The Devil's Code (5 page)

The closest business guy looked like a salesman—balding, pudgy, triple-chinned, exhausted. He sat head-down and dozing, his red, yellow, and black necktie splashing down his chest and stomach like a waterfall. The guy behind him was just as exhausted, but was too thin, his skull plainly carving the shape of his head. I got three good ones of the two of them, the thin man
like death’s shadow behind the fat one. I struggled to get the red necktie right, working the planes as it twisted down his shirt.

A stewardess stopped to watch for a few minutes, then disappeared into the front of the plane. A couple of minutes later, the copilot came back, watched for a while, said he did a little watercolor himself, and asked me if I’d ever seen the cockpit of a D9S at night. I hadn’t, and he showed me the way.

I did a half-dozen sketches of the crew at work, and left them behind: they all seemed pleased, and so was I. In the twenty years after I got out of college, I don’t think I went a day without drawing or painting something, except during a couple of hospital visits; even then, when I could start moving, the first thing I did was ask for a pencil.

In all those years, the work got tighter and tighter and tighter, until I felt like I hardly had the muscle to pick up a pencil or a pen or a brush: I could wear myself out in an hour, just moving a brush around. Then I broke through. The brush got lighter, and the work became fluid. The actual breakthrough came during a rough visit to Washington, D.C. I’d left behind the Washington nightmares—hadn’t had one for a couple of years, now—but the fluidity seemed to hang around . . .

I got back to my seat, restowed the Winsor & Newton tin and the sketchbook, and buckled up for the landing. When the wheels came down, Lane started, stirred, woke up and yawned, covering her mouth with a balled fist, pushed up the window shade, and looked out at the lights of Dallas and then, as we turned, of Fort Worth.

“My mouth tastes like something died inside it,” she said, her voice a little husky. A good voice to wake up to. She looked me over: “What’d you do? Sit there and stare at the seat back?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

Going out the door, the stewardess squeezed my arm and said, “Thanks so much, you’re really good.” Lane looked like she might drop dead of curiosity as we walked up the ramp, but then she finally asked, “What was that all about?”

I said, “Oh. You know . . .”

“Be a jerk,” she said. But she was smiling.

W
e stayed overnight at a Marriott. Early the next morning, she was pounding on my door, and at nine o’clock, we were headed down to Dallas police headquarters. Lane wanted me to go inside with her, but I don’t talk to cops when I can avoid it. She went in alone, a little pissed. Twenty minutes later, she was back, and told me about it as we drove back to the hotel.

The cops had been pretty straightforward about it, she said. “I got into their faces a little bit, but they wouldn’t budge. This guy I talked to said Jack was into something
tricky.
That’s the word he used.
Tricky.
”

“And that’s what they’ve got? That’s all? That he was doing something tricky?”

“No.” She was reluctant to talk; I had to pry it out of her. “They say they traced the gun he supposedly used. It was stolen in San Jose six years ago.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“Yeah. I kept saying Jack would never use a gun, and they kept saying, then how come the gun came from San Jose?” She was looking up at me with her dark eyes, pleading with me to understand that what the cops had said was all bullshit. “They said, ‘AmMath framed him using a gun that was stolen six years ago in San Jose? How did they do that?’ ”

“Good question,” I said.

“Jack would not shoot anybody,” Lane insisted.

“You can’t always tell what somebody will do when he’s cornered, and he thinks that his life may be ruined. Or that he might go to prison,” I said. “Or maybe he thought the guard was about to shoot him, and it was self-defense.”

She didn’t want to hear about it, and after we’d snarled at each other for a few minutes, I let it go. “So that’s it—they got a gun.”

“There were a couple more things,” she said, reluctantly. Then, “Watch it!”

I hit the brakes; a blue Toyota pickup chopped us off just as we headed up a freeway on-ramp. He never knew I was there. I shook my head, and said, “Asshole,” and then, “Listen, Lane, you gotta tell me everything they said. I don’t want to have to drag it out of you. I’m supposed to be on your side.”

“It’s all bullshit. You should’ve come in, then you could have heard it for yourself.”

“What’re the other things?”

The cop had explained that there were three doors into the secure area—two of them alarmed. The third door came out of a short hallway connected to the system
administrator’s office, and the main entrance of his office was well down the hall from the secure area. But if you knew which doors were wired with alarms, you could force the door into the system administrator’s office, which had the corridor leading directly into the secure area. That one locked from the system administrator’s side, so it would not have to be forced. An outsider trying to intrude into the secure area would not know any of that, and would be stuck with trying to find a way around the alarms . . .

“What else?”

“It turns out that the guard wasn’t responding to anything. He was making his regular rounds. Another guy, this security guy, was on his way to his office, and they went up together in the elevator, and the guard noticed that the door to the office suite had some damage around the door knob. So they went in . . .” She stopped, shaking her head.

“So what they’re saying is, it wasn’t like there was a sudden shooting and then a bunch of explanations. It was just a guard’s routine trip through the building.”

“It still could have been set up,” she said, stubbornly.

“Yeah, but, boy . . .” Didn’t sound good.

I
concentrated on driving for a couple of minutes, getting us out of a pod of Texans headed up the freeway in what seemed to be a test of Chaos Theory: you sensed an order in their driving, but you couldn’t say exactly what it was. I could see the Toyota pickup at the head of the pack, like the lead dolphin.

