The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “You have proof of this?”

  “None. I went to talk to Ryder, ask him some questions. But it turns out he killed himself a couple weeks ago.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  Fabee shrugged. “I’m not going to apologize for that. You weren’t part of the official investigation.”

  “No offense taken. I don’t know why Ryder killed himself, but I’m betting that he, like Harrison, was worried about someone poking around into this mess. And Dutton too, for that matter. Dutton stayed in the building to die when everyone else evacuated. Ryder, Harrison, Dutton—all dead by their own choice. Ryder was the inside man, and Harrison was the outside man, and that’s all Dutton needed to frame an innocent man.”

  “All of Draker’s employees turned on him, not just Ryder.”

  “C’mon, Justin. That’s what we do; we threaten people with indictment until they flip and say what we want them to say. People will say anything to save their skin. Especially after Murgentroy planted a fake memorandum implicating Draker in the manufactured fraud. If the government’s willing to do that to get a conviction, who is going to fight them?”

  “So Dutton paid off Murgentroy, too?”

  “He didn’t have to. Harrison pressured the Bureau to get enough evidence for a conviction, and someone at the Bureau pressured Murgentroy to make it happen. When there wasn’t a smoking gun, Murgentroy made one. Maybe he figured Draker was actually guilty anyway. It’s been known to happen.”

  “I don’t think I heard a shred of evidence in there.”

  “I found a little. But only after I found some evidence about something else.”

  “About what?” Fabee slammed his knife through the next pepper.

  “Something always bothered me about Murgentroy’s death.” Dagny paused. “I was in front of the house when I heard Victor scream, and I started toward the backyard. I heard two shots before I turned the corner, and then I saw Victor on the ground, near the woods behind the house. Murgentroy was standing on his back patio, holding a rifle. I thought that Murgentroy had shot Victor. When I told Murgentroy to drop the gun, he ignored me. I told him again and he turned toward me. Another second and I would have shot Murgentroy, but he fell to the ground first. The thing is I didn’t hear a gunshot. I ran over to Murgentroy and took his rifle, then started back toward Victor. And then I was hit by a tranquilizer dart. I didn’t hear that shot either, so I assumed that Murgentroy had been hit by a tranquilizer just like me. And I was right.” Dagny walked over to her backpack, pulled out a manila file folder, and handed it to Fabee. “His autopsy confirms it—a small needle penetration on his arm. So if Draker shot Murgentroy with a bullet, it was after he shot me with the tranquilizer.”

  Fabee set the file on the countertop. “We know that, Dagny,” he said. “I don’t think that’s been in question.” He did another heavy chop though the pepper. “He shot Murgentroy after he was already down.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because Murgentroy had seen him and could identify him.”

  “I don’t think so. Draker must have been pretty far back in the woods. I couldn’t see him when I ran into the backyard, and I doubt that Murgentroy could either. And besides, Draker wanted us to figure out who he was. He stole the Matisse and quoted Reginald Berry to lead us to Rowanhouse, and that’s because he wanted us to find him. He gave me a Jeffery Deaver novel when he had me in that cell, and I think he did it to remind me of the Deaver novel he was reading next to me on the plane. And he left his cell phone in my backyard, which...”

  “Okay,” Fabee argued, “so Draker wanted revenge against the guy who brought him down.” Fabee carried the sliced peppers over to the pot, dumped them in, and returned with a handful of jalapeños he’d gotten from a basket on the counter next to the stove. He started to slice the jalapeños with the tip of the knife, peeling away the outer skin and flicking the seeds aside.

  “If Draker had just waited a second, I would have shot Murgentroy. So why not let me do it?”

  “He wanted the satisfaction of doing it himself.”

