The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

“I guess I’m not flying below the radar anymore,” he replied.

  Fabee’s men took Dagny’s and Brent’s statements separately. There were logical reasons to do this—for instance, to make sure that they didn’t accidentally convince each other of a temporal or factual mistake—but it still was insulting. Even more insulting was Fabee’s insistence that Brent and Dagny stick around for another few hours in case further questions arose. As Dagny sat with Brent in a ten-by-ten conference room down the hall from Senator Harrison’s office, she couldn’t help but remember the last time she’d been locked away in a small room by a cruel, controlling man. Dagny looked at her watch. It was almost four in the morning.

  She turned on her phone and flipped through the photographs she’d taken of Senator Harrison’s call log. Maybe Draker had called the senator and had left Dagny’s number for the return. The most recent call had a Virginia area code. Dagny dialed the number, and after a few rings, a woman answered groggily.

  “This is Special Agent Dagny Gray. Can I ask who this is?

  “This is Deborah Harrison.”

  It was a punch in the gut. Dagny hadn’t planned to notify next of kin, and she wasn’t sure what to say. She decided to tell her the truth. “Mrs. Harrison, I’m very sorry to tell you that your husband has been found dead.”

  The woman’s voice trembled. “No. No.” She started to cry. Dagny wanted to ask her questions about her husband—whether he had been acting strange, if he had received any unusual calls—but she knew Mrs. Harrison wasn’t going to be much use for a while.

  “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Harrison. Some agents will be at your house shortly to talk with you about this,” Dagny said before hanging up the phone.

  “That was brutal,” Brent said.

  “Your turn.”

  They spent the next half hour passing her cell phone back and forth, dividing the call duty. Most of the numbers belonged to lobbyists and lawyers; their offices were closed. One number belonged to a young-sounding woman. After Dagny explained the situation, the woman replied, “Jesus. I just talked to him yesterday. He seemed nervous and said he couldn’t talk. It seemed like something was wrong.”

  When Brent dialed the next number on the log, Dagny’s phone rang.

  “What’s the date on that call?” Dagny asked.

  “April fifteenth.”

  “Then Draker used my phone to call Harrison. That’s why he thought he was calling Draker.” She imagined the call. Something like: I just killed sixteen kids because you don’t have the courage to come forward. A call like that could drive a man to suicide.

  “Why would he use your phone?”

  “I think he wanted the senator to call me.”

  Two agents knocked on their door and split them again, subjecting them to more questioning. Like any good POW, Dagny divulged nothing, and after another hour, they let her go.

  Fabee collared Dagny before she could escape, grabbing her arm and tugging her to an alcove at the end of the hallway. His face was red, and he was sweating through his shirt. The case had taken a considerable toll on the polished man she’d met in the Director’s office just a few weeks earlier. “Why you, Gray? Can you tell me why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there something you aren’t telling me, ’cause if there is, I will find it the fuck out.”

  “I don’t know, Fabee.”

  “Is it just because you’re pretty? Is he in love with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You seem to know everything else, don’t you? Laying the ID on Draker. Tracking his properties. If you know so much, why can’t you answer the simplest question of all: Why you?”

  Dagny just shrugged.

  Fabee shook his head, then stormed off toward the senator’s office. Brent passed Fabee on his way back to Dagny, but Fabee ignored him. “I don’t think he likes us very much,” Brent said to Dagny. “But we’re free to go.”

  “Warwick. Warwick!” the Professor yelled at Dagny and Brent as they entered his study. “Does that mean anything?”

  “Who is Warwick?” Dagny replied.

  “That’s where the senator was on January fifteenth. Warwick, Rhode Island.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The event was listed on the website for the Warwick Museum of Art. The page is gone, but it shows up in the Google cache.”

  Dagny was impressed that the professor knew what a cache was.

  “So what does that mean?” Brent asked, just as Victor entered the room carrying a six-inch-thick pile of documents.

  “We found a whole new set of properties. It’s never-ending,” Victor said.

  “It must mean something,” the Professor muttered.

