Something Missing (3 page)

Before the days of digital photography, Martin had used a pencil and notepad to keep track of the inventory in each of his clients’ homes, and this system had worked well. When the idea of taking digital photos first occurred to Martin, he immediately rejected it on the grounds that he was a professional, and professionals didn’t need fancy gadgets in order to be successful. Martin considered himself an old-school pro, as evidenced by his burlap sack and his cautious nature, and digital photography was anything but old school. However, after thinking about it some more (because Martin believed that professionals constantly reevaluated their decisions), he began to see the tremendous potential of digital photography for his business. And though there was nothing wrong with holding on to old-school beliefs, Martin also came to realize that professionals, old-school or otherwise, also kept abreast of the times, paid attention to new technology, and found ways of making their business better while adhering
to traditional values. Digital photography was a way to make his business even better.

By taking digital photos, Martin was able to reduce the overall number of minutes spent in each of his clients’ homes, a huge benefit in a profession where stealth and speed were of the utmost importance. Martin also found that digital photos were easier to rid himself of in the event of capture. The camera that Martin owned stored photographs on a memory stick that could be completely erased by pressing a combination of four buttons (a process that he practiced until it could be completed in less than seven seconds), or the memory stick could simply be broken in half, rendering it unreadable. With this new technology, Martin found that he was able to gather more information about his clients in far less time, and in Martin’s mind, information was invaluable.

Exiting the bathroom, Martin made his way back down the stairs with equal care (if not more, since the thief in the lateral-thinking puzzle had broken his leg going
down
the stairs) and passed through the Pearls’ dining room into the hall that connected the kitchen with the home office, the family room (complete with a second unused fireplace), and another guest bedroom at the western end of the house. Directly in front of him was the first floor bathroom, a large teal-and-peach rectangle complete with a full shower and monogrammed towels. Martin entered, sliding aside the white louvered doors on his left to reveal a matching washer and dryer. He quickly scanned the laundry supplies on the shelf above the appliances, locating a bottle of Tide two-thirds full, and proceeded to pour half of the remaining laundry soap into a clear plastic container that he had stored in his burlap sack.

Closing the bottle of Tide (now a little less than a third full) and returning it to its perch, Martin checked his watch, a black
Seiko that was waterproof and reliable in three atmospheres. The digital display, counting down, read 1 minute and 43 seconds, giving him just enough time to exit the premises. Martin was uncompromising on his time limit. No more than fifteen minutes inside a client’s home, no matter what was left on his list. Longer than fifteen minutes and any newly installed silent alarm or nosy neighbor reporting his presence would give the police ample time to arrive.

This, of course, would never happen. First, no homeowner with an ounce of sense would ever install a silent alarm in his or her home. The purpose of an alarm is to frighten off burglars. Silent alarms only served to trap burglars inside homes, oftentimes along with the unwitting homeowners. In these instances, dangerous hostage situations often occurred as the police surrounded the home, entrapping the burglar and the home’s occupants inside.

Second, in the event that any alarm was installed, the homeowner would almost certainly place a sticker on the front of their home, alerting thieves to its presence. This was a signal that Martin had grown to adore. While these signs served as effective deterrents, protecting the homeowners who possessed them, they also served to exploit the neighboring homeowners who did not own a sign. After all, if your next-door neighbor’s home was protected by ADT, with its blue, octagonal sign posted prominently around the house, why would you install a similar alarm system in your home but keep it secret? Wouldn’t this be just inviting disaster? Martin thought so. In fact, in Martin’s many years on the job, he had yet to run into a house with an alarm that did not also have a sticker alerting him to its presence, but some of his best clients had been those living adjacent to homes protected by alarm systems.

Nevertheless, Martin remained cautious and always left a
client’s home in less than fifteen minutes. No sense in taking chances, as remote as they might be. This time limit was easy to abide with long-term clients like the Pearls, whose homes Martin knew almost better than his own. But in a new client’s home, the fifteen-minute restriction often left Martin unable to inventory rooms and complete assigned tasks.
There’s always tomorrow
, he would think to himself in these circumstances (because he also avoided speaking aloud while inside a client’s home), and he would force himself to leave no matter how much valuable information there might still be to collect. Unlike in many jobs, when Martin made a mistake, it might mean the end of his career.

