The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  She smiled back. “The Professor said something about a team, but you look like you’re alone to me.”

  “Check this out,” Victor said, pointing to his laptop screen. Dagny walked behind him and leaned over his shoulder. The web page listed the forty-eight contiguous states. “When I click on one of them, I get a list of cities,” he said, demonstrating. “And if I click on the city, I get a list of properties that were once held by Draker, his company, and its subsidiaries, or by one of the shell corporations connected to Rowanhouse.”

  “Okay, I guess that’s cool.”

  “That’s not the cool part,” he said. “Since Draker had a place in Nashville, I’m betting he has a place near all of the crimes. Somewhere he could have schemed without the hassle of credit cards or nosy motel clerks. I figure either Draker is squatting somewhere, or he’s purchased properties under disguised names. If he’s squatting, then I’m not going to find him—hopefully Fabee will. But if he purchased property, the money for it had to come from somewhere, and it has to be in someone’s name. So I thought I’d trace Draker’s assets to see if he could have hidden some land or some money before he went to jail.”

  “If he owned the Matisse and sold it through Rowanhouse, then there’s four million right there.”

  “Enough for incidentals, maybe, after Rowanhouse takes his cut—but not enough to fund the whole thing. So I figured Draker must have laundered some other assets, not just the painting. I’m tracing all of Draker’s old properties. It isn’t as daunting as it sounds, because the bankruptcy dealt with most things. All of Drakersoft’s assets were sold to Systematic at a discounted price in order to satisfy Systematic’s claims against the company. And Draker’s personal assets were sold at auction—we have detailed lists of that stuff. Fortunately, most of this was kept in electronic format, so it’s easy to search.”

  “What about all the smaller companies—”

  “That Draker set up to diversify his holdings? They were almost all indebted to Drakersoft—the parent company—which had lent them start-up money. So the Drakersoft bankruptcy trustee ended up suing most of these companies and foreclosing on their assets. By then, most of the subs had sold off their holdings, so there wasn’t much to foreclose. These holdings included hundreds of pieces of property, scattered all over the country.”

  “Let me guess. Rowanhouse bought them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get warrants for these properties,” Dagny said.

  “Not so fast. All of these properties were immediately resold to legitimate buyers. Draker knew what he was doing. If any of the properties had been sold for significantly less than market value, the bankruptcy judge could have set the sale aside under—”

  “A theory of fraudulent conveyance?” Dagny said, remembering her bankruptcy law class.

  “Exactly. But each property was sold to Rowanhouse for near-market value. Maybe ninety-five percent of what it was really worth—consistent with property appraisals. Rowanhouse’s companies then resold the property shortly after the sale, collecting a profit of about five percent.”

  “So Rowanhouse and Draker probably had these purchasers already lined up.”

  “And they probably agreed to split the profit from the resale, hiding it all from the bankruptcy court. Every sale looked legitimate if you looked at the selling price. On average, each resale netted just twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s not much when you’re talking about million-dollar properties, but if you consider that there were about five hundred pieces of property, it adds up to twelve and a half million dollars that Draker and Rowanhouse were able to hide from the bankruptcy court.”

  “So you’re tracing the money?”

  “There’s no way to trace the money, so we’re tracing properties. That means tracking down the deeds for all of Draker’s old properties and driving out to see who actually lives there. If it’s commercial, is there a business there now? If it’s residential property, is there a family there now? Then we’re looking at each of the companies Rowanhouse used to buy these properties. What other properties have they owned? Maybe they sold off all of Draker’s properties, but bought new properties with his share of the proceeds of the sale. This means tracking down about two thousand more pieces of property—figuring out who really owns them. Unfortunately, there isn’t a computer database with all of this property information. You can’t even go to a state database for most of it. You have to go to the individual counties—some of which are online, but most of which aren’t. It’s a huge pain.”

  “So how are you doing this?”

  “That’s what’s so cool. We’re doing it with two thousand helpers. We set up a wiki.”

  “Like Wikipedia?”

  “Exactly. I figured if you can recruit people to write an encyclopedia online, maybe you could recruit people to solve a crime. So I e-mailed Wikipedia editors, local police departments, and criminology professors, and asked for their help.”

  “Criminology professors?”

  “College students have more free time than anyone, so I figured that criminology professors would be game for putting them to work on a case. Professors assign the work, and students go out and get the information. Stop by county auditor offices, photocopy deeds, and upload the information to the wiki.” He clicked through a few links to a list of properties around Cincinnati. “If the homeowner checks out as legit, the property gets marked as safe. But if ownership seems questionable, it gets a red flag.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I get notified by e-mail that we have a red flag; I call the local police, and they go check it out.”

  “What if people make a mistake?”

  “That’s what the editors check. They review each entry and the information that supports it. If the deed is missing, for instance, they’ll repost the property with a notation that the deed is missing. And someone will have to redo it.”

  “And this is working?”

  “Yesterday, we found a safe house in Chula Vista, and Draker’s prints are all over it. Right now we have cops visiting places in Bethel and Salt Lake City. It could be something; it could be nothing. We’ll know within the hour.”