  “The properties?” Victor asked.

  “No, Warwick, Rhode Island,” Dagny explained.

  “Isn’t that the place where the guitarist from Pantera was shot?” Victor said, setting down the papers.

  “No, that was in Columbus,” Dagny said. “You’re thinking of the nightclub fire at the Great White concert. I think that was in Warwick.” And then it hit her. Warwick and Columbus. The second and fourth crimes.

  “There was the Who concert in Cincinnati where eleven people died,” the Professor added, much to Dagny’s surprise.

  “Concerts with fatalities? Is that really it?” she said.

  “Was Bethel where they held Woodstock?” Victor asked. “The kid’s name was Crosby.”

  “Yeah,” Brent replied. “But no one died at Woodstock.”

  Dagny wasn’t so sure about that. She nudged the Professor away from his computer and ran a Google search. “Three people died at the original Woodstock,” she announced. “One from a heroin overdose, another from a ruptured appendix, and a third was run over by a tractor.”

  “What about Chula Vista?” Brent asked.

  Dagny searched the Internet for “Chula Vista,” “concert,” and “death,” and found that someone had been stabbed at a Nelly concert in Chula Vista in 2002. It took her a few more searches, but she found that three people had been trampled at an AC/DC concert in Salt Lake City in 1991, and two people had been crushed to death at a Public Enemy concert in Nashville in 1987.

  Dagny vaguely remembered a headline in the Post on the day she met Mike—something about a shooting on New Year’s Eve at the 11:30 Club in Washington, DC. A quick google search confirmed it.

  “Let’s not get too excited,” the Professor said. “Perhaps every major city has suffered a concert death.”

  “Maybe,” Dagny said, but when she tried similar searches for Baltimore, St. Louis, Toledo, Houston, and Jacksonville, none of them turned up anything of note. “I think we’ve found his pattern.”

  Tragic concerts. It seemed absurd.

  “So what’s next for him?” Brent asked.

  “Altamont?” Dagny suggested. “It’s probably the most famous concert tragedy of all.” In December 1969, eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was beaten and stabbed to death at the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway. Cameras filming the concert captured the incident. Some people considered Altamont the bookend to the Woodstock era, so it made sense for Draker to start in Bethel and finish at Altamont. And then it hit Dagny. Draker had already given them the clue: Roberto Altamont.

  She ran a search on Altamont. “Oh, my,” Dagny exclaimed, pushing back from the keyboard. “Pearl Jam’s scheduled to play a concert at Altamont on May fifteenth. That’s his final crime.” An article in the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that the racetrack expected to sell sixty to seventy thousand tickets.

  “Then what about today? What’s he going to hit today?” the Professor asked. Dagny searched various combinations on the web, pairing “concert” with words like “tragedy,” “murder,” “death,” “stab,” “kill,” and “trample.” There wasn’t much left to find. In 2003, twenty-one people were killed in Chicago as they tried to flee a nightclub after someone used pepper spray in the audience. In 1991, eight people suffocated whil
e trying to get into a gymnasium in New York City for a charity basketball game played by rappers. Three people died—one from a stabbing—at a Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne concert in Long Beach, California, in 1986. One man was beaten to death at a Korn concert in Atlanta in the summer of 2006.

  “That company that Draker cheated...” Victor struggled for a second to remember the name. “Systematic! Systematic is in Atlanta.”

  Dagny searched Google for Systematic and confirmed that the company’s four-story headquarters was located just south of downtown Atlanta, a few blocks west of Turner Field, along the Ralph David Abernathy Freeway. A recent company profile indicated that 307 employees worked at the building.

  “They’re on my list!” the Professor said.

  “They aren’t on Fabee’s,” Brent replied.

  Dagny looked at her watch. “It’s nearly eight. People are probably arriving at work.”

  Brent, Victor, and the Professor called the Atlanta police, Fabee, and Systematic’s main switchboard, respectively. Dagny dialed Harold Booker’s number at CNN.