Though he had hoped to photograph the Pearls’ home office today (Martin was in need of printer paper and staples), his watch was telling him to leave, so he made his way to the back door in the mudroom adjacent to the kitchen. In many clients’ homes, 1 minute and 43 seconds would still be a world of time, but the Pearls’ home posed a special challenge for Martin. Though he considered them one of his best clients, the Pearls’ home was closer to the road and to their neighbors’ homes than any of his other clients, and this made exiting especially dangerous. Fortunately, the Pearls’ backyard, a nice quarter-acre slice of grass and bushes that was frightfully exposed to the neighbors’ adjacent backyards, also abutted Mill Pond Park, a large area of grass, trees, playground equipment, and a public swimming pool, spaced around a quaint little duck pond. If Martin could make his way across the backyard unnoticed and pass through the row of hedges that marked the end of the Pearls’ land, he could be walking in the park in seconds, free as a bird.

Making it across the backyard always made Martin nervous, principally because it was his only means of exiting the Pearls’ home. In every other client’s home, Martin had at least three means of egress and would use each on a random basis (rolling a
ten-sided die that he kept in his pocket to determine each day’s exit, since Martin found that unconsciously falling into patterns was far too easy to do). The only thing that made this risk even remotely acceptable to Martin was his comprehensive knowledge of the Pearls’ two adjacent neighbors.

To the east were the Goldmans, a couple very much like the Pearls, who might have made excellent clients had their home not been equipped with three ADT stickers, thank you very much. The Goldmans both worked dependable schedules and late hours. Their home was not equipped with a garage, so Martin could always tell if Mr. or Mrs. Goldman were home sick (which almost never occurred). Therefore, the chances of them witnessing Martin’s exit during the middle of the day were infinitesimal.

To the west of the Pearls lived Noah Blake, a convicted sex offender who had been released from Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts more than ten years ago after doing six months on a third-degree sexual assault conviction, a fact to which Martin did not think the Pearls were privy. Martin had been unable to acquire the details of the arrest, but he did know that Noah Blake’s mother had passed away shortly after his release, and that her son had inherited the house free and clear, something Martin had done as well when his own mother passed away. Other than his one apparent indiscretion, Noah Blake was a hardworking, reliable mechanic at Mike & Son’s Automotive in Plainville, where he had recently become part-owner with Mike’s lackadaisical son, Darryl (Mike having retired from the business years ago). And Noah Blake’s home also did not come equipped with a garage. Therefore, as long as Martin’s visits to the Pearls’ home took place between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. (avoiding lunchtime in the event someone decided to come home), he felt sure that his exit was a safe one.

Still, it made him nervous.

Securing his burlap sack inside a black backpack that he had left just inside the door upon arriving, and making sure that his house key was still on the chain around his neck (he had acquired a key to the Pearls’ home years ago, as he had for many of his clients), Martin removed the rubber moccasins that covered his sneakers (and thereby prevented footprints), placed them in the backpack as well, and exited the house, crossing the back lawn as casually as possible. In less than thirty seconds, he was walking across the expanse of field that led to the bicycle racks on the far side of the park.

By the time Martin began pedaling, his appearance had changed dramatically. The blue baseball cap, emblazoned with its Northeast Utilities symbol, and the hairnet underneath had been replaced with a white and red cap declaring his allegiance to the St. Louis Cardinals. Martin, of course, cared little about the sluggers of St. Louis, and had chosen this cap as randomly as he had chosen his mode of transportation for the day. Patterns, he knew, were dangerous in his line of business, and were easy to fall into without even trying. A man who rode through the park on a mountain bike every Tuesday morning, wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, might eventually become a fixture in the memory of one of the park’s regular inhabitants. An observant individual might even come to expect to see this mountain bike–riding man each week. Becoming a memorable part of any landscape was exactly what Martin wanted to avoid.

