Spike, with Melissa Morgan, traveled from Afghanistan to Arlington. Photograph by Paul Morse

While working as a USAID contractor in Afghanistan last September, Katherine Martin noticed something unusual outside her office: a ten-pound ball of fur covered in dust. Speaking through a translator, she asked the Afghan guards what the puppy—which was too weak to stand—was doing there. “That’s just a dog,” a guard said. “We kick it on our way in.”

Martin lured the dog inside and gave her a bath. Within weeks, Spike—whose name is derived from the Pashto word for a female dog—was a familiar face at the heavily fortified compound where Martin stayed. The pair made a game of chasing each other around a fountain. “She really saved my sanity while I was there,” says Martin, who often heard explosions outside her windows.

At $30 to $40 a foot, copper gutters can cost more than $10,000 to replace

With its well-kept Colonials, Bethesda’s Westmoreland Hills neighborhood might be one of the last places you’d expect a crime wave. But recently a scene playing out there has been reminiscent of the HBO show The Wire.

“I was staring at the house and it just dawned on me,” says Dana Rice, a resident who temporarily moved out during a renovation. Her copper downspouts were missing.

According to a listserv, there have been at least four thefts of downspouts and gutters in recent months. A family was wakened at 4:15 am by thieves trying to disconnect their gutters. When the owners turned on the lights, the thieves drove off.

Mitch Greenberg of Rockville’s Central Roofing & Siding says five or six clients have said their gutters were stolen this year. “We used to only hear about this once a year,” he says.

The reason for the spike? Bryan Jacobs, who heads the DC-based Coalition Against Copper Theft, says the value of copper has been rising. According to Kitco Metals, which tracks the prices of metals, copper climbed from around $3 a pound in June 2010 to $4.50 this spring. (Right now it’s around $4.10.) Jacobs says thieves turn the copper in for cash at scrap yards, then use the money to buy drugs.

Thieves usually target neighborhoods built in the 1940s and ’50s, when almost all gutters were made of copper—now most homes use aluminum. “Chevy Chase has a ton,” says Greenberg. “Northwest DC, Bethesda, Silver Spring.” Police in Arlington and Fairfax counties say they haven’t heard about many incidents there.

The Georgetown home that former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, own will soon go on the market.  Photo by Erik Uecke

The home that disgraced former IMF head Dominque Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, own in Georgetown has been listed with Washington Fine Properties and is expected to officially go on the market within the next two weeks, according to Dana Landry, principal broker at Washington Fine Properties. Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair bought the home—located at 2613 Dumbarton Street, Northwest—in 2007 for $4 million. At the time, the listing described the three-bedroom, four-bath house as an “extraordinary and complete renovation of an East Village Federal.” It said the home had a library and “multiple sets of French doors that open to a huge backyard.” Built in 1900, the red-brick home is currently assessed for $3.8 million.

Photograph by Randy Faris/Corbis

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