Matthew Dicks

by Something Missing (v5)

  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.

  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.