Something Missing (14 page)

But Martin hadn’t always been so fortunate. Immediately following high school and up until his mother’s death a dozen years ago, he had lived in a series of apartments and rooms for rent, and these locales had posed serious problems for one who valued discretion as much as he. His last apartment, a second-floor, two-bedroom place on Willard Avenue in the neighboring town of Newington, had been extremely troublesome, especially since his client list had begun to expand during that time. Lacking an attached garage, he had already been doing all of his grocery shopping on Tuesday mornings at 3:00 a.m. at the twenty-four-hour Stop & Shop on Fenn Road, in an effort to ensure that his shopping habits wouldn’t become his neighbors’ latest topic of conversation. But after building a lengthy client list (about half its current size) and increasing his acquisitions each week, Martin had been forced to dramatically adjust his schedule to accommodate the success of his new business. After completing his morning and afternoon visits to clients, he would eat dinner, clean up, and go to bed around seven, waking up each morning at three in order to transport his acquisitions from his
car into the apartment under the cover of dark. These logistical problems also prevented Martin from acquiring most refrigerated and frozen foods in the warmer months, as these acquisitions would often sit inside his car for hours before it was safe to relocate them. The move to his mother’s home, with its gloriously insulating garage, had been an enormous boon to his already thriving business.

Taking a moment to breathe in the pine-scented air that he enjoyed so much, Martin turned in a slow, 360-degree arc, admiring the space that he had created for himself and relishing the safety it afforded. Just being inside the garage had allowed him to relax a bit, to slow his breathing and return his body to a state of equilibrium. Routine and regularity were proving to be his mental salvation, beginning with the garage.

The walls were covered with orderly rows of tools used in lawn maintenance: clippers, shovels, rakes, hoes, and many of the smaller, handheld tools used for gardening. Each tool looked as if it had hardly been used, but Martin in fact used his tools quite often and was meticulous in his cleaning of each one after use. Following an afternoon of yard work, for example, a soiled shovel would be hosed down, wiped clean, and dried before being returned to its assigned location, a process that Jim considered odd but one that Martin thought made perfect sense. The process took very little time and yielded excellent results. It eliminated the opportunity for rust to form and kept dirt from entering his otherwise pristine garage. The hooks suspending the tools stretched across the walls in rows that were perfectly straight and parallel with the ground, a fact to which Martin’s laser-guided level could readily attest. When he first moved back into the home following his mother’s heart attack, one of his first chores was to remove the nails that his former stepfather had pounded willy-nilly into the wall years ago, and replace
them with polished silver hooks, straightening out each row as he did.

Below the hooks stood the snowblower and lawn mower that Martin had also inherited with the house, and each of these also looked new, though they had required considerably more time to clean, repair, and repaint than the tools and hooks had. As he did with his tools, Martin would clean and dry these machines after each use, and even went so far as to remove the blade of the lawn mower monthly in order to sharpen it, though the manufacturer’s recommendation was to sharpen seasonally. Again, this was not something that Martin considered odd or out of the ordinary, but simply something that made sense. The sharper the blade, the better the cut.

With his moment of admiration over, Martin began the process of unloading the day’s acquisitions, trying to put the incident in the Claytons’ home out of his mind while he took care of business. But there was so much to ignore.

The danger that he had just faced.

The inconceivable lack of regard for the rules that had kept him safe for so long.

And Cindy Clayton’s voice, seeming to speak directly to him, as if he were meant to be in that closet at that particular moment. Only with great effort was he able to put these things out of his mind and concentrate on his work.

Lining the east wall of the garage were three rectangular banquet tables, empty except for a laptop and external hard drive positioned atop the table closest to the door to the house. Martin had set his computer up before exiting the garage earlier in the morning, and now with the touch of a button and the entry of a sixteen-digit password, the computer’s fan began to whir and the operating system began to boot.

While the computer readied itself, Martin unloaded the
items from the back of his Subaru, sorting them by where they would eventually be stored within the home. Frozen goods and refrigerated items were placed closest to the laptop for rapid processing, with dry goods, cleaning supplies, and toiletries positioned further down the tables.

