Something Missing (4 page)

Arriving at his car, Martin popped open the hatch and began to unload his newly acquired items into the back of the station wagon. A large cardboard box containing several empty grocery bags from the local Foodmart was sitting beside a Stanley toolbox and a case of bottled water. Martin transferred his newly acquired items from his backpack to the plastic grocery bags, much the same way as a bagger might do in a supermarket (keeping the canned goods together in one bag and items like soap and butter in another), and then neatly packed the three bags that he had filled into the cardboard box. His hope was that if he were ever pulled over by the police for any reason, it would appear that he was returning home after grocery shopping and not from a visit to one of his client’s homes.

Martin then took a quick look around to be sure that no one was watching, and after he was certain that he was alone in the parking lot, he reached under the left rear bumper of his car and removed a small magnetic box that had been attached to the metallic underside of the Subaru. Into this box, which was designed to hide an extra key (the lid was actually imprinted with the words “Hide-a-Key”), Martin placed Sophie Pearl’s diamond earring, sliding the box shut before returning it to its original position underneath the bumper. If Martin was ever pulled over on suspicion of burglary, the police would find it difficult, if not impossible, to locate the diamond.

Attaching his bike to the rack atop the Outback, Martin tossed his backpack, now nearly empty, into the passenger seat and climbed inside. Once his seat belt was buckled, he extracted the first-aid kit from inside the glove compartment.

Upon opening the first-aid kit, all appeared very normal. Band-Aids, gauze, a cold pack, and a thin tube of antibiotic cream were all assembled in neat order. Beneath the large gauze pads, however, was a plastic flap made from the same white plastic of which the kit was constructed. Martin was quite proud of this piece of handiwork. Lifting the camouflaged flap revealed a grid of small pockets, a total of twelve, all but one containing a key. Martin removed the chain with the Pearls’ key from his neck and placed it in the empty pocket. Keeping the key around his neck was something Martin began doing after accidentally leaving a key in the lock of a client’s home a number of years ago, one of his worst mistakes while on the job. He had managed to reacquire the key that day, but only after risking a second visit to the home, something Martin almost never did. Leaving the key around his neck guaranteed that he wouldn’t make that same mistake again. And concealing the keys in this modified first-aid kit prevented a police officer from questioning him about the inordinate number of keys that he would otherwise need to carry.

Having keys to his clients’ homes made Martin’s job a whole lot easier. Of his current twenty-three clients, Martin was in possession of keys for sixteen of their homes, and thirteen of those were for side or back doors, Martin’s preferred method of entry for a number of reasons, particularly their limited exposure to street traffic.

Keys, it turned out, were not terribly difficult to acquire once you had access to a client’s home. Not surprisingly (though Martin was admittedly surprised at first), people are quite careless with their extra house keys if these keys are locked inside the home. After all, if you were able to break into the home in the first place, why steal a key? In addition, most people in Martin’s line of work were what Martin referred to as “one-timers” or “smash-and-grabbers.” Martin despised these amateurs. Onetimers
or smash-and-grabbers broke into homes, usually by means of a broken window, acquired a few large-ticket items that would surely be noticed missing when the client returned, and then exited, never to come back again. Because there were so few who maintained a regular clientele (and Martin often wondered if he was the only one), homeowners generally felt safe about leaving their house keys in rather obvious places, and Martin was adept at finding them. The Pearls, for example, had three extra house keys in an
I LOVE NY
shot glass on Sherman’s desk in the home office, mixed with a handful of Kennedy half dollars (of which Martin had acquired two a few years back). Martin’s next client of the day, the Gallos, actually kept two complete sets of extra house keys on a hook by their front door. Martin had found house keys in jewelry boxes, underneath flowerpots, and inside toilet tanks (a place used surprisingly often for hiding things). Clients also tended to leave keys out in the open when away on vacation. Four weeks ago, for example, one of Martin’s newest clients, the Wilkinsons, had gone to Florida to visit relatives, and Mrs. Wilkinson had left her set of keys (car, house, and presumably work) in a wicker basket on the kitchen counter. Up until that point, Martin had been unable to locate a single spare key in their home, but thanks to the trip to Florida, his access to the Wilkinsons’ home had recently gotten a lot easier.

