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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-sevenin 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 the same person responsible for duplicating keys and seemed to always be working. Big-box stores like Home Depot had a different employee duplicating keys each day, allowing Martin to maintain his prized anonymity.
    Of course, all this depended upon Martin’s ability to gain initial entry to the home.
    When he first went into business, he’d thought that this would prove to be his biggest challenge, but without much effort, Martin had found more than a dozen businesses that would sell him lock-picking tools and instructional manuals with virtually no questions asked. For example, the website where Martin had recently purchased his newest set of tools, lockpickpro.com, listed this disclaimer: “It is the responsibility of the buyer, andnot Lock Pick Pro, to ascertain and obey all applicable local, state, and federal laws in regard to possession and use of any item ordered. Consult your local and state laws before ordering if you are in doubt.”
    Other lock-picking sites declared that their instruction manuals were for “academic study only” and “were not intended for any use other than magical or escape artist purposes.”
    Martin didn’t consider his purposes purely academic, and he wasn’t a professional magician or escape artist at the time (nor did he ever expect to be). And although he was fully aware of the local and state laws regarding his possession and use of lock picks, Martin purchased that first set anyway, making the payment with a Stop & Shop money order and having the lock picks shipped via UPS to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Marino, future clients of Martin’s who were vacationing in Tahiti for two weeks. Ordering over the phone had made Martin nervous enough, but to have the equipment shipped to his own home seemed ludicrous. It was just the type of information that the police might one day use to incriminate him. Instead, Maureen Marino had been the answer.
    Mrs. Marino was a regular customer in the Starbucks where Martin worked part-time, and she was quite friendly with Martin’s manager, an earthy-crunchy tree-hugging twenty-something named Nadia who referred to everyone as “honey” except for Martin. Over the obscene screaming of the milk steamer, Martin had overheard the two ladies chatting about Mrs. Marino’s upcoming and
absolutely fabulous
vacation to the South Pacific. Later on, a check of the phone books of the surrounding towns found Mrs. Maureen Marino living at 13 Cranberry Circle in Martin’s hometown of West Hartford, a mere twelve minutes from his own house.