The Devil's Code

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 acrossthe 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