The Devil's Code Page 5

  The fake ID convinced Lane that we really were going to break into her brother’s house: she’d been relaxed all afternoon, but now she was tightening up. “The question we have to ask ourselves,” she said, “is whether this is worth the trouble we could get into.”

  “We won’t know unless we find the Jaz disks. Like you’ve been telling me, there are some odd things about this killing. If Jack was killed because of something with my name on it, I want to know what that something is. Without the cops getting it first.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You don’t have to go in,” I said. “All you have to do is show up with the car when I’m ready to leave.”

  “If you’re going in, I’m going in.”

  That would help; we could cut the search time in half. So I didn’t say no, though I had the feeling that if I had said no, and insisted on it, she might have given in.

  “We won’t go in if the situation looks bad. If the neighborhood’s lit up, or we see people on the street.”

  “Okay. That’s sensible.”

  When we got back to the house, the neighborhood wasn’t all lit up, and there were no people on the street. The green house on the north side of Jack’s house was dark. There was no car in the drive, or in front of it.

  We cruised it once and I stopped a block away. “You remember everything?” I said. “We’re joggers . . .”

  “I remember, I remember,” she said. “If we’re gonna do it . . .”

  “Let’s go.”

  We jogged down the street, loose sweatpants and T-shirts. I was carrying a small olive-drab towel wrapped around our Wal-Mart tools. If we ran into cops, I was hoping I could pitch the towel into a bush before we had to talk with them.

  That was the plan. Or, as Lane put it, “That’s the plan?”

  The night was warm and you could still feel the day’s unnatural heat radiating from the blacktop. We stopped two houses away from Jack’s, as though we were catching a breather. Moved to the sidewalk. The streetlight was only about half-bright, and the shadows it cast seemed even darker than the other unlit spots.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “No.” She giggled nervously. “God, I’m going nuts.”

  “Be cool.” We sauntered on down the sidewalk, looking, looking. At the green house, we turned up the driveway, walked halfway around the loop, then cut across the lawn, and in five seconds, we were between the two houses, in the shadows. If caught and questioned at that moment, Lane was finding a bush to pee behind. We waited for a minute, two minutes, three—about a century and a half, in all—and nothing happened. No lights went on, we saw no movement. No dogs.

  The house behind Jack’s, with the pool, showed a backyard light, and lights in the windows, but there was a croton hedge along the back fence, and it cast a shadow over us.

  No sauntering, casual bullshit here. We duckwalked to the back porch, found the screen door locked, and the crack in the lock covered with a length of yellow plastic tape and a notice. I carefully peeled them off. The door wanted to rattle when I touched it: it was flimsy, meant to keep out nothing stronger than a blue-bottle fly. I unwrapped the towel, pulled out a short steel pry-bar, pried the door back enough that we could force the lock-tongue across the strike plate.

  We eased the door open and slipped inside, crawling now. Listened again. Nothing at all: or almost nothing. Cars on a major street, three blocks away. A crazed bird somewhere, chirping into the dark. An air conditioner with a bad compressor. “Hope the rest is this easy,” Lane whispered.

  “Shh.” We pulled on thin vinyl cleaning gloves and I stood up to look at the porch. The porch had been framed with two-by-fours, and around the top, where the two-by-fours met the screen panels, there was an inch-wide ledge. If I was naïve enough to try to hide a house key, that’s where I would have hidden it.

  Hoping that reports of black widows and brown recluse spiders were exaggerated, I ran my fingers down the length of the two-by-fours until, in the second panel from the end of the porch, I knocked a key off. It tinkled onto the concrete floor and we stopped breathing for a moment; then I got down on a knee and groped around until I found it. The key still worked: it was a little corroded, but I polished it on my sweatpants, slipped it in and out of the door lock a few times, and we were in.

  The interior of the house was almost dark, with some illumination leaking in from the front, from the streetlight, and through the back windows. The place smelled like carpet cleaner. We groped our way to a hall, and I switched on one of our flashlights—I’d taped the lens to get a single needle-thin beam of light.