Duplicating the keys, however, required some preparation. Martin rarely entered a home twice in one day, but copying a key required removing the original from the house for at least a day, and oftentimes for a week or more. In order to do this without arousing suspicion, Martin had spent more than a month creating a collection of replacement keys matching every size, shape, and color imaginable. Of course, these temporary replacements were not cut to open the locks on the clients’ doors but served only to hold the place of the real spare key until the copy could be made and returned. These substitute keys, thirty-seven
in all, were actually cut from a collection of old apartment and house keys that Martin initially had saved for posterity. Gold keys, silver keys, small round keys, large triangular keys, and many, many more filled a tomato jar on the top shelf of his pantry. It was quite uncommon for Martin to run into a spare key for which he did not have a veritable match, and when this happened he would photograph the spare and find a duplicate that matched, adding the new key to his growing collection.

Since homeowners rarely required their spare, Martin felt it safe to assume that a swapped spare key would go unnoticed. And in the unlikely event that the spare key was required while the real one was in Martin’s possession, the homeowner would simply assume that the replacement key had been cut poorly or that the locking mechanism in the door had become worn from use. Martin felt certain that no homeowner would ever suspect that someone had stolen their spare key and replaced it with a nearly identical match.

There were more than a dozen hardware stores that Martin used for key duplication, and he purposely avoided the small, individually owned stores because the owner or manager was often the same person responsible for duplicating keys and seemed to always be working. Big-box stores like Home Depot had a different employee duplicating keys each day, allowing Martin to maintain his prized anonymity.

Of course, all this depended upon Martin’s ability to gain initial entry to the home.

When he first went into business, he’d thought that this would prove to be his biggest challenge, but without much effort, Martin had found more than a dozen businesses that would sell him lock-picking tools and instructional manuals with virtually no questions asked. For example, the website where Martin had recently purchased his newest set of tools, lockpickpro.com, listed this disclaimer: “It is the responsibility of the buyer, and
not Lock Pick Pro, to ascertain and obey all applicable local, state, and federal laws in regard to possession and use of any item ordered. Consult your local and state laws before ordering if you are in doubt.”

Other lock-picking sites declared that their instruction manuals were for “academic study only” and “were not intended for any use other than magical or escape artist purposes.”

Martin didn’t consider his purposes purely academic, and he wasn’t a professional magician or escape artist at the time (nor did he ever expect to be). And although he was fully aware of the local and state laws regarding his possession and use of lock picks, Martin purchased that first set anyway, making the payment with a Stop & Shop money order and having the lock picks shipped via UPS to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Marino, future clients of Martin’s who were vacationing in Tahiti for two weeks. Ordering over the phone had made Martin nervous enough, but to have the equipment shipped to his own home seemed ludicrous. It was just the type of information that the police might one day use to incriminate him. Instead, Maureen Marino had been the answer.

Mrs. Marino was a regular customer in the Starbucks where Martin worked part-time, and she was quite friendly with Martin’s manager, an earthy-crunchy tree-hugging twenty-something named Nadia who referred to everyone as “honey” except for Martin. Over the obscene screaming of the milk steamer, Martin had overheard the two ladies chatting about Mrs. Marino’s upcoming and
absolutely fabulous
vacation to the South Pacific. Later on, a check of the phone books of the surrounding towns found Mrs. Maureen Marino living at 13 Cranberry Circle in Martin’s hometown of West Hartford, a mere twelve minutes from his own house. A visual inspection of the home told Martin that the Marinos would suit him just fine. Set back away from the road, with plenty of distance between their
house and the neighbors’, the Marino’s home was equipped with a wide front porch, capable of hiding any packages left by delivery persons.

