Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

His photo ID said he was Hayden Lamphere, District Operations Manager for Data Collection. His sweat-soaked gray uniform shirt bore the machine-stitched nickname Harry. To judge by his lumbering gait and sun-baked complexion, Harry had been on the road for a long time.

“Good guess,” Dollinger told him. “That’s exactly what they got.”

Lamphere adjusted the angle of his helmet and spat with fervor. “Shoot, I figured that the minute I seen the cruiser from up the street. You was about due for it — empty house, water shut off since May. Your house, ma’am?”

Ms. Winter repeated the capsule history of the property’s recent vicissitudes.

Lamphere nodded sagely. “You know what? As soon as this gets downtown, they’ll have me over here assessing the damage to Water Department property. Why don’t I do that now?” Clearly he had no objection to this interruption of his monotonous daily routine.

“Okay, but there’s an evidence technician working down there,” said Dollinger.

“No, there isn’t.” Kestrel appeared on the porch from the living room on the way to get something from his van.

“Is it all right if this meter reader checks out the damage down there?” Dollinger asked him.

“I guess so.” Kestrel flashed Lamphere one of his blood-curdling deadpan looks. “Just don’t remove anything from the premises.”

Lamphere left his probe and clipboard on the porch and went around with Dollinger to the backyard, a plot of turf between the house and the alley where a garage might have stood at some remote date. A pair of heavy, sloping wooden doors stood open at the entrance to a flight of stairs leading down into the basement.

At first the coolness of the basement felt refreshing, but within moments the clammy, musty atmosphere grew hostile. Kestrel had set up a battery-powered flood lamp to supplement the meager illumination afforded by a few low-wattage overhead bulbs.

Lamphere took off his helmet and marched from one section of the basement to another at a measured, deliberate pace, ducking under the furnace pipes and peering into every corner. “They didn’t miss an inch of copper, did they? Cut off every piece right back to the subflooring. You real estate?”

“Public Safety.” Dollinger showed his badge.

“Then you know this better than I do, but I’ll say it anyhow. They’s still at least a hundred yards of heavy-gauge copper electrical conductor down here — branch lines to the dryer outlet... range... central air. When they get hungry again, they’ll come back.”

The meter reader went his way. When Kestrel returned to finish up his work, Dollinger was examining the window at the rear of the basement where the thieves had gained entrance. One pane had been artfully taped with fiber-reinforced plastic postal strapping to suppress the noise of shattering, and broken inward with a sandbag or a well-padded knee. Having unlocked the window and climbed into the basement, the thieves had evidently unbolted the heavy doors to the outside stairs to remove their plunder to a truck or van parked in the alley.

“Something interesting down here?” asked Dollinger.

Kestrel held a fine-ruled tape measure up to a stump of copper pipe extending downward from the floor above. “This pipe was sheared off with a defective tubing cutter,” he said. “Instead of making a deeper and deeper groove in the metal as it rotated, it cut a spiral. So in order to slice all the way through the pipe, they had to keep turning it backward and forward as they tightened the cutter. That’s just like threading a machine screw with a die, and the pitch of this thread — actually one pitch for half-inch pipe and a different one for three-quarter — exactly matches what I’ve measured at three other jobs just like this one in the past couple of months. And the tape they used on the window, and the way they lapped it, also match those other jobs.”

“So you’ve got evidence to pin a whole series of thefts on these guys.”

“Agreed. But first I have to find the pipe that’s missing from here, and then I’ve got to link it up to the people who did the cutting. I could spend two hours every day making the rounds of the local salvage yards and measuring scrap copper pipe. They take it in by the ton from plumbers, remodeling contractors, demo companies... and crooks.”

“Wendy said you found something else?”

Kestrel repositioned the flood lamp to illuminate a section of curled and discolored vinyl floor tiles near the foot of the outside stairs. “This part of the floor has been scrubbed very recently,” he said. “I even think I can still smell chlorine bleach on top of the mildew. Every sample I scraped up from the cracks between the tiles tested positive for blood. I won’t know if it’s human, or how fresh it is, until I get it downtown to the lab. But as things stand, it looks like there’s a red line running from here to Fairmont Mall.”

“I hear that. But who’s the killer, and where’s the pipe?”