Something Missing Read Online Free PDF

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’ homes made Martin’s job a whole lot easier. Of his current twenty-three clients, Martin was in possession of keys for sixteen of their homes, and thirteen of those were for side or back doors, Martin’s preferred method of entry for a number of reasons, particularly their limited exposure to street traffic.
    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. Onetimersor 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