Something Missing (15 page)

While the machine would be impossible to build (and even more impossible to explain to anyone who asked what it was for), the idea of a spray bottle quickly replaced that of the complex machinery, and within a week he had cut the time it took to remove fingerprints by more than half. A liberal spray of rubbing alcohol (more effective at removing fingerprints than water), followed by a vigorous wipe-down, would remove all evidence that the item had been handled by anyone. He tested his method early on using a fingerprint kit, which he purchased with a Stop & Shop money order and had shipped to clients who were staying with their daughter in Iowa during the birth of their first grandchild. After a month of testing on random acquisitions, Martin found that with a diligent cleaning, the spray-bottle method was 100 percent effective in removing fingerprints. In all, it took Martin seventeen minutes to cleanse his latest acquisitions of evidence, produce included, and with this finally accomplished, the actual processing could begin.

Thankfully, he hadn’t thought of the Claytons once during the cleaning.

Martin’s laptop was attached to an external hard drive, in which all his business data was stored. This hard drive, which no one knew existed, was stored in a concealed section of his basement wall behind the sump pump when not in use, leaving his laptop free of all incriminating evidence. Using Excel, Martin opened the spreadsheet in which he tracked his large acquisitions and logged in Donna Gardner’s pendant, indicating the date of acquisition but leaving the “Profit” column empty. Once entered, Martin proceeded to hide the pendant in the location he had predetermined earlier that day.

Hiding small items like jewelry had always been easy for Martin, and he could never quite fathom why someone would use a safe, lockbox, or safety deposit box when so many secure locations could be found around the average home. The insides of large household appliances were some of Martin’s favorite locations, because they were easily accessible, plentiful, and extremely secure. The back panel of a refrigerator, for example, could quickly be removed with a screwdriver, and a pendant, earring, or even necklace could be well concealed among the various wires or nonmoving parts therein. In Martin’s mind, the chances of anyone, including law enforcement officials, looking inside the compressor of his refrigerator for a recently acquired diamond earring were nil. In fact, a safe or lockbox almost implied guilt, or at the very least acknowledged the presence of valuables to anyone searching his home. His refrigerator, on the other hand, only acknowledged the likely presence of bologna, lettuce, and milk, making it much less conspicuous and therefore much more secure. In the past, Martin had hidden his small but valuable acquisitions inside his refrigerator, dishwasher, television, VCR, electric can opener, air conditioner, and stereo, to name just a few places, and once they were hidden, he never gave a second thought to their safety.

Martin had predetermined that he would hide the pendant
within the metallic casing that protected the snowblower’s motor, and in less than five minutes it was concealed between several braids of cord within the machine.

With the pendant hidden, Martin started logging in the other items that he had positioned in his staging area, beginning with the frozen and refrigerated goods. In a database specifically designed for groceries, Martin entered the name of each item, indicating where it was acquired, how much of it was acquired, and what it was worth. Thanks to the same Peapod website that Emma and Max Reed used to purchase their groceries each week, Martin had access to an online database that contained the current market price of almost every grocery item that he had ever acquired, so it was easy to calculate his daily profit. Martin also assigned each item a code that indicated from which “grocery family” the item came (meat, produce, dry goods, etc.), and he would later use this information to analyze the history of his acquisitions from each client. His goal was to ensure that he was acquiring a proportionate number of goods from each client and that the average profit from a single household did not change significantly from week to week or month to month. Consistency was the key, for if a client suddenly noticed that their grocery bill was increasing without reason, suspicion might be aroused.

As he was processing, Martin also conducted a visual inspection of each item, looking for distinguishing marks that might indicate the location, date, or time at which the item was originally purchased. Deli meat, for example, often had a tag that indicated the store’s name, time, and date of purchase, and smaller, noncorporate grocery stores often used price tags that could be easily identified by a store employee. Occasionally, Martin would also find that a client had marked a product with a particular identifying characteristic. For example, he once acquired a box of cereal from a client who had completed the crossword puzzle on the back, and another time someone had
turned the image of Aunt Jemima on a bottle of maple syrup into a devil, complete with horns and a forked tail. These identifying tags and marks would either be removed from the item, or the item would be transferred into a new container before being brought into the house.

