The Devil's Code

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 ofthose 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 grillopening, 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.
    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,