  “Perhaps. But something else bothered me. Take a look at this.” Dagny opened the iPhoto program on her computer and scrolled to a scanned photograph of Murgentroy carrying a box out of Drakersoft. “This picture was taken by a photographer for The Cincinnati Enquirer during the raid at Draker’s company. Murgentroy looks pretty gleeful here, as you can see. And he’s not alone.” Dagny enlarged the photograph on the screen and pointed at a hefty young agent. “That guy looked kinda familiar, but it took me a minute to recognize him because he lost all that weight. But that’s Chunky. And the skinny man next to him, that’s Bones.”

  Fabee looked up to the screen and squinted. “Okay.”

  Dagny enlarged the picture a bit more and pointed at a short, stocky man smoking a cigar. “And this guy. That’s Jack. You see him?” She waited for Fabee to nod. “And next to Jack, this man here,” she said, pointing at a blur of a man with a long, thin face and dusty-brown hair. “That’s you, Justin. Isn’t it? You were at the raid.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and tapped the broad edge of the knife against the countertop. “Yeah. Okay?”

  “You didn’t mention working on Draker’s securities case before.”

  Fabee stepped back to the cutting board and continued slicing jalapeños. “They needed a big team to go through and collect evidence, so I came in and helped. It was a one-day assignment.”

  “When I was in the hospital and we identified Draker as the suspect, you said you’d never heard of him.”

  “One name from a thousand cases I’ve worked, Dagny. What are you trying to suggest?”

  “When we were at Murgentroy’s house, one of your goons mentioned that you had plane tickets in Murgentroy’s name for flights from Nashville to Salt Lake City and from Cincinnati to DC. We know that Draker was booking flights in Murgentroy’s name, or that maybe he booked them in his own name but later hacked into the reservation system to change the name on the record to Murgentroy. It wouldn’t have been too hard for him to do this, since he wrote the reservation software for the airline. I didn’t think about it at the time, but if you had his flight times, why didn’t you check security footage to see who was coming on and off the planes? If you had, wouldn’t you have seen Draker?”

  “By then, the footage would have been erased.”

  “No. I checked today.”

  Fabee stopped slicing the jalapeños and spun toward Dagny, gripping the knife in his hand. His eyes narrowed. “Then it was an oversight, Dagny.”

  Dagny took a step back. “I was a little blind because of pride. I kept thinking that our team of three was beating your team of hundreds on the merits. But we weren’t. Your team was dysfunctional chaos because that’s what you wanted. You already knew that Draker was committing these crimes, and you didn’t want your team to figure things out. So you made sure that no one was in communication with anyone else, that all of the information was filtered through you, and that no one started putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

  “When the Professor and I went through the files from the Draker securities investigation in Cincinnati, they were in disarray, things were missing. At the time I figured it was just typical Bureau incompetence. But you’d been through the files the night before, and you’d removed everything that had your name on it. That’s why things were missing.”

  Fabee crossed his arms, turning the knife handle over in his hand. “Keep going, Dagny. Your career is over, but I want to see where this goes.”

  “When Rowanhouse and Reynolds and Draker himself kept imploring me to keep going, I didn’t know what they meant. But Draker wanted me to go after you. He believed that you had something to do with setting him up. Maybe he thought that Murgentroy was your pawn, that he planted that forged memo at your request. Maybe he thought that Senator—then Congressman—Harrison asked you to do this as a favor.”

  “Pure fantasy,” Fabee s
coffed.

  “No, Justin,” Dagny said. “Harrison’s wife let me look through his calendars earlier today. He kept them in his home office, dating back to the nineties. You met with him during the investigation. Several times. You must have figured it would be good to have a congressman, a future senator, as an ally. You were aiming for director even then.”

  “If you’re claiming I framed Draker, that’s not much in the way of proof.”

  “You’re right. I don’t think I can prove that you framed Draker. But I do think I can prove you killed Murgentroy.”

  Fabee slammed the tip of the knife into the cutting board and marched into the living room. He pushed the curtains aside and looked out the windows to the backyard, then hurried to the front windows and checked them, too. Fabee moved through the dining room and his study, doing the same. When he finished, he returned to the kitchen and grabbed Dagny’s arm, pulling her gun from her holster and tossing it into the dining room. Then he patted her down. “I’m not wearing a wire,” she said, but he patted her down a second time anyway.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Dagny.”

