AHMM, March 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Auburn cruised to a halt opposite a rack of scissors, hemostats, clamps, probes, and pairs of wire cutters identical to the one in the evidence room. Strewn over the table below the rack were cheap manicure tools and pocket knives, magnifying glasses with warped plastic lenses, and squat figurines cast in pot metal.

  "The nuts are fresh every Friday."

  Until then Auburn hadn't even noticed the nuts, a sorry lot of cashews and almonds in cellophane bags that didn't look as if they'd been fresh on any Monday since around the Fourth of July.

  Not only was the vendor Caucasian, but Auburn was sure he'd met him before, almost certainly in the line of duty. Forty or so, he looked seedy and unkempt beyond all description. He had lost about half of one of his upper front teeth, and what was left formed a jagged triangular fang that gave him an irksome lisp.

  Auburn slid three of the wire cutters off the rack and examined them. The jaws of one didn't meet properly and the other two had conspicuous surface flaws.

  "Doctor, sir?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Dentist? Those are all imported and first quality,” he said, lying with practiced ease. “And you won't find any like that anywhere at a better price."

  Auburn bought the most presentable wire cutter for $1.99 plus tax. (According to Kestrel's research, a genuine first-quality example, if purchased through a U.S. retailer of surgical instruments, would have cost $77.44 plus shipping, handling, and tax.) All through the transaction he was struggling unsuccessfully to place this purveyor of shoddy merchandise and stale nuts. His only clue was an olive-drab backpack lying on the floor in the corner of the booth, on which the name dayle had been inked in block letters.

  Although Auburn wouldn't have eaten any of the food sold at the mall on a bet, he did buy a hot cider to warm his blood while he finished pacing the sketchily heated building. “I wonder,” he asked the woman who dispensed the cider, “if you'd happen to know Dayle's last name? The guy that sells scissors and nuts just on the other side of the drinking fountain?"

  "That's Dayle Yarst,” she said, and added inconsequentially, “He used to be a plumber."

  Auburn finished his cider in the car on his way back to headquarters.

  The finding, at the scene of Pyzegger's murder, of a wire cutter identical to the ones sold by a man named Yarst obviously put the other Yarst into the spotlight, implicating him in the crime until solid facts proved otherwise. The only information that Records had on Dayle Yarst was more than five years old and had been transferred to microfilm.

  As Auburn sat at the viewer cranking the roll of film through the sprockets, some of his own handwriting drifted into view on the screen, in the carbon copy of a traffic citation he'd issued to Yarst and the accompanying investigational report.

  Eleven years ago Yarst had been driving late at night during a blizzard when his truck skidded out of control and smashed the plate-glass window of a jewelry store. Then-Patrolman Auburn and his partner had practically witnessed the incident and, in spite of the weather conditions, had felt justified in citing Yarst for improper operation and causing property damage. Because the jeweler's insurance company and Yarst's had worked out an amicable settlement between them, a judge had let him off with a light fine and court costs.

  The whole crazy business came back to Auburn now, especially when he saw the photographs he himself had taken at the scene: the hideous weather, the pickup truck half on the sidewalk and half inside the store, rings and watches scattered in the snow and slush, and the man with the maddening lisp. Auburn printed the entire record and took it back upstairs to his office after making a formal request for a full-scale background probe on Dayle Yarst.

  He was now convinced that there had to be some link between the two Yarsts and the murder of Ernest Pyzegger. But, utterly unable to imagine what it was, he sat shuffling papers and staring stupidly at his computer screen with such absorption that he nearly forgot to eat lunch. When he finally got back from the canteen, he found a partial report on Dayle Yarst waiting on his desk.

  He was Gaylan's younger brother by four years. He had apparently never finished school, never married, never been employed anywhere for more than a few months. His credit rating was so bad that he probably had to pay in advance for a haircut. He had had two arrests for disorderly conduct and two for fighting, but had never served jail time. Although he had identified himself to Auburn as a plumber on the occasion of their first meeting, he had never held a plumber's license. Indeed, he didn't look to Auburn like a man with enough grit to wage daily battle with galvanized steel pipe, rusted fittings, and backed-up sewage.

