We parked in the right-hand lot in an empty slot between two white police cruisers. We got out into the brightness. Went in and asked the desk guy for Detective Clark. The desk guy made an internal call and then pointed us toward the left-hand wing. We walked through an untidy corridor and ended up in a room the size of a basketball court. Pretty much the whole thing was a detectives’ bullpen. There was a wooden fence that enclosed a line of four visitor’s chairs and then there was a gate with a receptionist’s desk next to it. Beyond the gate was a lieutenant’s office way off in one corner and then nothing else except three pairs of back-to-back desks covered with phones and paper. There were file cabinets against the walls. The windows were grimy and most of them had skewed and broken blinds.
There was no receptionist at the desk. There were two detectives in the room, both of them wearing tweed sport coats, both of them sitting with their backs to us. Clark was one of them. He was talking on the phone. I rattled the gate latch. Both guys turned around. Clark paused for a second, surprised, and then he waved us in. We pulled chairs around and sat at the ends of his desk, one on each side. He kept on talking into the phone. We waited. I spent the time looking around the room. The lieutenant’s office had glass walls from waist height upward. There was a big desk in there. Nobody behind it. But on it I could see two plaster casts, just like the ones our own pathologist had made. I didn’t get up and go look at them. Didn’t seem polite.
Clark hung up the phone and made a note on a yellow pad. Then he breathed out and pushed his chair way back so he could see both of us at the same time. He didn’t say anything. He knew we weren’t making a social call. But equally he didn’t want to come right out and ask if we had a name for him. Because he didn’t want to look foolish if we didn’t.
“Just passing through,” I said.
“OK,” he said.
“Looking for a little help,” I said.
“What kind of help?”
“Thought you might give us your crowbar notes. Now that you don’t need them anymore. Now that you’ve found yours.”
“Notes?”
“You listed all kinds of hardware stores. I figured it could save us some time if we picked up where you left off.”
“I could have faxed them,” he said.
“There’s probably a lot of them. We didn’t want to cause you the trouble.”
“I might not have been here.”
“We were passing by anyway.”
“OK,” he said again. “Crowbar notes.” He swiveled his chair and got up out of it and walked over to a file cabinet. Came back with a green folder about a half-inch thick. He dropped it on his desk. It made a decent thump.
“Good luck,” he said.
He sat down again and I nodded to Summer and she picked up the folder. Opened it. It was full of paper. She leafed through. Made a face. Passed it across to me. It was a long, long list of places that stretched from New Jersey to North Carolina. There were names and addresses and phone numbers. The first ninety or so had check marks against them. Then there were about four hundred that didn’t.
“You have to be careful,” Clark said. “Some places call them crowbars and some call them wrecking bars. You have to be sure they know what you’re talking about.”
“Do they have different sizes?”
“Lots of different sizes. Ours is pretty big.”
“Can I see it? Or is it in your evidence room?”
“It’s not evidence,” Clark said. “It’s not the actual weapon. It’s just an identical sample on loan from the Sperryville store. We can’t take it to court.”
“But it fits your plaster casts.”
“Like a glove,” he said. He got up again and walked into his lieutenant’s office and took the casts off the desk. Carried them back one in each hand and put them down on his own desk. They were very similar to ours. There was a positive and a negative, just like we had. Mrs. Kramer’s head had been a lot smaller than Carbone’s, in terms of diameter. Therefore the crowbar had caught less of its circumference. Therefore the impression of the fatal wound was a little shorter in length than ours. But it was just as deep and ugly. Clark picked it up and ran his fingertip through the trench.
“Very violent blow,” he said. “We’re looking for a tall guy, strong, right-handed. You seen anyone like that?”
“Every time I look in the mirror,” I said.
The cast of the weapon itself was a little shorter than ours too. But other than that, it looked very much the same. Same chalky section, pitted here and there with microscopic imperfections in the plaster, but basically straight and smooth and brutal.
“Can I see the actual crowbar?” I said.
“Sure,” Clark said. He leaned down and opened a drawer in his desk. Left it open like a display and moved his chair to get out of my way. I leaned forward and looked down and saw the same curved black thing I had seen the previous morning. Same shape, same contours, same color, same size, same claws, same octagonal section. Same gloss, same precision. It was exactly identical in every way to the one we had left behind in Fort Bird’s mortuary office.
We drove ten miles to Sperryville. I looked through Clark’s list to find the hardware store’s address. It was right there on the fifth line, because it was close to Green Valley. But there was no check mark against its phone number. There was a penciled note instead: No answer. I guessed the owner had been busy with a glazier and an insurance company. I guessed Clark’s guys would have gotten around to making a second call eventually, but they had been overtaken by the NCIC search.
