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And Rocky says, before giving Mugsy a whoopin’: “I don’t know how ya’s done it, but I know ya’s done it!”

Which was exactly how Harry felt about Edwin Nabler. Except where Nabler was concerned, not only did Harry not know how he’d done it, he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done.

But in each of those households where tragedy had struck recently, there was a train set from Nabler’s store. It was more than that. There were, at least in some of these instances, freakish parallels. While Auden struggled to make his new Santa Fe train run, his father could not start his barbecue. As Delbert Dorfman smoked himself to death, a toy train pumped out smoke only a few feet away. A dog went wild when a whistle button was depressed on a transformer at the Wilford home.

If Harry had felt in over his head over the Tanner murder, he was now at the bottom of the pond with these new developments.

So who was Edwin Nabler?

As a law officer, Harry had access to numerous government databases. If he wanted to know whether someone had a police record, he entered a name and a date of birth and a Social Security number and waited to see what popped up. And if this grand and glorious Internet that everyone was so excited about turned out be everything it was cracked up to be, the day would come when Harry could find out even more personal information on someone.

And in the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act that President George W. Bush had pushed through Congress, getting details on a suspect faced fewer roadblocks than in the past, especially if you dropped even the slightest hint that said suspect might be involved in a terrorist act.

Harry didn’t have Edwin Nabler’s Social Security number or date of birth, but he did have something to start with. He had wandered the alley that ran behind the Main Street stores. It was there he found a van withchoo-choo’strainsprinted on the side. He made a note of the letter and numbers on the green Vermont license plate.

A good place to start.

Back at the station, he logged in to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles and entered the plate from Nabler’s truck.

And nothing came back.

Harry wondered whether he had copied it down wrong. Did he mistake a lowercase letterlfor the numeral 1? No, he hadn’t, because the plate contained neither. He had written it down clearly, legibly. So he entered the plate into the system again.

And again, nothing came back.

He put in a call to someone he knew at the DMV. “I got a plate that when I enter it I’m coming up with nothing,” he told the woman who took his call after identifying himself.

“Let me try it,” she said. He could hear her tapping away on a keyboard. “Chief, there is no such plate.”

“Yes, there is. It’s on the guy’s van.” Harry had encountered stolen plates plenty of times, but never ones that were outright fake.

“Well, there’s no plate that’s been issued by the state of Vermont that matches what you’ve given me. You sure it was a Vermont plate?”

Harry sighed. “I can read. It said Vermont on the plate. I’ve done this before. And to the best of my knowledge, there’s not another state in these United States of America that has green plates like Vermont’s.”

“You don’t have to get snippy, sir.”

“Forget the plate. Run a name for me. I want to see if this guy I’m looking at has a driver’s license more legit than his plate.”

“Go ahead.”

“Edwin Nabler.” He spelled it.

“Middle name or initial?”

“Don’t know.”

More tapping in the background.

“There’s no one in Vermont with a driver’s license by that name,” the woman said.

Harry said nothing.

“Chief?”

“Thanks,” he said, and ended the call.

He tried some non-vehicle-related databases, entering the name Edwin Nabler. When one came up short, he tried another, and then another.