  “Remember,” I said, “Never turn the flashlight up. Always keep it down. If you don’t bounce it off a window, nobody’ll see us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. She headed for the bedroom-office, while I went to the living room. I knew exactly where I was going. Jack had met LuEllen in Redmond, and we’d had a couple of beers together at a motel bar. The conversation had drifted to burglary, which wasn’t unusual, given the circumstances of our being in Redmond in the first place.

  LuEllen had told Jack about a guy who lived in Grosse Point Farms, Michigan, and had a lockbox built into the floor of his fireplace. The fireplace was one of those remote-control gas things, and all the heat went straight up—and the fireproof box under the fireplace was not only invisible, it was absolutely, completely counterintuitive: who’d put valuables where there was a fire?

  LuEllen had said, “He thought it was the safest possible place. And it would have been, I’d never have found it in a million years, if his wife hadn’t told me about it.”

  Jack had laughed about that: the safest possible place. Was the line in the letter just an easy cliché? Maybe.

  A few minutes later, I was ready to give up. This was an old, crappy concrete-with-steel firebox, one of the instant fireplaces installed by the millions in low-end ramblers. There was a flue, which could be opened, but I could neither see nor feel anything inside it. When I got down on my hands and knees for an inch-by-inch inspection with the flashlight, there was no sign of a crack, a seam, a false plate.

  Lane came out just as I was backing away. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “I thought he might have hidden it around the fireplace,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I explained, quickly, and she said, “That should have worked.” But it hadn’t. “There is a crawl space up above, under the eaves,” she said. “There’s a hatch in the bathroom.”

  “The feds probably already looked,” I said.

  “We should take a peek, anyway.”

  The hatch was right in the middle of the bathroom ceiling. I stood on the toilet and pushed it up, and could just barely feel around the edges of the opening. All I could feel was insulation.

  “Anything?” Lane asked.

  “Can’t reach far enough in,” I grunted, stretching up as far as I could.

  “Make me a step and boost me up,” she said.

  I hopped off the toilet, interlaced my fingers. She stepped into it, and I lifted her belly-high into the hole. She pushed herself the rest of the way up, and whispered down, “Give me a couple of minutes. There’s a walk-board up here, but there’s all this insulation.”

  I stepped out of the bathroom and tried to think. Might the fireplace have some kind of hatch in the back, to shovel out cinders? I’d seen those on other . . .

  I stepped back into the bathroom. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Lane, keeping my voice low. “I want to look in the utility room.”

  “Okay.”

  I found my way back to the utility room, passed on the washer, dryer, and water heater, and went to the furnace. The furnace was one of those baby things you find in the south, no bigger than a twenty-gallon can, with a grill on the front and an access hatch on the back. The access hatch was crammed with switches and valves, with no space for anything else, so I pulled off the grill. Nothing. There was a dark space above the grill opening, small pipes twis
ting around some furnace apparatus I didn’t know about. I couldn’t see anything, and just reached inside . . . and felt something hard, square, and loose. I rattled it, and a taped bundle of Jaz-disk boxes almost fell on my feet.

  I pushed the grill back in place and headed for the bathroom: and that involved moving slowly along the front-room wall. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see a little better in the gloom, especially with the front-room curtains half open. As I moved along the front-room wall, my eye caught a movement in the yard. I froze, uncertain that I’d seen it. Then I saw it again, a man’s shoulder on the sidewalk, apparently walking up to the house.

  I continued back to the bathroom, almost tripped over the tool towel, picked it up, and hissed up at the hatch: “Lane.”

  “What?” A white patch, her face, hovered over the hatch.

  “Somebody coming,” I said. “I’m gonna hand you the towel.”

  As I said it, I heard a scratching at the front door. Somebody was peeling the police tape off the front, and taking care to be quiet about it. I stood on the toilet, handed her the tool towel. “Take the disks,” I said.

  “You found them!”

  “Move back; I’m coming up.”