  The only vehicle registered to Yarst was a pickup truck, ancient but obviously not the one he'd totaled at the jewelry store. Auburn had another look at the snapshots he'd taken of that wreck. It occurred to him that it would have been a spectacular smash-and-grab operation, except that nobody had done any grabbing. Unless...

  He unlocked the left compartment of the credenza behind his desk and slipped a small, plain looseleaf notebook out from behind a stack of other materials.

  Although the national criminal history reporting program had begun with efforts at interstate gun control and the tracking of child molesters, it had evolved into a highly sophisticated information management system whose database constituted, in effect, a national registry of criminal M.O.'s. For run-of-the-mill offenses like muggings, break-ins, and DUIs, the files had little value except as a source of statistics. But when local authorities were confronted by an unsolved crime involving an unusual method, they could search the database for others of a similar nature elsewhere in the country.

  Auburn punched in the appropriate codes and passwords and entered both “smash and grab” and “vehicle” for the search engine to mull over. Within seconds he had a veritable flood of data. Even when he narrowed the focus to his sector of the state, he found that this M.O. was anything but unusual. During the past ten years, burglaries from ATMs alone, attempted or successful, within about seventy-five miles of where he was sitting totaled thirty-one.

  Few of these were ever solved. The reports were depressingly monotonous. In almost every case, a freestanding ATM in an area remote from residences and heavily traveled roads had been knocked off its foundations in the middle of the night and either hauled away bodily or ripped apart at the scene with tools or machinery of gargantuan clout. Evidence at the scene was scanty or nonexistent, usually consisting of tracks left by truck tires or the treads of a piece of heavy equipment.

  Jewelry and electronics stores isolated from observation in strip malls seemed to be the next favorite targets. Sometimes the thieves broke in a plate-glass display window, sometimes a rear door. Always they operated with lightning speed—at least the ones who didn't get caught. As with the assaults on ATMs, by the time the police responded to alarms they generally found the scene deserted.

  The tighter Auburn drew his circle, the more he was struck by the frequency with which local knockovers of jewelry stores had been committed during periods of bad weather during the night—severe electrical storms, downpours of rain or sleet, blizzards ... He took the stairs two at a time on his way down to Records to retrieve investigative reports on the four cases that had occurred within municipal police jurisdiction.

  At four p.m. he called Gaylan Yarst's office at Andover. Jitzi Swa, answering after many rings, told him Yarst had been admitted to Chalfont Hospital that morning for emergency surgery.

  "You can probably tell me what I want to know,” said Auburn. “Did Mr. Pyzegger open the mail every day?"

  "Mail? Package coming in? No, Mr. Pyzegger not do mail. Mr. Yarst and I do mail."

  "And what do you do with it exactly? I mean, do you make a list, or—"

  With remarkable clarity, considering her difficulties with the language, she gave him a detailed explanation of the routine handling of each day's mail. Letter mail went to Mr. Yarst's office for sorting. Incoming shipments of parts were opened by Mr. Yarst, who checked the contents
against invoices and handled the paperwork, then turned over the parts to Ms. Swa and her staff for storage or distribution to workstations. Parcels containing articles submitted for repair were counted, stamped with the date received, listed by source on a laptop, and arranged on wheeled carts, which were then taken to the storeroom.

  "Do you open any of those packages?"

  "Not open when come.” She fell silent as if suddenly struck by a passing thought. After an interval she added, “Mr. Yarst take package if have special order inside."

  "How does he know a package has a special order inside?"

  "Have red sticker."

  "So do you open those packages right away?"

  Again a period of pregnant silence. “I not open. Mr. Yarst take to office."

  "How many packages do you get with these red stickers on them?"

  "Only few. Maybe four, five in year."

  A call to Chalfont Hospital informed Auburn that Gaylan Yarst was in stable condition in Intensive Care.

  * * * *

  Auburn lay awake at least half the night, or so it seemed, trying to make two trains of thought run on the same tracks. By Saturday morning they had melded into a coherent hypothesis.