Martin timed the placement of his order so that his package would arrive in the middle of the Marinos’ vacation, leaving plenty of room on either end for error. Prior to delivery, he also noted the time that the UPS truck typically made its rounds through the Marinos’ neighborhood, so that he could be prepared to receive his order upon delivery. By shipping through United Parcel Service, Martin had also managed to bypass the hold that the Marinos had presumably placed on their mail through the U.S. Postal Service. Martin simply watched the Marinos’ home from across the street for three days until the brown UPS truck stopped in front of their house, then watched as a man dressed to match his truck stepped onto the Marinos’ porch, knocked, and waited. After determining that no one was home, the driver, a middle-aged man who appeared to be going through the motions of life with little zeal, placed the package on the Marinos’ porch swing and left. Martin removed the package later that evening after the sun had gone down and the neighbors had gone to bed.

Thus, for an initial investment of just under $1,000, Martin had managed to purchase a top-of-the-line lock-pick kit, complete with instruction manuals in three different languages, half a dozen tension wrenches, two standard sets of lock picks, and two pick guns, including an electric model. Another $500 in locks of various types, purchased at the same impersonal hardware stores where he had his keys cut, and Martin was ready to begin his training, which was surprisingly simple. He installed more than thirty standard door locks, dead bolts, and the like along a set of two-by-fours in his basement, and for more than three hours each day he studied, practiced, and perfected his craft. After years of training, Martin could now pick all but the
most complicated tubular locks. And since most dead bolts operate with cylinder locks (the simplest and quickest to pick), Martin’s continued attempts with tubular locks were more of a hobby than a genuine professional interest. In fact, all of Martin’s lock-picking skills, honed through years of study and practice, were largely irrelevant thanks to the advent of the pick gun.

Developed to allow law enforcement officers who were unskilled in the art of lock-picking to open locks with speed and minimal instruction, the pick gun had become one of Martin’s most important occupational tools (he still considered his ten-sided die the most important). Rather than opening locks by the picking and raking techniques of a standard pick, a pick gun relies on the transfer of energy to compromise locks. A pick gun basically consists of one or more vibrating pick-shaped pieces of metal. These long pieces are inserted into the lock, just as one would insert a key. As the metal pieces vibrate, they push up the pins inside the lock. By turning the gun as the picks vibrate, the pins are caught at the shear line, allowing the lock to open. With very little practice, Martin was able to open more than half the locks he encountered in a matter of seconds, oftentimes faster than a homeowner would take to locate the correct key and use it to open the lock normally. After years of practice, it was rare for Martin to run into a lock that he could not pick in less than thirty seconds, and he had increased the effectiveness of his pick gun to more than 80 percent.

It also helped that homeowners often put so little thought into the locks used in their houses. While front doors were often equipped with complex tubular locks that resisted most of Martin’s efforts, the side, back, and garage doors of most houses (the doors that Martin preferred to use for entry anyway) were often safeguarded by simple dead bolts or cylinder locks built into the doorknob.

Martin’s lock-pick kit was at home this day, hidden in a space behind the paneling in his partially finished basement, covered by a Mondrian print in primary colors. Because of its incriminating nature, Martin carried his kit around as little as possible, limiting his visits to the eight clients whose locks still required picking on the same days as his visits to potential new clients. When traveling with the kit, Martin kept it stowed in the back of his wagon, hidden in a space beneath the spare tire. When in use, his picking tools were inside his backpack or within the inner pockets of the coat that he might be wearing, though all of the locks that still required picking could be opened quite easily with the pick gun with the exception of two, where old-fashioned lock picks were still needed.

For the next three visits of the day, however, no picking would be required.

Martin pulled out of the parking lot, heading toward Route 9 at three miles over the posted speed limit, the speed at which Martin always drove. Martin believed that driving the speed limit made a person look suspicious, so he hoped that his three-miles-over-the-limit policy made him look like an average Connecticut driver. About fifteen minutes south was the town of Kensington, the home of two more of Martin’s clients.