen had unlocked the desk, she checked a filing cabinet, found nothing interesting, and then went through the rest of the building. As I finished, she came in and said, “Come look at this.”

I packed my machine and followed her into the back. There was a small loading dock at the rear of the building, with a pulldown door, like a small garage door. Built into the wall opposite the door were two cubicles, four-by-four-by-four feet, with heavy Plexiglas doors. There was a grille in the wall of each, and the doors had thick rubber seals.

“Gas chambers?” she asked. “For the animals?”

I looked at the seals and then at a pump apparatus off to the side. “No. It’s a vacuum system. They put the dogs in the chamber and suck the air out. That’s the way they do it most places now.”

“Christ, it sounds awful.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s supposed to be humane.”

We left it at that. LuEllen made a last check of the building, to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind, relocked the door from the inside, and pulled it shut after us.

Ten minutes later we were on the river. We didn’t talk much as we pushed back upstream. LuEllen lay in the sunbathing well, looking up at the stars, and the tension current drained away with the current.

By two o’clock I knew I had the books. I didn’t know what they meant.

“They’ve used codes for all the categories,” I told LuEllen. “The numbers are there, but I don’t know what the categories are.”

“Marvel may be able to figure it out,” she said.

“I hope.”

While I worked on the books, LuEllen set up the enlarger in the head. She made four prints, fixed them, washed them, and let them dry. By the time I was sure about the books, she was looking at the enlargements under a high-intensity light.

“We got three out of the four,” she said.