A
fter the shooting, Lane said, the police went to a house Jack had rented, with a second security man from AmMath, and found a bunch of computer disks—“Two of them were in a pair of shoes in the closet, which doesn’t sound like Jack at all”—and a lot of other unauthorized stuff from AmMath, including manuals and confidential information about the Clipper II. AmMath wanted to take it, but the cops wouldn’t give it to them: instead, they called in the FBI.

“They’ve still got it?”

“Yes. The FBI.”

“And that’s all.”

“Well. They say the back entrance and the secure area at AmMath are covered with cameras. A call came into the building computer at TrendDirect—that’s the building owner—and the security cameras were interfered with. The scanning range for the one in the back was changed so that it didn’t scan a door at the end of the building; and the camera that watches the secure area was turned off.”

“The guards didn’t see that? Weren’t the cameras monitored?”

“I asked that,” she said. “The camera in back constantly scans back and forth, and the only change was to cut out part of the range. The other camera is one of about ten around the premises, with a constant cycle, three seconds at each station, and they cut out one station. They never noticed the changes.”

We sat and thought about that for a moment; then
Lane sighed and said, “They said we can probably get his computers back. Not the hard drives, but the rest of them. And the monitors, and his personal stuff.”

“What about Jack? I mean, the body.”

“I’ve got to go to the medical examiner’s office and sign for him. They’ve released it . . . him.”

“Huh. So maybe we should stop by his house and take a look around,” I said. Over time, I’d crept up on the blue Toyota. He edged over to make it onto an exit, and I chopped him off, nearly sending him into the retaining wall. At the bottom of the ramp, I went right and he went left, but I could see his middle finger wagging out the window.

“For what?” Lane was unaware of the drama.

“Those Jaz disks. He said he’d put them in the safest possible place.”

“You know what that means? I thought it was just a . . . phrase,” she said.

“Maybe. But we could look around.”

“The house is sealed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “With a piece of tape.”

 4 

T
he rest of the afternoon was taken up with the melancholy routines of violent death: claiming the body, signing for a bag full of personal effects that the cops didn’t want—besides the routine junk, Jack had $140 in his wallet, unless somebody had clipped it along the way, and Lane’s high school graduation photo, which made her cry again. She also signed a contract with a local funeral home to handle shipment of the body by air freight. The coffin cost $1,799, and came with a guarantee that neither of us was interested in reading.

W
hen Lane was in Dallas the first time, to identify the body, she’d gone to look at Jack’s rented house,
although she hadn’t been allowed inside. We cruised it late in the afternoon, a two-bedroom, L-shaped cement-block rambler painted an awful shade of electric pink. The exact shade, I thought, of a lawn flamingo. A short circular driveway took up most of the front yard. There was no carport or garage. We could see only one door, right in the middle of the house, under an aluminum awning. We continued around the block, and from the other side, could see a small screened porch jutting into the backyard.

And there was a fireplace chimney. Not much of one, but there was one.

“He always rented the cheapest livable place,” Lane said. “He’d fly back to California on weekends.”

“Didn’t like Texas?”

“Not a California kind of place,” she said.

“Some people would count that as a blessing. Most Texans, for example.”

She let the comment go by, as we cruised the house again.

“How do we get in?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to see what lights are on, with the neighbors. If we can get in the back porch, we’ll have some cover.”

“Okay,” she said. Simple faith.

We did the block once more, and I looked for kids’ swing sets and bikes, basketball hoops, and dogs. LuEllen had trained me: if there are kids around, the parents in a family tend to be at home in the evening, and awake and alert. Basketball hoops often mean teenagers, and teenagers come and go at weird,
inconvenient times. Dogs are the worst. Dogs bark: that’s how they earn their money, and in this neighborhood, they’d probably be listened to.

The house on the south side of Jack’s had a hurricane fence around the backyard, which could mean either kids or dogs. The one on the north side, a noxious-green one, was as simple and plain as Jack’s, with no sign of life. The house directly behind Jack’s had an aboveground swimming pool in the backyard, which probably meant kids.

If there were kids running around, or splashing in the pool, we’d have to forget it. If not, the biggest problem might be the streetlight across the street and down one house.

“What do you think?” Lane asked.

“We probably ought to sky-dive onto the roof and cut our way into the house with a keyhole saw . . .”

“Kidd . . .”

“We ought to sneak around the back between the green house and Jack’s place, if the green house doesn’t show any lights, then cut our way into the screen porch and see what the situation is there. Usually, there’s a way in.”

“If we break in, they’ll know it was us.”

I shook my head: “No, they won’t. We’re leaving for San Francisco at eleven o’clock tonight. If they don’t get around to the house for a few days . . . well, who knows what might have happened? And really, who cares? They’ve already searched the place.”

W
e found a Wal-Mart and bought burglary tools—might as well have the best—spent some time eating Tex-Mex, dropped the rental car with the airport Avis, and checked in with the airline. When we were set to fly, we rented another car from Hertz, using a perfectly good Wisconsin driver’s license and Amex gold card issued to my old pal and fishing buddy Harry Olson, of Hayward, Wisconsin. Harry didn’t exist, but he had money in the bank, a great credit rating, and a perfect driving record.

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.”

W
hen 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.”

W
e 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.

T
he 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.”

T
he 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 twisting 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.