John Sandford - The Devil's Code

I turned and she turned with me, smiling, saying, "Yadda yadda yadda," and then, "All right, I got him. He's not a cop, unless he's some kind of federal spook that I don't want to know about."

"He's not a cop," I said. "He could be private security. He could be a major asshole."

The people at the funeral were starting to look around, ready to start moving as soon as the last handful of dirt was dropped in the grave. LuEllen said, "Let me give you a peck, say good-bye," and I leaned over and she gave me a peck on the cheek and started for her car, lifting a hand to wave good-bye as she went.

She was the first to go; her car was only fifty feet down the cemetery lane. She popped the trunk with a remote key, pulled out a shoulder bag, tossed it across the front seat, started the car and drove away. I turned, casually, saw the man in the gray suit still standing there, but faced in a different direction, looking ninety degrees away from us. The last handful of dirt went in the grave, and Lane shook hands with a couple of people, and took the arm of a guy who, with his wife, had driven her to the cemetery: their oldest friends, Jack's and Lane's, and from what I'd seen, nice people.

As Lane started moving toward the car, the man in gray started to move, down away from the stone where he was standing. I couldn't see a carit was apparently behind an evergreen-covered knoll, out of sight. LuEllen had only had a couple of minutes to set up, and I wasn't sure if she was ready yet. Nothing to do about it, 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 used to 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."

The 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 streetthat 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 jewelryand a lot of memories, Lane saida Minolta 35mm camera and three lenses, a checkbook, a couple of hundred English pounds that she kept in a bureau drawer, and a broken Rolex watch given her by her ex-husband.

"Making it look like they were here for the high-value stuff laptops, cameras. Making it look like junkies," I muttered.

"Goddamn animals."

The cops were decent about it. They told her there wasn't much they could do, absent any indication of who might have broken in. They apologized, as though it were their fault, told her to get better locks, and left.

Lane and I spent the next ten minutes teasing out the consequences of the burglary. There were a couple. If the people who took the disks were worried about what Jack knew, and were willing to kill him to keep his mouth shut, then the same might apply to Lane. On the other hand, they might look at the disks and conclude that nothing on them was worth killing forthat another death would just draw attention to them. Flip a coin

LuEllen called, and I told her about the burglary "The cops are gone, we're gonna have a war council "

"I've got a room at the Holiday Inn," she said "I'll change clothes and come over. listen, you don't have a package, do you?"

"No."

"Maybe.

"Yeah."

LuEllen had reverted to her usual dress by the time she arrived at Lane's, jeans and cowboy boots, and an orange silk blouse under a jean jacket She had the figure of a gymnast to go with the jeansshe looked spectacular, if you like cowgirls. She brought along a roll of 35mm Polaroid color slide film, a compact Polaroid film-development machine, a single-slide cabin projector, and a box of empty slide holders. She popped the film out of the camera, and we sat around the kitchen table while she developed it, cut out the individual frames, and snapped the frames into the plastic slide holders.

"If she's gonna be around here, she's gonna need somebody looking out for her," LuEllen said, talking to me as if Lane weren't there.

I nodded. "You know who I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about John Smith. He's in on this already, and he lived in Oakland. I bet he'd know somebody."

"Who's John Smith?" Lane asked.