  Immediately after report that day, Auburn discussed the case with Lieutenant Savage, his immediate superior, who had pulled weekend duty as first watch commander. Although Savage seemed impressed with his investigative work to date, he wasn't buying Auburn's theory of the crime as anything more than just that—a theory requiring the support of solid evidence before it could be turned over to the city prosecutor. He approved the next step that Auburn proposed but nixed the idea of applying for warrants.

  Patrolwoman Georgie Wales drove Auburn in an unmarked car to Lotus Mall, where they found Dayle Yarst's booth chained up and vacant. Back in the car Auburn called the phone number listed for Dayle Yarst in the directory.

  "Dayle's not here.” Auburn had a vision of a sharp-featured, cross-grained woman about Yarst's age who had started in early on the day's ration of beer.

  "Would you know where I could reach him? It's kind of urgent."

  A silence of about ten seconds ensued, during which Auburn was beginning to think she'd hung up. “He's over at the cemetery with his brother."

  "Ma'am?"

  "You know Broad Acres? Go in the maintenance entrance off Pritchard Street. They're in there pitching horseshoes. Don't tell him I sent you."

  It took them a half hour to get to Broad Acres Cemetery. On Pritchard Street, far from the section of the cemetery that was open to the public, the part where the graves were, they found an open gate marked service entrance—no admittance. Passing through, they entered an exotic, untamed world of whose presence, surrounded by long-established residential districts, neither of them had ever dreamed.

  This zone of the cemetery, destined no doubt to receive the remains of people not yet born, consisted of broad reaches of wild, unreclaimed territory. The gravel road wound among primeval thickets, precipitous crags, and deep rocky gulches running just now with flashing water from melting snow.

  The road led eventually to a shed, open on two sides, under whose high roof a variety of lawn mowers, three golf carts, and a backhoe on a trailer were parked among piles of mulch. Near the shed and blocking the road stood a pickup truck—in fact, Dayle Yarst's current vehicle—and in a flat tract of waste ground next to it two men were indeed pitching horseshoes.

  "Yikes!” said Wales. “There's three of ‘em!"

  "Three of what?"

  "Three Yarsts. Neither one of those dudes is Gaylan, right?"

  "Right, but the one in the green jacket sure is Dayle."

  The other man was tall and broad, with a full gray beard. He was wearing winter coveralls, boots, and a flat cap that sat on top of his head like a pancake on a pumpkin. Hearing the car, he abandoned his game and came toward them, a horseshoe in each hand. “Get out of here, folks,” he shouted. “This is private."

  Wales put down her window and showed her ID. “Police officers,” she said. “We want to talk to Mr. Yarst."

  "That's me."

  Auburn got out of the car. “We want to talk to Mr. Dayle Yarst,” he said, loud enough for both men to hear. “About some burglaries.” He started walking toward Dayle, who evidently hadn't recognized him as the man who had bought a surgical wire cutter from him yesterday. And never would recognize him as the patrolman, skinny as a screwdriver and not yet wearing a mustache, who had ticketed him eleven years earlier for putting his truck through a window.

  "You keep your mouth shut, Ray,” said Dayle. “Let me handle this.” He stood his ground, cowering like a rat cornered by a ferret as Auburn made his way toward him over the rough gravel road.

  Ray, ignoring his brother's advice, began a noisy lamentation. “Oh, lordy, Dayle, they've got us and now we're all going down. Gaylan's gonna die—"

  "No he ain't,” snapped Dayle without taking his eyes off Auburn. “You shut up now, Ray."

  "Yes he is. Gaylan's gonna die, and so are we.” It was apparent that Ray's IQ was somewhere down in the single digits. A tic of his jaw made his beard twitch periodically like the tail of a squirrel traversing a telephone wire in a high wind.

  Auburn had reached Dayle and showed identification, keeping just out of his reach and alert for any attempt at resistance or flight. “Sir, I'd like to have you come to the car where it's warm and we'll have some privacy.” He looked pointedly at the bigger man. “Your brother?"

  "Yeah, that's my brother Rayland,” said Dayle with suddenly affected nonchalance. He had just recognized the man who bought the wire cutter. Unfortunately Auburn missed the significance of his change of mood. “He digs graves ‘cause he's kinda slow. See, he was too big to be born regular."