Sperryville wasn’t a big place, so we just cruised around looking for the address. We found a bunch of stores on a short strip and after driving it three times we found the right street name on a green sign. It pointed us down what was basically a narrow dead-end alley. We passed between the sides of two clapboard structures and then the alley widened into a small yard and we saw the hardware store facing us at the far end. It was like a small one-story barn, painted up to look more urban than rural. It was a real mom-and-pop place. It had a family name painted on an old sign. No indication that it was part of a franchise. It was just an American small business, standing alone, weathering the booms and busts from one generation to the next.
But it was an excellent place for a dead-of-night burglary. Quiet, isolated, invisible from passersby on the main street, no living accommodation on the second floor. In the front wall it had a display window on the left set next to an entrance door on the right, separated only by the width of the door frame. There was a moon-shaped hole in the window glass, temporarily backed by a sheet of unfinished plywood. The plywood had been neatly trimmed to the right size. I figured the hole had been punched through by the sole of a shoe. It was close to the door. I figured a tall guy could put his left arm through the hole up to the shoulder and get his hand around to the door latch easily enough. But he would have had to reach all the way in first and then bend his elbow slowly and deliberately, to avoid snagging his clothes. I pictured him with his left cheek against the cold glass, in the dark, breathing hard, groping blindly.
We parked right in front of the store. Got out and spent a minute looking in the window. It was full of items on display. But whoever had put them there wasn’t about to move on to Saks Fifth Avenue anytime soon. Not for their famous holiday windows. Because there was no art involved. No design. No temptation. Everything was just lined up neatly on hand-built shelves. Everything had a price tag. The window was saying: This is what we’ve got. If you want it, come in and get it. But it all looked like quality stuff. There were some strange items. I had no idea what some of them were for. I didn’t know much about tools. I had never really used any, except knives. But it was clear to me that this store chose what it carried pretty carefully.
We went in. There was a mechanical bell on the door that rang as we entered. The plain neatness and organization we had seen in the window was maintained inside. There were tidy racks and shelves and bins. A wide-pla
nk wooden floor. There was a faint smell of machine oil. The place was quiet. No customers. There was a guy behind the counter, maybe sixty years old, maybe seventy. He was looking at us, alerted by the bell. He was medium height and slender and a little stooped. He wore round eyeglasses and a gray cardigan sweater. They made him look intelligent, but they also made him look like he wasn’t accustomed to handling anything bigger than a small screwdriver. They made him look like selling tools was a definite second best to being at a university, teaching a course about their design and their history and their development.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“We’re here about the stolen wrecking bar,” I said. “Or the stolen crowbar, if that’s what you prefer to call it.”
He nodded.
“Crowbar,” he said. “Wrecking bar is a little uncouth, in my opinion.”
“OK, we’re here about the stolen crowbar,” I said.
He smiled, briefly. “You’re the army. Has martial law been declared?”
“We have a parallel inquiry,” Summer said.
“Are you Military Police?”
“Yes,” Summer said. She told him our names and ranks. He reciprocated with his own name, which matched the sign above his door.
“We need some background,” I said. “About the crowbar market.”
He made a face like he was interested, but not very excited. It was like asking a forensics guy about fingerprinting instead of DNA. I got the impression that crowbar development had slowed to a halt a long time ago.
“Where can I start?” he said.
“How many different sorts are there?”
“Dozens,” he said. “There are at least six manufacturers that I would consider dealing with myself. And plenty of others I wouldn’t.”
I looked around the store. “Because you only carry quality stuff.”
“Exactly,” he said. “I can’t compete with the big chains on price alone. So I have to offer absolutely top quality and service.”
“Niche marketing,” I said.
He nodded again.
“Low-end crowbars would come from China,” he said. “Mass produced, cast iron, wrought iron, low-grade forged steel. I wouldn’t be interested.”
“So what do you carry?”
“I import a few titanium crowbars from Europe,” he said. “Very expensive, but very strong. More importantly, very light. They were designed for police and firefighters. Or for underwater work, where corrosion would otherwise be an issue. Or for anyone else that needs something small and durable and easily portable.”
“But it wasn’t one of those that was stolen.”
The old guy shook his head. “No, the titanium bars are specialist items. The others I offer are slightly more mainstream.”
“And what are those?”
“This is a small store,” he said. “I have to choose what I carry very carefully. Which in some ways is a burden, but which is also a delight, because choice is very liberating. These decisions are mine, and mine alone. So obviously, for a crowbar, I would choose high-carbon chromium steel. Then the question is, should it be single-tempered or double-tempered? My honest preference would always be double-tempered, for strength. And I would want the claws to be very slim, for utility, and therefore case-hardened, for safety. That could be a lifesaver, in some situations. Imagine a man on a high roof beam, whose claw shattered. He’d fall off.”
“I guess he would,” I said. “So, the right steel, double-tempered, with the hard claws. What did you pick?”
