The Devil's Code

asking any more questions. I mean, right now, it’s another dope-related shooting. Nobody’ll give it another look.”
    “Good for Green . . .”
    “Probably,” I said.
    S o we didn’t go to the library. We didn’t go to Waco, either; not that day, or the next. If there was anything going on at the ranch, they might be looking out for conspicuously nonrancher cars, for at least a couple of days.
    So we spent Sunday and Monday wandering around Austin; bought a basketball at a Wal-Mart and played a little one-on-one at a local playground, hit some more golf balls, did some drawing. Checked the Dallas Morning News Web site a couple more times, but the story was dead.
    Talked to Bobby. The FBI had interviewed Green, pretty much cutting out the local cops. He’d convinced them that he was hired muscle: he had all the background, plus the attitude. They left with a few threats, but both Green and his lawyer thought it was all over.
    I also spent some time calling around Austin, and found a place I could rent a pickup—“I need to help mydaughter move some furniture from one house to another,” I told the guy at Access Car Rental, who didn’t care one way or the other—and picked up the truck. On Monday night, we watched movies on pay TV. The next morning, at eight o’clock, we left for Waco.
    Or Whacko, as LuEllen pronounced it.

 22 
    W hen we were killing time in Austin, we hardly talked about Lane Ward. We were working at pushing her away, the image of her dead on the motel bed. Instead of talking about that, we were technical: How did they find us so quickly? When did they detect the intrusion, etc.?
    On the way up to Waco, LuEllen, who had hardly spoken at all that morning, asked, “Who’s going to take care of her?”
    “What?”
    “Who’s going to take care of Lane? Who’s going to take care of the funeral and her stuff at her house? What’s going to happen with all that? Does somebody just haul it to the dump?”
    “Don’t start,” I said.
    “I can’t help it. I woke up thinking about it. I mean, she was about my age, and she doesn’t have any kids, and her parents are dead, just like me. Then, all of a sudden, she’s killed—and who takes care of her? The state? I mean, do they just cremate her and throw her ashes in a dump somewhere? Do they take all of her books out and throw them away, or have a garage sale, or what?”
    “If she’s got a will . . . I mean, that should take care of it.”
    “That’s just legal,” LuEllen said. “I wonder if there’s anybody who really cares?”
    She worried about it all the way to Waco; and didn’t really stop then, I don’t think. She just stopped talking about it.
    W aco has a county courthouse that looks like a state capitol. I went in looking for a map, and they sent me across the street. I got one, chatted with the map guy for a few minutes, and he showed me a plat book. It took a while, but I eventually spotted Corbeil’s ranch just outside a little town called Crawford, which was northwest of Waco proper. We stopped at a Barnes & Noble bookstore, LuEllen ran in and bought a couple of crumpets and some kind of health juice, and we headed for Corbeil’s.
    T here’s a big lake at Waco, and a couple of rivers, which didn’t fit with my mental picture of the place: but there they were. The November countrysidewas low and rolling, and as we got closer to Crawford, cut by gullies and a few creeks. There was some corn farming, and lots of hay around, but in general, the country was more ranch than farm. We crawled through Crawford, inadvertently ran a four-way stop that I thought was two-way, and almost got T-boned by a Chevy pickup. LuEllen was peering out the window and said, eventually, “Took me sixteen years to get out of a place like this.”
    “Really? A place like this?”
    “Up in Minnesota,” she said. I’d never known she was a small-town girl, though if I’d thought about it, I might’ve guessed. And I waited. No small-town kid has ever been through another small town without some kind of comment about the other town’s inferiority. She said, “But the place I grew up, at least we had a Dairy Queen.”
    Yup.
    C orbeil’s place was set on a ridge above Texas Highway 185; the place was a sprawling yellow log-cabin–style house. Not new, but not antique, either: the kind of log place that city people buy. We couldn’t see it all from the road, but a half-dozen outbuildings of one kind or another were