The Devil's Code

that we might try to go in. I said:
T REND D IRECT LOOKS TOUGH . A NY ONLINE OPTIONS ?
    C ANNOT FIND ONLINE OPTION BUT DID LOOK AT C ORBEIL HOME . H E HAS T-1 LINE .
    E XCELLENT . G IVE ADDRESS  . . .
    C orbeil lived in a snazzy glass-and-brick low-rise apartment building on a North Dallas golf course; a gated community called Lago Verde. The T-1 line meant he was probably working from home on his downtown computer system.
    “This is the place to do a sneak,” she said, as we rolled past the gate. “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that all the security is out here, on the fence, with maybe some drive-by guys in golf carts at night.”
    “So let’s go in,” I said.
    “Let’s call Bobby again,” she said. “We need to nail down Corbeil’s exact address, and we need the name of a single woman who lives in there, anywhere. Maybe he could check elevators—don’t elevators have to be inspected or something?”
    “I think so.”
    B obby came back and said that Corbeil, according to the local phone and electric companies, lived on the eighth and ninth floors of a nine-story building called Poinsettia. All of the apartments in the building were two stories—on two and three, four and five, six and seven, eight and nine. He couldn’t find out what was on one, nor could he find anything about elevators. There was a state elevator data bank, but you had to know the serial number to find the right one; the bank was not searchable by address.
    He did get the name of a single woman, an Annebelle Enager who lived in the Poinsettia building.
    “That’s a start,” LuEllen said.
    “We’re gonna do a sneak?”
    “An easy one,” she said.
    O ne thing the movies never tell you is that burglars spend about half their life shopping. We bought a small paint brush and jars of red and black water-soluble poster paint at a kids’ store. At an office supply place, LuEllen picked up a bottle of rubber cement, a roll of duct tape, an X-Acto knife, and one of those roller-receipt boxes with a roll of receipt paper to go with it. The receipt paper went on a spindle-bar inside the top of the box—like a toilet paper holder—fed to the outside, across a plate where a customer would sign, and then back inside the box to a take-up spindle.
    We rented a white van from Hertz, took the van to a mostly vacant parking lot outside a thirty-six screen theater, and I used the poster paint to create a business on the side of the van: Rose’s Roses.
    “That looks great,” LuEllen said, when I’d finished. “You missed your calling. You should have been a sign painter.”
    “Yet, I think I would be unfulfilled,” I said. I’d painted two intertwined red roses, with black stems, above the name, in red. You had to hope nobody looked at both sides of the truck, because the roses were not exactly the same.
    While I was painting, LuEllen sat on the backbumper and used a screwdriver to rip the guts out of the roller-receipt box, and the X-Acto knife to cut a quarter-sized hole through the plastic side. Her JVC miniature camcorder fit snugly inside, held in place with the duct tape; she used the rubber cement to glue a receipt across the face of the box.
    “We ready?” she asked, as I finished up the roses.
    “If you are.”
    “Let’s go.”
    I didn’t have to do anything, truth be told. LuEllen drove the truck up to the gate, said something to the gatehouse guard, who pointed, and let her in. I waited a block away, in the car.
    She was inside for exactly twenty-two minutes, about ten more than I thought reasonable. She waved at the guard as she left, took a left, and five minutes later, we met in a weedy, litter-strewn strip under a freeway. When I got there, she’d already gotten out a gallon jug of spring water and a roll of paper towels, and was wiping Rose’s Roses out of existence.
    “No problem,” she said cheerfully, as I walked up. “I even got a date, if we need it.”
    “Who with?”
    “Guy named Ralph Carnelli, he’s an office guy there; some kind of low-level manager, I think.”
    Inside the compound, she’d driven around until she spotted the Poinsettia building. The first and basement floors were parking, she said. That was as much as she could see. Then she found the clubhouse, which sat onthe edge of the golf course. The clubhouse included a receiving area, the upstairs management offices, and a lounge and exercise room for the residents.
    “I got lost,” she said. “I wandered all over the