The Devil's Code

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