The Bubble Gum Thief (41 page)

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 button, 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.

“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.”