"If we find them, though, that'll be the last thing we need."

We never did find Harold.

The Bolivar County Sheriff's Department found him, in the river above Rosedale. Or rather a cat-fisherman did. The body was floating off a wing dam. The catfisherman called the sheriff, and the deputies pulled the body out, just about the time the city council was meeting. We got the word from Bobby that night, when we came off the river.

I'd put in the hookups and gone back for a shower when the phone rang; Bobby had been auto-dialing every minute or so, waiting for our return. I answered it, got the carrier tone, and punched up the computer. A block of newspaper text slid onto the screen:

ROSEDALE, MISS. (AP)-The body of an unidentified man was found in the Mississippi River near Victoria Bend above the city of Rosedale late Saturday, according to a spokesman for the Bolivar County Sheriff's Department.

The body was partially decomposed and apparently had been in the river for several days, the spokesman said. The dead man was black and was wearing a yellow dress shirt and gray dress slacks. No identification was found with the body.

An autopsy is scheduled for this week in Greenville. The sheriff's spokesman said there was no sign of foul play.

Appended to the story was a note from Bobby:

That's all. Could it be Harold?

It seemed likely. The body had been found in one of Bobby's high-probability areas. And if Harold's body had gotten there, maybe Sherrie's had, too. I called Bobby back.

Don't talk to Marvel or John about the body. We'll tell them later, OK?

There was a moment's hesitation as he thought it over, then:

OK.

LuEllen and I were looking at the corps's navigation maps of the lower Mississippi when Marvel called.

"There's a meeting tonight," she said. She was quietly triumphant. "The governor has announced his appointments, and Bell called a meeting at eight o'clock to swear them into office. Ballem, Hill, and Brooking Davis."

"Was anybody upset by Davis?"

"No. He's an attorney, and the governor's people were running around telling everybody that it was political-a gesture to the black caucus in the legislature. They understand that kind of politics down here. It's considered smart and harmless. Especially with Ballem and Hill going on the council."

"All right. It's time for you to talk to Reverend Dodge."

"We're ready."

"Take John with you. Just in case. You've got to get him by the balls-"

"We got him."

"Then just sit tight. We'll take care of Ballem and Hill."

We spent the rest of the evening talking, sitting on the top deck, watching the river go by. We were almost done, we agreed. We should take the boat on down the river, to New Orleans. Hang out awhile. French Quarter. Take our time heading back up north.

"Maybe you could stay with me awhile," I suggested.

"That's kind of scary, Kidd," she said.

More river went by. "Listen, I kind of wanted to ask. is your name really LuEllen?"

She looked amused. "Yeah, it really is."

Marvel called at ten o'clock. It had worked, she said. Hill, Ballem, and Brooking Davis had been sworn in as the new city councilmen.

"And the Reverend Dodge's ass is mine," she said. "His ass, and his vote."

"Did he freak out?"

"Nope. He was cool as a cucumber," Marvel said. "I told him about this one girl, and then a second one, and he just reached out and patted me on the knee, and he said, 'Marvel, what exactly is it that you want?' I told him, and he said, 'Well, I guess you got me,' and asked if we wanted a beer."

"That's cold," I said.

"I actually kind of admired him, the way he kept his shit together," Marvel said.

At the meeting, she said, Ballem tried to get a "consensus of the council" that committed the new members to resign when the former members were found innocent of wrongdoing.

Only Hill voted with him.

Then two black members of the audience got up and demanded a new investigation of the shooting of Darrell Clark. After some heated discussion – and a recess, during which Marvel spoke to Brooking Davis – the proposal was rejected, three to two, with Bell and Dodge voting in favor. Both Bell and Dodge were surprised by Davis's decision to vote with Hill and Ballem, as were the black members of the crowd.

"Brooking is going to take some shit, but we figure we've got to lay back. We don't want anybody having second thoughts about who is on that council. We want him solid with the whites in town. I'd have told Dodge to vote against, too, but he'd already suggested a new investigation, so he couldn't."

After a few more angry exchanges about the state investigation, Bell was about to adjourn the meeting when Davis brought up the bridge. Instead of looking to the state legislatures for money, he said, the city should look into the possibility of a revenue bond issue and build its own bridge. A toll bridge, if necessary.

Bell said the idea had been proposed before, and the financing looked impossible. Davis insisted that it was worth exploring. Ballem was positively enthusiastic. There'd been some problems, but there'd been problems before, and the machine always kept rolling. Revenue bonds were just the thing to fuel it. The vote was unanimously in favor of Davis's idea.

"We figured that would get Davis in solid with Bell, just in case we need him later," Marvel said. "Now, the real question is, "When can we dump Ballem and Hill?"

"Right away," I said. "We'll start working on it tonight."

"How're you going to do it? The state cops could take a while with those books."

"Don't worry about it. You just be ready to move."

Everything was rushing together.

We got up early the next morning, drove to Greenville, and mailed sets of LuEllen's murder photos to Ballem and Hill. We'd give them a chance to stew over the photos, and then LuEllen would call them. Using her best phony southern-belle accent, she would say that she had been on the hill, making landscape photographs, and that she'd seen Harold's body and the shooting of Sherrie. She wouldn't want to send a white man to the electric chair for killing a Negro, she'd say, but she would, if they didn't quit and leave town.

"How're we going to convince Ballem? He wasn't even there."

"Hill's his errand boy. Everybody in town knows it. When he sees the pictures, he won't argue. Not right away. He might go looking for the photographer later, but the first thing he'll do is quit. Just to keep things quiet, so he can maneuver. When he does that, we're outa here," I said.

We were back in Longstreet before noon. The marina operator told us that Hill had been there and had asked after us but hadn't left a message.

"I heard that you and him had a misunderstanding sometime back, outside the Holiday Inn," the marina man said.

"It cleared up," I said.

"Yeah. Well, you take care," he said, spitting in the river.

We cut the boat loose and headed downstream again, looking for Sherrie's body. As we passed the animal control complex, we could hear the ooka-ooka-ooka of the vacuum pump, working the death box.

Late in the afternoon, a couple of miles above Victoria Point, LuEllen took the binoculars down from her eyes and pointed out over the water.

"Over there. Yellow."

"Another float?"

"Doesn't look like a float. Looks like it's stuck on a tree."

Sherrie's body was hung up on a dead cotton-wood sweeper near the Concordia Bar Light.

"Jesus," LuEllen said as we drifted up. The smell of decaying flesh was overwhelming. I had intended to tangle the body in a wad of heavy monofilament fishing line and tangle the line in some brush, to anchor it, but in the end, neither of us had the stomach for the job. Instead, we calculated the distance the body lay above the light and turned back upriver.