  “I saw Murgentroy fall. He fell facedown. But the autopsy said that the bullet wound was in the chest. I guess Draker could have rolled him over and shot him in the chest, but I checked the crime-scene photographs. There was blood splatter on the side of the house. Murgentroy was standing when he was shot. I don’t think Draker would have waited around for Murgentroy to wake up. Draker was long gone when you shot him. I’d guess that Murgentroy woke up before Victor did, and that Murgentroy called you and told you what had happened. He was spooked by the whole thing, maybe he even said something about coming clean. Or maybe you’d already lost faith in him. That scene you guys put on for me and Victor—that whole interrogation bit—it was a great show, but Murgentroy wasn’t faking the drunk part and that had to have you worried. So you shot Murgentroy, Justin.”

  Fabee stepped toward Dagny. His face was red—she could feel the heat radiating off his skin. But his voice was calm. “He was shot with Draker’s gun.”

  “He was shot with yours.”

  “The ballistics matched Draker’s gun, Dagny.”

  “But you were the one to retrieve the bullet from Murgentroy’s body. You broke protocol. You should have left it for the examiner.”

  “Under our time constraints, I wanted a quick match. I wanted to check the lands.”

  “You retrieved the bullet from Murgentroy’s body because it came from your gun. You needed to replace it with one of Draker’s bullets so that it would look like Draker shot him.”

  “And where did I get that bullet, Dagny?”

  She noticed that he was twirling the chopping knife in his fingers. It made her nervous, but she couldn’t show it. She straightened up, standing even taller. “I figured it was the bullet from the dog. The one I brought you the last time I came out here. I figured that you still had that bullet—that you’d never sent it to the file—and that you substituted that bullet for the one that really killed Murgentroy when you sent it for analysis. But when I went through the file last night, Tucker’s bullet was there. So then I thought that maybe you’d taken a bullet from the bank or the Silverses’ house and substituted one of those for Tucker’s bullet, but those bullets were all accounted for, too.”

  “So then you were wrong.”

  “No, Justin.” Dagny took a step away from Fabee. “Because Draker committed another murder. All of his crimes took place in cities with tragic concerts. And since there wasn’t one in Washington, DC, Draker made one. On New Year’s Eve, Draker went to a rap concert at the 11:30 Club, fired his gun, and killed someone. I didn’t realize this until a couple of days ago, but you figured this out a couple of weeks ago. You went to DC Homicide and got the bullet, and told them it was a match to Draker’s gun so they could close the case. But you kept the bullet—I checked last night. DC Homicide never got it back. It’s not listed in the Bureau’s file contents either, but it’s in the file. Since you’d substituted Tucker’s bullet for the one that actually killed Murgentroy, you simply took the rap-concert bullet and placed it in the file where Tucker’s bullet should have been. Tomorrow, that file was to have been sent off storage, never to be seen again. You would have been in the clear. That’s the great thing about Draker being dead. No trial. No need to keep the file open. That’s why you shot him when I wouldn’t. And that’s why you were desperate to be there to catch him, because you needed to make sure he died.”

  Fabee grabbed her wrist and held it tight. “And your proof for this insane theory is that we lost the bullet from DC Homicide? You’d throw away your livelihood on something so flimsy?”

  She yanked her wrist from Fabee’s hand and took another step back. “Well, then there’s the baseball. And that’s where you were just plain stupid, Justin. I thought it was strange that you were desperate to get control of this case after Michael and Candice were killed. No one knew at the time how big this case would become. Later, when everything snowballed, I figured that you were just particularly prescient. But that’s not why you wanted in on the case. You knew from the start that Draker was committing these crimes. You knew it before Michael and Candice were murdered. You knew because Noel Draker told you.”