  CHAPTER 46

  May 1—Atlanta, Georgia

  When he was six years old, Seymour Dutton’s favorite toy was a small rubber ball attached to five feet of elastic rope. He’d tie that rope around his little wrist, throw the ball as hard as he could, and try to catch it when it came rearing back at him. It was a nice toy for a boy who didn’t have any friends. One day the rope snapped and the ball sailed into the china cabinet. Four plates shattered. When he heard his mother coming, Seymour ran to his father’s study and hid under the desk.

  Now, more than thirty years later, he was hiding under a desk again.

  A second knock at the door—this one louder. He could see the door swing open through a small gap in the front of the desk. It was the security guard, holding on to the doorframe, leaning into the office. What was his name? Wallace. Or Willis, maybe. Friendly black man—said hello to Dutton every morning. Spoke with a funny accent. Maybe he was from Africa.

  “Mr. Dutton, are you here? Hey-lo, Mr. Dutton? We must e-e-evacuate. Hey-lo!” The guard leaned back into the hallway, yelling, “He’s not here! Maybe he’s at the gym?”

  He left, closing the door behind him.

  Dutton crawled out from under the desk, scuttled to his office door, and turned the lock. He was not at the gym, and anyone who’d seen his belly should have known that was a lousy place to look for him. Dutton had gained five pounds each of the last ten years. It was amazing that such a small amount each year could leave him fifty pounds overweight.

  Every morning, Dutton flipped through new e-mails, checked the mail pile, and went down the hall to get his first cup of coffee. This morning, he never made it to the coffee. He never made it past that first envelope on top of the stack. There was no stamp on it—it must have been delivered by hand, he thought. Maybe Draker had even placed it there himself.

  During the awful hour between the opening of the envelope and the ordered evacuation, Dutton had sat alone at his desk, trembling in fear, compulsively checking the clock on the wall, sweat dripping from his forehead and down his back, praying that God would do something to stop what was about to happen. And then, finally, when his corporate security announced the evacuation over the building’s speakers, Dutton assumed that God had answered his prayers—that God had intervened to save his employees since he lacked the courage to save them.

  Dutton also lacked the courage to save himself. That’s why he’d hidden under the desk. That’s why he was looking out the window of his fourth-floor office, watching as workers left the building. Their faces were familiar, even if he didn’t know all their names. He saw the janitor who waited for Dutton to leave each night—no matter how late—so that he could clean his office. They spoke every day, but what was his name? Rudy, maybe. Or Randy. He spotted Brenda—or was it Barbara?—the corporate chef. She’d left one of the best restaurants in New York to oversee dining operations for the Systematic campus. She was standing next to Phil, the new vice president of marketing, who was still in his first week on the job. He knew Phil’s name, and Rhonda’s, too. She was his secretary. She was leaning against the hood of a Honda Accord. Was that what she drove?

  Dutton sat at his desk and folded his hands. Two weeks earlier, a journalist from Businessweek had sat across the desk. She was a small, pretty brunette, sharp as a tack, too. Jennifer Walters, was it? Something like that. Had an anchorwoman’s haircut...shoulder-length hair, curling in just a little at the shoulders. She’d wanted to know whether business database systems could compete with open-source products, and he’d proudly described the upcoming release of Systematic Deluxe. It featured videoconferencing, real-time multiuser collaboration tools, desktop syncing, and remote access. He’d nailed the interview. But the woman had asked one question that had nothing to do with her article. It wasn’t really even a question. More of a statement. “If Draker hadn’t cheated you all those years ago, who knows how things would have played out. Maybe I’d be interviewing him about this.” Was she just making conversation? Was she just joking around? Or had she pieced something together? Maybe she was working on a different kind of article, and the open-source angle was just a ruse.

  Outside, police and fire sirens wailed. Helicopters hovered overhead. They were there to protect the workers and the building, so why did he feel like they were coming for him? Dutton felt his cell phone vibrate against his waist. He checked the number. It was his wife. He didn’t answer it.