  I had to stand on my tiptoes to get my hands around the joists at the edge of the hatch. I heard the key in the lock, got a grip, and did a pull-up and then a push-up through the hatch. The door opened outside, and Lane whispered, “Now what?” and I whispered, “Shut up. Shine your light on the hatch.”

  She turned her light on the hatch board. I picked it up, and carefully settled it back into its slot. As long as nobody was doing a thorough search . . .

  Whoever was down below us was as quiet as we’d been. After a few minutes, Lane said, “Are you sure they’re down there?”

  I nodded: “I heard a key in the lock.”

  A minute later: “I don’t hear anybody,” she said.

  “Quiet.”

  I was standing on a joist. A long plank ran down to the end of the house, to a head-sized vent that looked out over the front yard. Half hunched against the low overhead, I eased down the board and peered through the vent. A sports utility vehicle—maybe a 4Runner or a Pathfinder, I could only see the front end of it—was parked in front of the green house, a spot that had been empty when we came in. There was no other movement on the street, although I could see a television through a window across the street. Then I heard the door open below me, softly, and a man stepped out onto the curved driveway. He looked back and said, “Hurry, goddamnit.”

  As he turned to talk, I caught an image of his face, eye-blink quick. A second man pushed the door shut, and they hurried toward the SUV. The second guy was carrying what looked like . . .

  “A gas can,” I said aloud. “Ah, shit.” I turned back toward Lane.

  “Get out, get out,” I said, “Get the hatch up, get the hatch up, get . . .”

  “What, what . . . ?”

  She was looking toward me, still whispering, as I scrambled frantically down the plank, and she was not lifting the hatch.

  “Get the goddamn hatch . . .” I was almost on top of her before she lifted it up, still uncertain.

  “Drop through,” I said, urgently. “Hurry—they’re going to burn the place.”

  She got it: no question. She put her feet over the edge, held on with her hands for a second, dangled, and then dropped into the bathroom.

  “Disks,” I said. I handed the bundle down, then dropped into the bathroom myself. I stepped into the hallway, and the air was thick with gasoline fumes and something else. “Out the back.”

  “What?” She’d taken a step toward the front room, to see what was happening. I took a step after her, caught her arm. Just beyond her, a burning rag hung from a string that must have been taped or thumb-tacked to the ceiling. The “something else” odor was burning cotton. As I caught her arm, the string, already burning, parted, and the rag dropped to the floor.

  The gas went with a whump, like a giant pilot light—or napalm, for that matter—and I jerked her back, and her sweatshirt was burning and I beat at it with my hands as I dragged her through the firelight to the back door.

  She was screaming and beat at her shirt with her free hand. I twisted her and got the bottom of the back of the shirt and ripped it up over her head and off, and she groaned and said, “I’m burned,” and I led her out the door and around the house and said, “Run, run, run,” and we ran through the backyards of the green house and the next house over, and then around onto the sidewalk and down the street.

  In one minute, we were at the car. In three minutes, we were a mile away.

  “How bad?” I asked.

  “My arms, my hands, my face,” she said. “I don’t think it’s too bad.”

  “Gotta find a good light,” I said.

  We found a good light at a hot-bed motel a couple of miles from the airport. I checked in with the Harry Olson ID. The clerk was locked behind a thick bulletproof glass window, and I said, “We’ll want to check out early; we got a real early flight.” He grunted, said, “Drop the key in the box,” pointed at a locked box hung on the side of the motel, and went back to a gun magazine whose lead story was, “Exposed! Handgun Control Inc.’s 5-Year Plan to Disarm America: Read It and Weep.”

  Inside, we got the good light. Lane had been burned on the backs of her hands, her forearms, and under her chin. Her eyebrows were singed, and the dark hair over her forehead had taken on some new curls. The burns were pink, rather than white or black. The worst were on her arms; the biggest burn, under her chin, was the size of her palm.

  “What do you think?” she asked, holding her hands away from her body, palms up. She was hurting.

