The Devil's Code

upstairs, LuEllen was dressed: “Green called. He and Lane are checking into a Radisson Hotel up in Denton, which is like twenty miles from here.”
    “Why there?”
    “Because Green plays golf, and it’s a golf resort.”
    “Silly goddamn game,” I said.
    “You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said.
    “Chasing a white ball around a cow pasture . . .”
    “Look at a list of people who play it, and tell me they’re chasing a ball around a cow pasture. If you gottabrain in your head, you gotta suspect that there’s something else going on, even if you don’t play yourself.”
    My eyebrows went up: she actually sounded a little passionate on the subject. Not like LuEllen, eternal cynic. “Mmm,” I said.
    “Fuck you.”
    L uEllen drove. I sat in the passenger seat, looking through the architect’s drawings and trying not to get carsick. Eventually, I gave up; but I’d found one interesting thing.
    “There’s a silent alarm wired into Corbeil’s apartment. The console is in a closet.”
    “Can you trace the out lines?”
    “Nope. The lines go into an indicated junction box along with lines from some other rooms, and then they all go down to the first floor.”
    “Either to a security service or over to the reception area in the clubhouse. Or both.”
    “Clubhouse would get a quicker response,” I said.
    “Yeah, but if you wanted a little more weight, some pros with guns, it might go out.”
    T he Radisson sat on a hill on the west side of the highway; it took a while to find the driveway in, but we got it sorted out eventually and went up to Lane’s room. Green answered the door. He was wearing a golf shirt and loose, pleated, tan slacks and hadhis hand in his pocket. He took it out when he saw us. “There you are.”
    Lane was lying on a bed, watching a movie on HBO. LuEllen, who’d come in behind me, looked past me and said, “ Emma. I didn’t know that was on.”
    She went over and dropped on the bed next to Lane.
    “I think we’re gonna go into this Corbeil guy’s apartment,” I said to Green and Lane. “We’ve got some . . .”
    “Shhh,” Lane said. “They’re gonna kiss. This only takes a minute.” Emma and her friend were standing under a spreading oak. Lane and LuEllen were totally focused.
    “I think we gotta . . .”
    “Shut up, shut up, just one minute.” LuEllen held a finger up.
    I went over to look: “Christ, that woman’s got a long neck.”
    “They all did back then,” Lane said.
    “This wasn’t made back then, this was made . . .”
    “SHUT THE FUCK UP,” LuEllen said.
    I looked at Green, who shrugged, and we went over to a corner of the room, sat down, and shut up.
    A fter Emma and her friend were married, and the movie ran down what happened to everyone else, Lane sighed and turned off the TV. “God, I love that movie.”
    “So do I,” LuEllen said. “But you know what? I don’t think they did a very good job with Frank. Theyneeded to make him more attractive in the beginning and worse in the end, and show why Emma was attracted to him.”
    “I didn’t think he was very attractive at all,” Lane said. “I don’t see how he could possibly compete with . . .”
    “Could we talk about what we’re doing?” I asked.
    “I think that would be good,” Green said, “since we’re in these guys’ hometown.”
    W e brought them up to date on what we’d done, without providing any details that might be used against us in a court. We would have to trust them at some point, though, and I said, “We’re seriously considering going into Corbeil’s apartment. He has a T-1 phone line, and we think he probably uses it for rapid access into the company computers. There’s a good chance that I can tap into his computer line, and that’ll give us a door into their mainframe.”
    Lane said, “We’ve been looking at the photo you sent us, and I can’t see anything in it. If we knew who the people were . . .”
    “It’s a blank wall,” I said. “Jack must have gotten something out of the computers that went with the photographs. That’s what we need to find.”
    “I really, mmm, I had some problems back home and if I got caught going into a place, I could be looking at a long time,” Green said. He sounded apologetic.
    “You couldn’t go in anyway,” I said. “It’s not an area where a black guy can wander around. We could use a couple of eyes, though.”
    “We could do that,” Green said. “Do we know