  "How about it? Want to come over to the car?"

  "Not really. And I don't know anything about any burglaries."

  "I think you do. We have evidence that you've knocked over about a dozen jewelry stores during the past eight years. The last one was a week ago yesterday at Montrose Mall in Tilbury. You used that backhoe right there, didn't you? Without even unloading it from the trailer, whose rear registration plate seems to be missing?"

  Dayle's eyes were slits. “You don't have evidence of anything, mister. And you're never going to have evidence of anything.” If the .32 hadn't caught on his shirttail as he pulled it out, somebody besides Auburn might have had to present the police case against him and his brothers at their trial.

  Dayle Yarst's deployment of a firearm had blown the limit off the level of force appropriate to subdue him, but there was no time for Auburn to draw his own weapon. Reacting with a pattern of movements that repeated training had burned into instinct, he closed with his opponent before he could raise the weapon to firing position. Clamping Yarst's right wrist with both his hands, he took control of the gun and pointed it away from himself, then jerked him off balance and kicked his right leg out from under him so that he fell in a heap by his own weight with Auburn on top of him.

  Wales had been standing on the driver's side of the car keeping a wary eye on Rayland Yarst. Now she abandoned him and came to Auburn's aid, drawing her weapon and helping Auburn to disarm his prisoner. Wales had worked as a carpenter before joining the force and she conducted self-defense training for women at the Y. By the time she had the cuffs on Dayle Yarst, that felon had gained an entirely new understanding of the principle of equal force.

  * * * *

  On the first day of spring Nick Stamaty braved a squall to bring Auburn the final report of the Pyzegger autopsy in person from his office at the courthouse across the street.

  "Sit down a minute, Nick, while your umbrella makes a widening puddle on my spotless floor. I'm just finishing my report on the Ripoffsky brothers."

  Stamaty lowered his bulk into one of two chairs opposite Auburn's desk. “Of all the harebrained, crackpot schemes I ever heard of—"

  "Hey, don't knock it. It worked for them for years. They pick a je
welry store in a deserted spot and within a couple yards of a mailbox and wait for a night of really foul weather. Ray cracks the place open with one slam of the backhoe and heads back to the cemetery. Dayle puts on his rubber gloves, pops in, and stuffs whatever he can lay his hands on into Andover Group mailers with government postage labels and red stickers, drops them in the mailbox, and melts into the landscape before the cops get through putting on their galoshes to answer the alarm. If he was picked up and questioned for being near the scene of a break-in, he didn't have anything on him to connect him with the crime."

  "Then Gaylan pulls the loot out of the mail at work and salts it away somewhere till it's safe to fence it, or whatever they did with it."

  "Until Gaylan gets sick,” said Auburn, taking up the crucial part of the story, “and the chief technician finds some parcels with red stickers in the daily mail and turns them over to the boss. Who opens them up, finds them crammed with stolen jewelry and watches, and locks the stuff in the safe. And when Gaylan comes in to check on the mail, Pyzegger gives him the third degree. But, considering that Gaylan is looking more dead than alive, he decides to give him twenty-four hours’ grace before he calls the police."

  "Which is Dayle Yarst's cue to rub out Pyzegger, after torturing him into opening the safe so he can recover the loot-slash-evidence. With tactical support from brother Rayland. That must be quite a report you're putting together. Anyway the newspaper sure turned it into a Dick Tracy romp."

  "It's a good story,” conceded Auburn. “Too good. Needs a little fudging."

  "Fudging?” Stamaty sat forward in his chair and peered at Auburn over the tops of his bifocals. “To me that word implies the suppression of truth and/or the suggestion of falsehood."

  "Exactly. Those yahoos got the idea for their M.O. from an accidental crash at a jewelry store eleven years ago, which I heard from a block away and personally investigated. That means I was in at the birth of a crime streak, something I'd just as soon nobody around here gets to know."

  Stamaty sat back again and favored him with a capriciously enigmatic smile. “And you're telling me about it?"