Martin peeled the price tags from a pound of hamburger and a chicken breast, each indicating the date and store of purchase, and stuck both tags to a blank sheet of computer paper stored on a shelf over the workbench. With the tags firmly attached, he ran the sheet of paper through the shredder, destroying the tags in the process. In all it took Martin a little over thirty minutes to enter the data on all of his newly acquired items, and looking at the total at the bottom of the screen, saw that he had earned a total profit of $156.36 from his day’s work, a slightly below-average day considering the number of clients he had visited.

Of course, the incident at the Claytons’ house (he had already begun to think of it as
the incident)
had prevented Martin from finishing his work. There had been several items in the Claytons’ linen closet scheduled for acquisition, but these would have to wait for another day. The more he thought about Cindy Clayton’s voice and her desperate plea for attention, the more he began to believe that fate had intervened. His less-than-expected profit was no surprise.

What did surprise Martin was the thought that, less than three hours ago, he had been contemplating bashing in a client’s skull with a lamp. Had he not been so nimble-minded, he might right now be hiding in the wooded area between the Claytons’ house and the nursing home, trying to evade a platoon of policemen carrying flashlights, batons, and Taser guns.

Maybe even dogs.

Had Martin been exceptionally unlucky, it was entirely possible
that he could have found himself sitting behind bars at this very minute instead of relishing the orderliness of his garage. With a life built upon predictability and routine, Martin marveled at how quickly his circumstances had changed in the span of a couple hours.

Refocusing on the task at hand, Martin saved his work, shut down his computer, and entered the six-digit combination (randomly generated with dice) that deactivated the state-of-the-art alarm system protecting his home. He had purchased this system within a week after moving back into the house, never understanding why his parents hadn’t made the investment themselves but pleased that they had not.

He might have ended up in a very different career had his parents been more cautious.

Martin returned the hard drive to its hiding place in the basement, first enclosing it in a watertight bag and then placing that bag in a large sack of fertilizer for additional concealment, and then began moving the newly acquired items inside the house to their assigned locations. As he moved through the rooms, he was careful to avoid allowing his pants to touch furniture, walls, or any other part of his body. He was almost counting the seconds until they could be removed.

Martin’s house was a large, two-story Colonial centered on just under a half acre of land in a suburban neighborhood of West Hartford, Connecticut. The downstairs was a large, almost entirely open space consisting of a modern stainless-steel kitchen that opened into a spacious, window-filled family room, with a mudroom connecting the kitchen to the garage. On the west side of the house, beyond a stairway and dividing hallway, was a combined living room and dining room, complete with fireplace and sliding glass doors that opened onto a raised deck.

Upstairs, a total of five rooms wrapped around the staircase,
including a full bath off the master bedroom. As a child, Martin had inhabited one of the smaller rooms tucked into the northern corner of the house, but now this room served as his business office, the door always locked when not in use. Upon inheriting the home, he had moved into the master bedroom and kept the other two rooms as guest rooms, leaving them furnished just as they had been the day he moved back in. In fact, one of the guest rooms had yet to be occupied since the day Martin had inherited the home, and so he had yet to change the sheets that his mother had put on the bed sometime before she died.

The garage wasn’t the only place where Martin had made changes to his parents’ original design. Almost immediately upon inheriting the house, Martin re-tiled the kitchen floor and countertops, replacing a hunter green, which his mother had installed just a year before her death, with pristine white surfaces. Martin despised the color green and had found it amusing how often his mother would emphasize the word “hunter” when describing the color of her newly decorated kitchen, as if one word apologized for the other.

More significant than just despising the color, Martin also did not approve of dark colors in the kitchen or bathroom, as they served as effective agents in the hiding of dirt and germs. He believed that if there was a germ festering in the kitchen, it was better to be able to deal with it rather than allowing it to hide in the grout between green tiles.

