The Devil's Code

and since I’d come with her, I had nothing to do but wait. The man in the gray suit came to watch? Couldn’t be that simple.
    Everybody was moving now, but Lane, about to get in the backseat of her friends’ car, saw me standing, watching, and called, “Kidd? Where’s your friend?”
    I strolled over and said, “Give me a hug?”
    With a question on her face, she stepped over to give me a hug and I said, quietly as I could, “One of the people who burned Jack’s house is here.”
    “Oh, no.” She took my arm and led me a few steps away from the car, looking up at me earnestly, as if giving comfort. What she said was, “What’s he doing? Do you see him?”
    “He left as soon as you started to. I gotta get back to your house. I’m afraid he might have been here to keep an eye on you while the other guy broke in. Are Jack’s disks . . .”
    “On my desk. Both copies.”
    “Shit.”
    “But we sent a set to Bobby . . .”
    “Yeah, but if they get the others, they’ll know that we’ve at least looked at them,” I said. “Or that you have, anyway.”
    “But we don’t know anything. Not really,” she said.
    “They don’t know that.”
    LuEllen’s rental car whipped around the knoll, moving too fast on the narrow black-topped cemetery lane. She pulled up, popped the door and said, “Got him, and got his plate.”
    “Good. We’ve gotta get back to Lane’s place. Like now.”
    “Call the police,” Lane said. LuEllen and I glanced at each other. She caught it and said, “Okay. I’ll call the police. We’ll find a pay phone on the way out. The guy who was here knows we can’t get back there for half an hour. If there is another guy, maybe the police could still catch him.”
    “Worth a try,” I said.
    “Wait for me.”
    She went back to her friends’ car, leaned in the back, said something, got her purse, and hurried back to us. “I’m riding with you,” she said.
    We drove out to a gas station, spotted a drive-up coin phone. LuEllen dialed 911 and passed the phone to Lane, who said, “Look, I don’t want to get involved in this, but I think I saw a man breaking into a house. No, I don’t want to get involved . . .” She gave the address, hung up, and we were gone.
    LuEllen would not have anything more to do with any cops: “I’ll drop you at the church so you can get Lane’s car, and I’ll call you from a motel.”
    “Sure.”
    LuEllen looked at Lane: “If the cops are there when you get there . . .”
    “I’ll be surprised.”
    “Tell them that you were at your brother’s funeral. Right up front. First thing.”
    “Why?”
    “That’ll fit you into a slot, for the cops. Dopers hit houses during funerals. The neighbors have gotten usedto people coming and going, and during the funeral itself, the house is usually empty, so it’s a good time to go in. It’s like a thing. ”
    “Like an MO,” Lane said.
    “Right, exactly,” LuEllen said. “Like television.”
    T he cops were there, two squads, four officers. We pulled up and one of them came trotting over. Lane got out and asked, “What’s wrong?”
    “Do you live here, ma’am?”
    “Yes, it’s my house.”
    “We think it may have been broken into. We got an anonymous nine-one-one call and when we checked, we found the front door had been forced.”
    Lane’s hand went to her throat and she said, “Is the man . . .”
    “We don’t think he’s inside. We talked to one of the neighbors and he said he saw a man exit the back door, and walk away down the street—that was just about the time we got the nine-one-one call. He had a fifteen-minute start on us by the time we talked to the neighbor, so he’s miles away. His car was probably right around the corner.”
    “Oh, my god,” Lane said, and she started walking toward the house. I said to the cop, “We were just at her brother’s funeral.”
    “You’re not her husband?” One of the cops asked, as the others started after Lane.
    “No, I’m just a friend of her brother’s; I drove her car to the church.”
    “We better check the house, just in case,” he said.
    Inside, as the cops moved from one room to the next, Lane looked at me and shook her head, silently mouthed, “They’re gone.” Also gone: her laptop, a jewelry box with a few hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry—and a lot of memories, Lane said—a Minolta 35mm camera and three lenses, a checkbook, a couple of hundred English pounds that she kept in a bureau