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By Root 331 0

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.

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’