  “Does Fabee know about this?”

  “We had to tell him about Chula Vista, of course, and we’ll tell him about the others if they check out, too. But he doesn’t know how I’m tracking it down. He thinks I did all the work. Probably driving him crazy, since he’s got a huge team of his own sifting through much of the same data. They’ve probably gotten an earful about how one guy found the Chula Vista house by himself. When in fact, it’s not one guy, but an army of Davids.”

  “An army of what?” Dagny asked.

  “This law professor, Glenn Reynolds, wrote a book called An Army of Davids,” Victor explained. “It’s about how technology and the Internet let individuals work collaboratively to compete with big media or big government. Like the way bloggers got Dan Rather fired over the phony memos, or how they dug up stuff on Trent Lott. Reynolds says that Goliath is no match for an ‘army of Davids,’ at least not in the Internet age.”

  “And Draker is Goliath?”

  “Actually, I think Fabee would be Goliath, in this particular metaphor,” Victor said.

  An army of Davids. Maybe it would change law enforcement, just as bloggers had changed the media. It was pretty darn smart—even smarter than her use of chain e-mails, which turned up the third crime.

  “Hey, Dagny...something’s been bothering me.”

  “Yes?”

  “If Draker didn’t try to run us over, shouldn’t we be worried about who did?”

  “Right now, we need to worry about the guy who’s actually killing people. We can worry later about whoever tried but didn’t.”

  “Two hundred and twelve names?” Brent was wearing a V-neck cardigan over a white T-shirt. He’d stopped home to change after spending a long day at Fabee’s warehouse. They sat at the corner table at Oyamel, sharing ceviche and a vi
ew of the street.

  “If you think that’s a long list of enemies, you should see the Professor’s.”

  He laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “No. He showed it to me.”

  “How many names?”

  “Thousands,” Dagny said. “It looks like the phone book.”

  “Remind me not to cross that man.” Brent called over the waitress and ordered two more beers. Dagny looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. “We have time,” Brent said.

  “Time is one of the things we don’t have.” Dagny spied a young couple kissing on the sidewalk. “It’s amazing.”

  “What?”

  “That life goes on.” The waitress set the beers down on the table. “Tell me something comforting.”

  “Fabee’s shutting down the courthouse, the prison. Draker’s former schools. A golf club he used to belong to. Half of the Professor’s list, Fabee will be watching. There’s a good chance Draker won’t be able to get near his intended target.”

  It wasn’t comforting enough. “Danny Deardrop didn’t show up for school, but Draker slaughtered those kids anyway.”

  “I’m just saying that we’ll have people there to catch him, hopefully before he does anything.”

  Hopefully. “Tell me about the warehouse,” she said, needing to change the subject.

  “Imagine an aircraft hangar, shelves from front to back, floor to ceiling. Forty tables down the middle, with a hundred agents sifting through documents and evidence.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “No real rhyme or reason to it. Mostly trying to trace finances.”

  “Are they having any luck?”

  “A lot less than Victor, it seems. Which apparently drives Fabee crazy. How is Victor doing it?”

  She didn’t have the energy to explain it in full, so she just said, “The boy’s a genius.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Her phone rang. When she answered, the man’s anguished words tumbled out. “However many you’re planning to kill tomorrow, you can make it one less. They’ll find my body hanging in my office in the morning.” Click. The line went dead.

  CHAPTER 45

  May 1—Washington, DC

  It was easy to trace the number. Convincing the taxi driver to run the red lights on Pennsylvania Avenue was hard. “They have the cameras.”

  “We’ll reimburse you.”

  “No you won’t,” he muttered. But he obeyed nonetheless.

  When the taxi skidded to a stop in front of the Hart Senate Office Building, two Capitol police officers rushed the vehicle. After Dagny and Brent showed their credentials and explained the situation, the officers quickly escorted them inside. The building was surprisingly modern and plush. A giant sculpture composed of large black aluminum triangles rose from the center of a nine-story atrium. Interior offices, reserved for congressional committees, looked down upon the sculpture through glass walls. The senators’ suites circled the outer rim of the building. Each suite had two floors, connected by an internal staircase.

  They raced past the triangle sculpture, bypassed the elevator bank, and darted up a plush, rounded stairwell to the third floor. Just past Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, they found Senator Brock Harrison’s glass door. One of the Capitol officers knocked firmly and called to the senator. When no one answered, he pounded again on the door, rattling the glass. After a few seconds of silence, he grabbed a key from his pocket and unlocked the door.

  The room was dark but for a faint horizontal line of light radiating from the bottom of a door on the left side of the room. Dagny flicked on the light switch. They were standing in a reception area; two desks were at the far end of the room. Chairs lined the walls. Copies of The Washington Post and Washingtonian were arranged neatly on the tables between the chairs. Pictures of Senator Harrison with other luminaries—presidents, prime ministers, Supreme Court justices, and Bono—adorned the walls. Brent opened the door on the left, and they ran past a conference room and several small offices. Harrison’s office was in the back. His door was closed most of the way. Dagny pushed it open.