Though much of the furniture throughout the house remained primarily the same, Martin had removed a great deal, emptying shelves of bric-a-brac, throwing away ornamental chairs that decorated corners of rooms but served no real purpose, and tearing up the carpeting in the family room and master bedroom. An empty shelf was a thing of beauty in Martin’s mind, with its clean, straight lines and absence of useless objects.
Carpeting was another household furnishing that Martin deplored because it was impossible to keep clean. Dirt on a hardwood floor or on tile could be seen and removed easily, but carpeting allowed dirt to linger and hide no matter how powerful one’s vacuum cleaner might be. Though it had cost him a considerable sum, one of Martin’s first projects was to hire someone to restore the hardwood floors that his parents had covered with carpeting long ago.

With his newly acquired items stored in their predetermined locations throughout the house, Martin went to the upstairs bathroom to shower, placing his contaminated jeans into a brown paper bag before rolling it closed. Once in the shower, he began scrubbing vigorously, removing any microscopic evidence that he had potentially collected from his clients’ homes, as well as any of the fetid remnants of the toilet water that had once covered Cindy Clayton’s toothbrush. Even in the presence of these germs, Martin smiled when he considered the contrast between this shower and the showers that the Claytons had taken earlier that day. Standing under the nearly scalding water, Martin’s muscles finally began to relax. But just a short time ago, he had been straining to hear the sound of a shower from a nearly unimaginable position.

An incredibly foolish position too
, Martin reminded himself. With his years of experience, he wondered how he could’ve been stupid enough to break so many rules in order to help a client.

All that danger over a toothbrush. It was almost impossible to believe.

As he washed his hair for the second time (as prescribed on the bottle of shampoo that had once belonged to Tracy and Bob Michaud of Kensington), Martin began inventorying the litany of errors that he had made in the course of the Clayton incident, his sense of disappointment and disgust growing with each item
on the list. But at the same time, that feeling of excitement had returned with the possibility that he might be able to help the Claytons once more without having to break another rule.

The more he thought about it, the more his idea seemed foolproof.

Once cleaned and dressed, Martin went to the front porch to collect his mail. In addition to the usual bills, magazines, and circulars, he found a total of three cardboard boxes and one large, cushioned mailing envelope. Placing the rest of the mail on the kitchen counter for later processing, Martin brought the boxes and envelope to his upstairs office, unlocking the door with a key from a ring that he kept in his pocket at all times while within the house. On this ring were the keys to Martin’s home, his car, his storage unit in Groton, and assorted bike locks, padlocks, etc. No matter where he was or what he was doing, Martin kept his keys with him at all times in case of emergency. If he needed to exit his home quickly, the last thing he wanted to hold him up was searching for keys that he had flung into some conspicuous location in a home full of conspicuous locations.

Though Martin’s business was highly profitable, this hadn’t always been the case. Before venturing into the realm of large-scale acquisitions, the business had for a long time provided him with groceries and common household necessities, but not with the cash required to pay rent, make car payments, and pay utility bills. So for the first ten years that Martin had been on his own, he had held down a variety of jobs in order to generate the funds needed to survive. Working as a part-time barista at Starbucks had been and remained his primary job (its early morning hours fitting in well with his afternoon client visits), with stints as a pizza deliveryman, a McDonald’s cashier, a telemarketer, and an ice-cream vendor filling in the gaps. He hated all these
jobs; particularly Starbucks with its corporate brainwashing, pretentiously named coffee sizes, and tattooed-pierced-vegetarian coworkers. But despite the noticeable loathing that he exuded behind the counter each day, Martin’s excessively logical and methodical mind, and his affinity for sequence and order, had allowed him to produce the overpriced lattes and espressos for which Starbucks was famous more quickly and efficiently than anyone else in town. Though his manager, Nadia, was clearly an idiot and did not like Martin, she was at least smart enough to recognize his skills, and was willing to put up with his sour face in exchange for quick service for her customers, all of whom she presumed to know intimately each time they came in. As a result of his business’s profitability, he had been able to reduce the number of hours that he worked at Starbucks considerably, keeping the job only to maintain the excellent health insurance that the company provided its employees.