Roz Fenwick had written down every truck that parked on Mercer Street since 1987, and this one didn't belong.
It was a white van, a Ford, with no writing on the side. It pulled up across the street at 10:14 on a Monday morning in June and parked in front of Angie Iannucci's house. Two men got out.
Both wore gray work shirts and carried clipboards. One had a tool bag.
Roz wrote it all down in a green steno pad on the windowsill. White Ford van, no name. 10:14.
Two men, gray shirts. Angie's.
She was eighty-three. She'd lived in the same rowhouse in South Philadelphia for sixty-one years, since the week she married Jimmy Fenwick at St. Monica's.
For thirty-one of those years she'd worked as a switchboard operator for the Bell Telephone Company, sitting in a long room full of women with headsets on, connecting the city to itself. She could still hear a number once and remember it all day.
Jimmy had died in the spring of 1987. The house went very quiet after that. Roz started sitting by the front window in the mornings with her coffee, and one day she started writing down what she saw, just to have something to do with her hands.
She never stopped. There were a hundred and forty steno pads in boxes in her basement now. Mailmen, plumbers, ambulances, moving trucks.
The ice cream truck, every summer, at 3:30. The Russo boy's girlfriend, who left at 6:00 a.m. on Saturdays and thought she'd gotten away with it for two years.
The two men in gray shirts went into Angie's house at 10:16. They came out at 10:51. Roz wrote that down too.
On Wednesday the white van came back. This time it had a magnetic sign stuck to the driver's door, white with blue letters. GAS SERVICE.
No company name, no phone number. It parked in front of Leon Bivens's house, three doors down, at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Roz didn't like it. A real gas company truck had the company's name painted on it, big. She'd seen a thousand of them.
She wrote down the plate, or what she could see of it. The rear plate had road dirt smeared across half of it. JZK 8, and then mud.
Thursday morning, Angie Iannucci came over in her slippers with her eyes red.
"My mother's ring," she said, sitting at Roz's kitchen table. "The gold one, with the little garnet. I keep it in the dish on my dresser. Every night I look at it before bed. It's gone, Roz."
"When did you see it last?"
Angie thought. "Sunday night, I think."
"Angie, who came in your house Monday?"
"The gas men. They said there was a leak on the block, they had to check all the houses." Angie's hand went to her mouth. "One of them went upstairs. To check the radiator, he said. The other one had me down the basement looking at the meter."
That afternoon, Leon Bivens told Roz that six hundred dollars was missing from the coffee can over his refrigerator. It was his rent money. He was ninety and a retired Navy Yard welder, and he'd kept money in that can since Lyndon Johnson was president.
On Friday the van went to Dottie Sheehan's.
Roz saw it pull up, and she was halfway out her own front door in her housecoat before she remembered that Dottie wasn't home, she was at her daughter's in Cherry Hill until Sunday. The van sat in front of Dottie's empty house for six minutes, then drove away.
They were picking houses. And they were picking old women and old men who lived alone.
On Saturday, Roz called the police district and asked for an officer to come by. He came on Sunday afternoon, a young man named Officer Mullen with a kind face and a notebook of his own. He sat in her front room and listened politely, and he wrote down what Angie and Leon told him.
Then he asked the questions.
Had Angie seen the man take the ring? No. Could she say the ring wasn't there on Sunday night?
Not for certain. Had Leon counted the money recently?
Not since the first of the month. Had anybody seen either man actually take anything?
No.
"Ma'am," Officer Mullen said to Roz, very gently, "I'll file the report. I will. But a white van on a city street, that's every third van in Philadelphia. And without something somebody saw, I can't really tie those men to the missing things." He hesitated. "Sometimes at a certain age, the days run together a little. You might be a little confused about which van was where."
Roz put her coffee cup down.
"Young man," she said, "I was a Bell Telephone operator for thirty-one years. I don't get confused about times."
He smiled at her like she was his grandmother. He meant it kindly. That was the worst part.
Officer Danny DiSanto came by on Monday evening.
He was thirty-four now, with a wife and two boys of his own. But when he was seven, he'd lived four doors down, and his father had worked double shifts, and Roz had spent one whole summer running behind a blue bicycle on Mercer Street holding onto the back of the seat.
He'd fallen off in front of her house about forty times. She'd put Band-Aids on him at her kitchen table.
"My mother called me," Danny said, taking off his hat in her front hall. "She said you were upset."
"I'm not upset. I'm right."
He sat down. Roz handed him the green steno pad, and he read it from the first page to the last, slowly, and he didn't smile once.
"Times," he said quietly. "Plate partial. Two men, which one went upstairs. Miss Roz, this is better than most of the reports I read."
"Then why won't they listen?"
"Because it's a van and a partial plate." Danny tapped the page. "But I'll tell you something. There've been reports like this in Delaware County. Fake gas men, one keeps you busy, one goes upstairs. I'm going to make some calls." He looked at her hard. "And if they come back, you don't open that door. You lock it, and you call me. Right away." He wrote his cell number on the back cover of her steno pad.
The van came back the next morning.
10:02. White Ford.
Magnetic sign. Two men, gray shirts.
It didn't stop at Dottie's this time. It pulled up in front of Roz's own house and parked.
Roz dialed Danny with her hands perfectly steady. He picked up on the first ring.
"They're here," she said. "In front of my house."
"I'm ten minutes out," Danny said, and she heard his siren start. "Miss Roz, lock the door."
But the doorbell was already ringing. Through the lace curtain on the front door, Roz could see the man in front with his clipboard, smiling a pleasant, practiced smile.
"Ma'am?" he called through the door. "We need to check your gas line."