  “You probably ought to have a doctor look at it,” I said.

  “Then the police will know.”

  “ . . . but if you can stand it, we could catch our flight, and you could go to the doctor—or to an emergency room—out on the West Coast. We could tell them that you burned yourself with charcoal lighter at a barbecue, but didn’t think it was bad until it started hurting overnight.”

  “It hurts now,” she said.

  “Which is good,” I said. “Really bad burns don’t hurt right away: the nerve endings are destroyed.”

  She actually smiled, which suddenly made me like her a lot, and said, “If the burns aren’t too bad . . .”

  “I really don’t think they are, but they’ll hurt,” I said.

  “Then I can stand it. Better than going to jail,” she said.

  “ . . . and I’m not a doctor.”

  “Do you think the airline people will notice?” she asked.

  I shook my head: “No. You don’t look bad at all. Keep your jacket over your arms, let me handle the tickets.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  I checked my watch: “We’ve got some time yet. I’m gonna find a pharmacy, see if I can get some sunburn painkiller, or whatever I can get. That could help.”

  “Good . . . I held on to the disks.” She turned her head up to smile at me again, and winced. “I guess I don’t want to move my head too fast,” she said.

  “I’ll go get the stuff.”

  “Don’t tarry,” she said, the woman with the big dark eyes.

  5

  ST. JOHN CORBEIL

  St. John Corbeil was sitting in a leather armchair, reading, light from the floor lamp glinting from the steel rims of his military spectacles. As he read—Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia—he threaded and rethreaded a diamond necklace between his stubby fingers, as though it were a string of worry beads.

  He liked the cool sensuality of the necklace, and the money it represented. He’d had it made to his specifications by Harry Winston of New York. One hundred diamonds, excellent cut, clarity, and color in each, and each a single carat in size. The Winston people had thought that curious—he’d seen the curiosity, unspoken, in their eyes—because a hundred-diamond necklace doesn’t carry the flash of say, a big central stone or two, surrounde
d by a constellation of smaller diamonds.

  Corbeil had good reasons: one-carat diamonds were easy to move, easy to sell, and anonymous. The necklace was a bank account. If you popped the diamonds out of their settings, you could put $300,000 in the toes of your shoes . . .

  Another good reason was the sensuality of the stones. Corbeil’s face might have been chopped from a block of oak, but he was a sensual man. He liked the feel of a woman, the sound of a zipper coming down on the back of a woman’s dress, the smell of Chanel. He liked fast cars driven fast, French cooking and California wine, Italian suits and English shoes and diamonds. He hadn’t been able to afford the very best in women, wine, and song until AmMath. Now he had them, and he would be damned if he would give them up . . .

  The doorbell rang; he’d been expecting it. He put the book down, slipped the necklace into a shirt pocket, crossed to the intercom, and pushed the button. “Yes?”

  “Hart and Benson.” William Hart’s voice. Four men were involved in various parts of the operation. Corbeil himself, as coordinator; Hart and Benson, as security and technicians; and Tom Woods, a computer-encryption expert who loved only money more than codes. Woods was not aware of the Morrison, Lighter, or Ward difficulties, other than that Morrison had been killed in a break-in. He was a nervous man.

  “Come in.” Corbeil pressed the door-release button, buzzing them in.

  Done,” Hart said.

  Corbeil nodded. “So. There’s no reason to think that anything remains here in Texas.”

  “Not as far as we know.”

  Corbeil turned away, fished the diamond necklace out of his pocket, and began unconsciously pouring it from hand to hand, as though it were a slinky. “There remains the possibility that he sent his sister something.”

  “He could have sent something to anybody; but we can’t find any really close friends. No girlfriends, right now. The sister’s the obvious candidate. I mean, we’re still backgrounding him, but if there’s somebody else, it’s not obvious,” Hart said.

  “I wish we’d had time to interrogate him,” Corbeil said. “But the pressure to get him out of the way . . . well, we couldn’t both interrogate him and have a credible disappearance, could we?”