“Well, actually I compromised with one of the items I carry. My preferred manufacturer won’t make anything shorter than eighteen inches. But I needed a twelve-inch, obviously.”
I must have looked blank.
“For studs and joists,” the old guy said. “If you’re working inside sixteen-inch centers, you can’t use an eighteen-inch bar, can you?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“So I take a twelve-inch with a half-inch section from one source, even though it’s only single-tempered. I think it’s satisfactory, though. In terms of strength. With only twelve inches of leverage, the force a person generates isn’t going to overwhelm it.”
“OK,” I said.
“Apart from that particular item and the titanium specialties, I order exclusively from a very old Pittsburgh company called Fortis. They make two models for me. An eighteen-inch, and a three-footer. Both of them are three-quarter-inch section. High-carbon double-tempered chromium steel, case-hardened claws, very fine quality paint.”
“And it was the three-footer that was stolen,” I said.
He looked at me like I was clairvoyant.
“Detective Clark showed us the sample you lent him,” I said.
“I see,” he said.
“So, is the thirty-six-inch three-quarter-section Fortis a rare item?”
He made a face, like he was a little disappointed.
“I sell one a year,” he said. “Two, if I’m very lucky. They’re expensive. And appreciation for quality is declining shamefully. Pearls before swine, I say.”
“Is that the same everywhere?”
“Everywhere?” he repeated.
“In other stores. Regionally. With the Fortis crowbars.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Perhaps I didn’t make myself quite clear. They’re made for me. To my own design. To my own exact specification. They’re custom items.”
I stared at him. “They’re exclusive to this store?”
He nodded. “The privilege of independence.”
“Literally exclusive?”
He nodded again. “Unique in all the world.”
“When did you last sell one?”
“About nine months ago.”
“Does the paint wear off?”
“I know what you’re asking,” he said. “And the answer is yes, of course. If you find one that looks new, it’s the one that was stolen on New Year’s Eve.”
We borrowed an identical sample from him for comparative purposes, the same way Detective Clark had. It was dewed with machine oil and had tissue paper wrapped around the center shaft. We laid it like a trophy across the Chevy’s backseat. Then we ate in the car. Burgers, from a drive-through a hundred yards north of the tool store.
“Tell me three new facts,” I said.
“One, Mrs. Kramer and Carbone were killed by the same individual weapon. Two, we’re going to drive ourselves nuts trying to find a connection between them.”
“And three?”
“I don’t know.”
“Three, the bad guy knew Sperryville pretty well. Could you have found that store in the dark, in a hurry, unless you knew the town?”
We looked ahead through the windshield. The mouth of the alley was just about visible. But then, we knew it was there. And it was full daylight.
Summer closed her eyes.
“Focus on the weapon,” she said. “Forget everything else. Visualize it. The custom crowbar. Unique in all the world. It was carried out of that alley, right there. Then it was in Green Valley at two A.M. on January first. And then it was inside Fort Bird at nine P.M. on the fourth. It went on a journey. We know where it started, and we know where it finished. We don’t know for sure where it went in between, but we do know for certain it passed one particular point along the way. It passed Fort Bird’s main gate. We don’t know when, but we know for sure that it did.”
She opened her eyes.
“We have to get back there,” she said. “We have to look at the logs again. The earliest it could have passed the gate is six A.M. on January first, because Bird is four hours from Green Valley. The latest it could have passed the gate is, say, eight P.M. on January fourth. That’s an eighty-six-hour window. We need to check the gate logs for everybody who entered during that time. Because we know for sure that the crowbar came in, and we know for sure that it didn’t walk in by itself.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’ll be a
lot of names.”
The truant feeling was completely gone. We got back on the road and headed east, looking for I-95. We found it and we turned south, toward Bird. Toward Willard on the phone. Toward the angry Delta station. We slid back under the shelf of gray cloud just before the North Carolina state line. The sky went dark. Summer put the headlights on. We passed the State Police building on the opposite shoulder. Passed the spot where Kramer’s briefcase had been found. Passed the rest area a mile later. We merged with the east–west highway spur and came off at the cloverleaf next to Kramer’s motel. We left it behind us and drove the thirty miles down to Fort Bird’s gate. The guard shack MPs signed us in at 1930 hours exactly. I told them to copy their logs starting at 0600 hours January first and ending at 2000 hours January fourth. I told them to have a Xerox record of that eighty-six-hour slice of life delivered to my office immediately.
My office was very quiet. The morning mayhem was long gone. The sergeant with the baby son was back on duty. She looked tired. I realized she didn’t sleep much. She worked all night and probably played with her kid all day. Tough life. She had coffee going. I figured she was just as interested in it as I was. Maybe more.
“Delta guys are restless,” she said. “They know you arrested the Bulgarian guy.”
“I didn’t arrest him. I just asked him some questions.”
“That’s a distinction they don’t seem willing to make. People have been in and out of here looking for you.”
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