Something Missing_ A Novel - Matthew Dicks [11]
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