Before he could process any of his acquisitions, however, several important tasks needed to be completed. Using a paper shredder that was set up beneath the center table of his staging area, Martin destroyed the four acquisition lists that he had used in each home that day, allowing the machine to devour the flourish of French that he had so meticulously typed less than twenty-four hours ago. Later he would burn these paper shreds in his fireplace along with other potentially incriminating evidence, including the hairnet that he had worn, the four pairs of latex gloves and rubber moccasins—one pair per house—that he had donned before entering, and of course, his pants.

Just the thought that he was still wearing them made his skin crawl, but he knew that, as much as it pained him, processing his acquisitions would have to come before disinfecting his body. Unprocessed acquisitions posed a danger to Martin and his career, and his jeans did not. They would have to wait. But he would most assuredly take great pleasure in watching the contaminated denim burn along with the other essential parts of his work attire.

Thankfully, the items that Martin wore when visiting clients were simple to procure. Hairnets were easy to find in a variety of stores, including pharmacies and supermarkets, and Martin considered them very important, particularly in light of the proliferation of DNA evidence that law enforcement officers were using today. A single stray hair left inside a client’s home might be enough to convict him, so although Martin’s hair wasn’t very long (and he had actually considered shaving his head for a long time but thought that an average head of hair would attract less
attention), a hairnet was an essential element of his uniform, and explaining its presence if caught would be simple enough. Though Martin did not suffer from dandruff, the large supply of dandruff treatments in his bathroom (courtesy of Maurice Grant) provided enough evidence of his affliction, so if questioned, he would justify his hairnet as a means of keeping his flaking scalp to himself.

Acquiring latex gloves had also been fairly easy; there were several local medical supply stores that sold the gloves in bulk. But devising a cover story as to why he required so many gloves proved to be quite another matter. The last thing he wanted was to have to explain the presence of five thousand latex gloves in his kitchen cabinet to a law enforcement officer.

After some research, however, Martin found that many homeowners, particularly gardeners, kept latex gloves on hand in order to safely remove poison ivy and other irritating plants from their backyards. Martin didn’t keep a garden, but the rear of his property was bordered by a constantly encroaching copse of trees and shrubs, and although poison ivy had never been a problem before, he was certain that he could make it a problem.

That, however, turned out to be more difficult than he had imagined.

After more than two weeks of searching, Martin was unable to locate any gardening store, nationally or abroad, that stocked poison ivy seed or seedlings. Most of his inquiries were met with perplexed and skeptical responses from shopkeepers who thought they were being made the punch line of some ridiculous practical joke. When he realized that purchasing the seed would be impossible, Martin decided to transplant existing poison ivy plants onto his property. Armed with a botanical field guide, Martin made his way on a Sunday afternoon to a forested section of land between a local elementary school and a park, and quickly found the plant in abundance. Despite poison ivy’s
invasive and persistent nature, transplanting proved to be a challenge. Martin’s first three attempts ended in failure, and it wasn’t until his fourth try that the plant finally took hold and began to thrive. Several years later, Martin doubted that he could remove the poison ivy even if he wanted to. Consistent watering and the seasonal application of fertilizer had helped his initial three transplants spread and grow into a veritable jungle of the three-leafed irritant.

Disposing of the gloves had also been a concern for Martin, and he had never arrived at a method that he considered satisfactory. He desperately wanted to rid himself of each pair of gloves immediately after use, so that if he were ever pulled over by the police, there would be no used gloves in the car to explain. But this would mean leaving evidence behind, out there in the world for anyone to find, and though this is just what Martin had done for a long time, a scare eight years back had forced him to adopt a new policy.

Following a visit to the Pearls’ home on an early April morning, Martin had made his way to a trash can on the south end of the tennis courts in order to dispose of his gloves. As he dropped them into the can, he happened to glance in and notice another pair of gloves still sitting at the bottom of the trash, barely covered by a candy bar wrapper and an empty tennis ball container. Without pause, he plucked both sets of gloves from the can and hurried back to the Subaru, where he sat in the front seat, breathing heavily and waiting for his rapid pulse to return to normal. Though he hadn’t used the trash can in more than two weeks, the gloves from a previous visit were still sitting there, covered with his fingerprints and the microscopic bits that they had acquired from the Pearls’ home. His pulse began to race even faster as he thought about the thousands of latex gloves he had left about the world over the last several years, in random
trash cans and dumpsters around his clients’ homes, each one loaded with microscopic evidence of him and his visit.