  He picked the envelope up off his desk and pulled out the card. Dutton thought about the years that Draker had spent in prison, the way he’d been treated in the press, how he’d lost everything he had built. Why didn’t Draker just kill himself? Was it courage, or something else, that had kept him alive? Dutton turned the card over in his hand and pulled away the piece of gum that was taped to the back, unwrapped the foil, and folded the gum into his mouth. Cinnamon.

  Dutton tossed the empty envelope back onto the desk, and then realized the poetry of it all. He’d had the desk for so long he’d forgotten. It used to be Draker’s—Dutton had bought it at auction during the Drakersoft bankruptcy. How could he have forgotten this? He’d been so proud of it at the time. It had been his trophy. His spoils. And yet, over the last ten years, he’d slowly forgotten that it ever belonged to Draker. He’d forgotten about Draker entirely, in fact.

  His cell phone vibrated again, and Dutton tossed it onto his desk. He looked down at Draker’s card, still in his hand, and then looked up at the clock on the wall. It was almost nine. Would it be a bomb? He assumed it would. But what if Draker wasn’t coming after him at all? What if Draker was just playing a joke? How would Dutton explain the fact that he’d stayed in the building? Maybe he’d say that he’d fallen asleep. But then why didn’t they see him when they opened his door? Because he liked to nap under his desk. Just like George Costanza. Still, could he have slept through the sirens, the loudspeaker? Sure, if he wore earplugs. What if they asked to see his earplugs? Christ, why would they ask to see those? It isn’t a crime to stay in a building that’s about to blow. They wouldn’t care why he stayed. They’d just be happy he was alive.

  Could a man wearing earplugs really sleep through the commotion of the morning? If he didn’t go with the napping story, he could claim he’d had a stroke, couldn’t he? No, of course not—there would be medical evidence of a stroke. They’d make him go to doctors, and they’d call him a liar. Okay, so if it wasn’t a stroke, what was it? Maybe he just blacked out. Something generic. Doesn’t even remember it happening. Amnesia. He could fake amnesia. All he would have to do is—

  The floor tore open, and Dutton fell through broken pipes and wires, crashing into the office below. A flashing fireball raced through the room, burning Dutton’s face and body. Though he’d closed his eyes, the light from the fire seared his eyelids. Every part of his body was in pain. Maybe he was dead and this was hell. Though debris burned around him, the worst seemed to be over. I’m goin
g to live, he thought, just as a steel beam crashed from above and crushed his skull.

  The card fluttered in the rubble, then settled in the growing flames.

  THIS IS MY NINTH CRIME.

  MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER.

  Seymour Dutton had thrown a ball on an elastic rope, and it had come rearing back at him.

  CHAPTER 47

  May 1—Arlington, Virginia

  In an instant, the bright-orange fireball filled the screen and overflowed its edges, only to disappear just as quickly under a black cloud of soot and smoke. Victor was sifting through his pile of papers, but the rest of them stood in front of the television, transfixed by the spectacle. The Professor took a step closer to the monitor, then shook his head. “It takes a man years to build something and another man seconds to destroy it. If there were a benevolent God, wouldn’t the opposite be true?”

  “You don’t believe in God?” Brent asked.

  “Not a benevolent one,” the Professor replied.

  Over the next few minutes, CNN news anchors interviewed Systematic employees, local politicians, former special agents, psychologists, and profilers. The network moved so deftly and effortlessly from one interview to the next that it felt like a choreographed ballet. They’d even managed to create a three-dimensional computer animation of the explosion that had occurred only minutes before. “It’s sad,” Dagny noted. “We’ve become so used to crisis and disaster that they can do it in their sleep.”

  The only hitch in the broadcast was the network’s unsuccessful attempt to track down Seymour Dutton, whose on-air denunciation of Noel Draker would have added a richer layer of personal drama to the day’s events. But Dutton was nowhere to be found. “He was in his office,” his secretary sobbed. “I assumed he was leaving with everyone else.”

  “I checked his office,” Walter Davies, a security guard, explained. “He wasn’t there. Unless he was hiding under his desk,” he chuckled, until he realized that chuckling wasn’t appropriate in the aftermath of an explosion.