Martin was riding his mountain bike today because of the roll of a 3 that he had made on his ten-sided die over breakfast earlier this morning. Had the die come up a 1 or a 2, Martin would be walking the mile or so to his car. A 3, 4, or 5 placed him on his mountain bike; a 6, 7, or 8 would have had Martin parking his Subaru Outback in the lot adjoining the swimming pool and basketball courts. A 9 or a 0 would’ve had Martin jogging back to his vehicle. Martin had experimented with other
modes of transportation in the past, including Rollerblades, skateboards, and a brief flirtation with the possibility of a motorized wheelchair, but each of these, he’d realized, attracted more attention than necessary, so Martin had decided to stick with the ordinary. Ordinary, at least on the outside, was safest for someone trying to remain inconspicuous.

Had Martin been able to alter his physical stature, he might have shaven an inch off his 5′ 11″ frame, favoring the 5′ 10″ of the average American male. He did, however, make a concerted effort to keep his weight around 180 pounds, the average weight for a white American male aged 30–39 years. In addition to his weight, Martin kept himself clean-shaven at all times and wore no jewelry in hopes of eliminating any distinguishing marks from his person. He was a good-looking man, he knew, but he also knew that he wasn’t too good-looking, and this pleased Martin more than it would most. Excess in appearance was to be avoided at all costs.

Martin’s greatest concern was his ears. Though they were not excessively large, they were positioned on his head at such an angle to appear so, jutting out like the bolts from Frankenstein’s neck. As a child, his classmates had made fun of his ears, referring to Martin as “Dumbo” and “Big Ears,” both names failing to impress Martin even back then. Despite the ineffectiveness of his classmates’ verbal abuse, Martin had tried to readjust his ears so that they would appear more normal. In sixth grade he used superglue to pin his ears to the side of his head, and although the glue held his ears back for more than three days before losing its potency, it failed to permanently alter the orientation of his ears in any discernible way. He tried this method several more times that year until the jeers of his classmates, who noticed the change in his physiology and accurately deduced the cause, forced Martin to abandon the attempt. Hats,
it turned out, were Martin’s most effective means of concealing his ears, and therefore he wore them often, as he did on this day.

In addition to the change of hats, Martin had also removed his blue button-down work shirt, stuffing it into his backpack and revealing a yellow and black long-sleeved cycling jersey beneath. A pair of mirrored sunglasses had been added to cover his clear blue eyes, and once he had mounted his bike, an aerodynamic helmet had been planted atop the Cardinals cap to complete the image.

Today Martin’s path would take him west around the duck pond, following the paved path onto the bridge by the picturesque Mill Pond Waterfall. Many a couple, dressed in pale gown and tuxedo, had stood on that bridge overlooking the falls, unwittingly beginning their divorce proceedings with the simple phrase “I do.” From the bridge, Martin would leave the path, pedaling across a soccer field out to Willard Avenue, where he would double back to his car, parked at the foot of the falls.

This was just one of the many routes that Martin could take to his car, and the parking lot at the foot of the waterfall was just one of many locations to leave the Subaru. Martin could also have parked in the lot on Brookdale Avenue, adjacent to the tennis courts; at the public library on the opposite end of the park; at the Newington Town Hall (across the street from the library); or at the CVS pharmacy, a half mile up Garfield Street. If Martin wanted to bike slightly farther (and he often did), then all of Main Street opened up to him, offering him an almost limitless number of spaces in which to park his vehicle. Today Martin had chosen the parking lot at the base of the waterfall because it was one of the closer places available to him, and the weatherman on Channel Four, a professorial-looking man of at least two chins, had warned of the possibility of rain later that morning. Though Martin often chose his parking spot randomly as well
(there was always a die in Martin’s pocket), he didn’t want to be stuck with a three-mile ride through the center of town during a torrential downpour. To anyone who looked out their shopwindow at the right moment or drove by in their car, this would have been a memorable sight indeed.