Though he realized that the chance of someone locating one of these gloves and using the evidence that it contained against him was slight, police officers seemed to canvass crime scenes quite thoroughly on television, and it wouldn’t take an exceptionally bright cop to connect the presence of latex gloves in a nearby trash can to one of his visits. So, following his scare, Martin began bringing his gloves home and burning them daily. Latex, he found, burned quite well and left no proof that the gloves had ever existed. And though he concealed his used gloves in a well-hidden space underneath his dashboard (created by the removal of some unnecessary plastic and the repositioning of several bundles of wires), he was always relieved to watch them go up in flames in his fireplace each evening.

Martin now removed the gloves from their hiding spot, placed them atop the shredder, and then moved to the rear of the car and detached the Hide-a-Key from the inside bumper. Earlier that day, he had acquired a diamond and silver pendant from the home of Ron and Donna Gardner, a middle-aged couple whose three children had flown the coop years ago for exciting and exotic careers. As he’d done with Sophie Pearl’s earring, Martin had secured the pendant in the Hide-a-Key box for transport to his home. As he removed the pendant from the box, he made sure that the black ignition key to a Subaru Legacy that he had owned more than five years ago remained behind. Though he would never be foolish enough to hide a key to his car
on
his car, he wanted to maintain proper appearances, and if ever questioned about the hidden key he would explain that he had moved the Hide-a-Key from his old car to the new, forgetting to exchange the actual keys in the process. The pendant was placed on the laptop’s mouse pad for immediate processing. This would
be the most damaging item if law enforcement suddenly arrived, so Martin wanted to process it first.

Lastly, Martin removed Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush from the floor of his car (vowing to purchase new floor mats as soon as possible) and placed it into the garbage bin in the rear of the garage. Fortunately, the trash was scheduled for pickup the next day. Had it been a longer wait, Martin might have been forced to dispose of the toothbrush on his own. Just the thought of it lying at the bottom of his garbage bin for more than a day might have been too much of a reminder of what had just happened in the Claytons’ home.

Once his car had been completely emptied, Martin removed a large spray bottle containing rubbing alcohol and several clean rags from a cabinet over his worktable and began lightly spraying and wiping down each item on the table, removing all fingerprint evidence. This was a process that he had begun following the latex scare and his horrifying realization about the mountain of physical evidence that he was carrying into his home each week. Every item that he acquired had at one point been handled by its previous owner, and it likely contained dozens of incriminating fingerprints. In putting together a case against Martin, the police could seize items from his home and test them for fingerprints. Finding the print of a different homeowner on items within his cupboards could provide enough evidence for a conviction.

Initially, Martin’s attempts at removing fingerprints had been amateurish. Using a bucket of soapy water, he would wash the cereal boxes, milk containers, cans of soup, and jars of spaghetti sauce much the same way one might wash a dog or a car, by scrubbing and rinsing. But this process was time consuming and often left cardboard containers moist and labels peeling. After several attempts at altering this method, the spray-bottle technique finally came to mind after driving his car through an
automated car wash one day. As the large rollers scrubbed the pollen and bird excrement from his hood, the blueprint of a fingerprint removal device suddenly entered his mind, complete with a moving conveyor belt, spray nozzles, and drying fans, very much resembling the machinery in the automatic car wash, only reduced in scale. By the time his Subaru was rolling back onto the street, the entire sketch of his machine was complete in his mind, and he was certain that if it were given to an engineer and built to his specifications, he would never have to worry about a fingerprint again. In a way, Martin felt like he understood the plight of Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could envision the plans for the first helicopter but lacked the tools, materials, and technology to fabricate one. He felt a great deal of frustration and pride in this realization.