  “Yeah. He came right up to me and—”

  “He threw a baseball through your window.” She paused to try to read Fabee’s face, but it wouldn’t betray the thousand thoughts that must have been crowding his head. “Waxton’s ball. You saw the signatures on the ball and realized it wasn’t just some neighbor kid’s. You did what anyone would do—you hopped on the Internet to find out about the ball and found an article about the bank robbery in Cincinnati. And maybe you thought about the only time you’d been to Cincinnati, back at the time of the Draker raid. You either figured out Waxton’s connection to Draker yourself, or maybe Draker taped a note to the ball. The lab found traces of adhesive on the ball, along with tiny shards of glass. You can’t get glass out of anything, Justin.

  “You should have burned that ball and buried the ashes,” Dagny continued. “But you kept it. Maybe you thought you could plant it as evidence, if you needed a warrant or wanted to frame someone. Or maybe you just figured it would get you one more picture in the paper when you gave it back to Waxton. But the article noted that the baseball was all scratched and damaged. The first time I came out here, to drop off Tucker’s bullet, I noticed that one of your front windows looked a little different than the rest. I’m betting that there are little pieces of glass in your carpet that match the little pieces of glass in the ball. And I’ve got a warrant to get those pieces.” Dagny pulled an envelope from her backpack and handed it to Fabee.

  He tossed the warrant aside. “Glass is glass, Dagny.”

  “No, and you know that. We can match refraction. Break down the chemical composition of the glass, even analyze the sand. But it’s not just the glass, Justin. It’s Tucker’s DNA, which we’re lifting from the bullet you claimed killed Murgentroy, and the DNA on the bullet from the 11:30 Club.”

  Fabee raised his knife and lunged at Dagny. She ducked and pushed his arm aside, then barreled into his stomach, knocking him down. Her gun was on the dining-room floor, fifteen feet away. Dagny started toward it, but Fabee rammed his shoulder into her back and she fell forward. He drove his knee into her spine, holding her flat on the ground. “Where will you run, Justin?”

  “Away,” he said, raising the knife above Dagny. “Just away.”

  The shot hit Fabee in his right shoulder. He dropped the knife and fell to the floor. Victor walked over to him and cuffed his hands behind his back, then pulled him up to his knees and patted him down.

  Dagny knelt next to Fabee and smiled. “My partner,” she said, nodding toward Walton, “finally figured out how to fire a Glock.”

  Fabee looked over his shoulder at Victor, then turned back to Dagny. “Fuck the two of you if you think you’ll bring me down. I’ve got the whole Bureau behind m
e. It’ll play like the two of you trying to set me up. Breaking in here and trying to kill me. Fucking self-defense.”

  “It’s not just the two of us,” Dagny said.

  Brent entered through the kitchen door and caught Fabee’s glare. He smiled, then walked over to Dagny’s laptop and pointed to the small camera lens in the bezel above the screen. “Little movie camera,” he said. “Broadcasting live to the Director.” Brent maximized the chat window that had been running in the background. The Professor and the Director appeared on the screen, staring back at them. The Director was scowling and shaking his head. The Professor was smiling broadly. “Even if we couldn’t get you on Murgentroy, we’d get you for attempted murder on Dagny,” Brent said, as he grabbed Fabee by his arm and lifted him to his feet.

  While Brent read Fabee his rights, Victor fetched Dagny’s gun from the dining room and returned it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem.” He put his hands in his pockets and shuffled from foot to foot. “This was something else, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “He hit you pretty hard. You okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “You sure? That knee in the back was—”

  “No, I’m good. I feel fine.”

  He took in a deep breath, then exhaled. “You know, that was the first time you’ve called me your partner.”

  “Yeah, well,” Dagny said. And then she gave him an awkward hug.

  CHAPTER 57

  May 23—Alexandria, Virginia

  The bell rang. They had come to her since she wouldn’t answer her phone.

  Bleary-eyed, she pushed herself out of bed, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and answered the front door.