  Harrison had removed one of the drop panels from the ceiling and looped his belt over a pipe. The senator was hanging from this belt in his dark-grey suit, swaying slightly from the air circulating through the vents. Brent felt for his pulse.

  “Dead,” he said.

  One of the Capitol officers rushed to the body, but Brent blocked them. “We can’t disturb the scene,” he explained. It was obvious that they had never dealt with this kind of situation before. “What do you want to do?” Brent asked Dagny.

  “I don’t suppose you have a crime kit here?” she asked the officers. They shrugged. “Can you get us latex gloves and some ziplock bags then?”

  After the officers had left to find the supplies she’d requested, Brent told Dagny, “We’ve got to call Fabee.”

  Dagny nodded, pacing around the senator’s body. Brent grabbed her forearm and held her still. “If we start processing this scene ourselves, he’ll have the Director pull us off this case. It won’t matter how close the Professor is to the president.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Dagny said. She pulled out her cell phone and started to snap pictures. “Just to get a little head start.”

  Brent looked down at his watch. “Okay,” he agreed and grabbed his cell phone from his suit pocket. “Just pictures.”

  Dagny circled to the front of the senator and photographed his face. His eyes were red. “Does hanging make your eyes bloodshot?”

  “I found a man hanging once. I remember sweating and drooling, but I don’t remember anything about his eyes.”

  “Then I think the senator was high,” Dagny said. She took a dozen more pictures of the senator’s body before noticing that something had been stuck to his tie. She used a pen to part his suit jacket. “Come look at this,” Dagny said, snapping a picture. A card had been stapled to the tie.

  THIS IS MY SECOND CRIME.

  MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER.

  “Do you think he stapled this, or do you think Draker was here?”

  “I’m guessing Harrison put it there,” Dagny replied. “Figured it was something we needed to know.”

  The Capitol officers returned a few moments later with two pairs of gloves. “From the cleaning crew,” one of them said, handing the gloves to Dagny. “We can’t find any bags.”

  Dagny put on a pair and handed the other pair to Brent. “More agents should be coming. Don’t let anyone through who doesn’t have credentials,” Dagny ordered. The officers understood, and made their way to the front door of the senator’s suite.

  “We’ve got to call Fabee,” Brent said, anxiously. “He’s going to ask the officers what time we got here and it better be pretty close to the time we called him.”

  “Okay,” Dagny agreed.

  While Brent placed his call to Fabee, Dagny phoned the Professor and explained the situation. “Check his calendar,” the Professor said. “And his phone. See who was calling him.”

  “I will.” Dagny hung up her phone, walked around to the senator’s desk, and opened the center drawer. There was no calendar, but there was a bag of white powder. She snapped a picture.

  “Second crime was a drug buy from Draker, I’m guessing,” Dagny said.

  “Maybe,” Brent said, hanging up his phone. “Fabee’s in town. He’ll be here in less than twenty. With the whole cavalry, I imagine. He ordered us to stand down.”

  Dagny ignored the directive and continued her search. In the top right desk drawer she found a daily planner. There was no entry for the fifteenth of January; in fact most of the pages were empty. “I guess he didn’t use this.”

  “Let me check the receptionist’s desk. Maybe she kept his schedule,” Brent said, jogging out of the room.

  Dagny searched through the other drawers of the desk, then the credenza, but found no other calendars. Maybe he used Outlook, she thought. The computer wasn’t on. She reached to press the power b
utton, but Brent stopped her. “You do that and they’ll know you turned it on.”

  “Nothing at the receptionist’s?”

  “No.”

  “We’re FBI,” Dagny argued. “I don’t see why we can’t turn his computer on.”

  “We had a stand-down order. The computer will register the time when we turned it on. Fabee will compare it to his phone log and see that we turned it on after his order.”

  “Why would he even look?”

  “Because they’re going to look at everything, Dagny. That’s how they work.”

  Dagny sighed and turned away from the computer and back to the senator’s body. Maybe he had a smartphone, she thought. She checked his pockets and found a BlackBerry. Fortunately, he hadn’t turned on password protection. She scrolled through his calendar, but again there was no entry for January 15, and hardly any other entries either. Maybe he didn’t keep his own calendar. Of course, even if he did, he probably wouldn’t list his drug buys on it, she concluded.

  Dagny switched to the senator’s in-box and cycled through his most recent e-mails, photographing them with her cell phone. She scrolled down to e-mails from January and photographed them as well. None of them seemed suspicious, but she didn’t have time to study them in any detail. Fabee would be here any minute. Dagny checked the senator’s call register and saw that his last call had been to her phone. She scrolled through the long list of received and dialed calls, photographing them, wondering what other scandals lay buried in these numbers.

  Fabee landed with his men like MacArthur in the Philippines. She heard them in the hallway and stuffed the BlackBerry back into the senator’s pocket just before Fabee rounded the corner into the office.

  “Out! Out!” he shouted at Dagny and Brent, pointing toward the door. As Brent passed by, Fabee muttered, “I see you’ve gone to the dark side, Davis.” Brent just kept his head down and followed Dagny out of the room.

  “That was awkward,” Dagny whispered.