The Bubble Gum Thief (48 page)

“Now what, Sherlock?”

If Dagny was right, there was only one more place to check for bullets. “DC Homicide.”

May 16—Leesburg, Virginia

Gravity seemed to pull a little harder than normal at Dagny. Her backpack felt like an anvil. Her knees wanted to buckle. Her body wanted to collapse, to lie down and doze. She’d spent two and a half days without sleep, chasing loose ends and filling in blanks with Brent. After the document warehouse, they’d visited DC Homicide, flown to Ohio and back, talked to Senator Harrison’s wife, met with one of the Professor’s friends at the FBI Laboratory, called TSA officials, and sworn affidavits before a judge. Among other things.

It would have been nice to lie down right there, on Fabee’s front lawn, breathing in that fresh forest air, watching the glowing red sun sink to the horizon. Instead, Dagny pushed up the steps with a sense of dread. She had to tell Fabee that the case was not closed. After spending the last two weeks on a televised victory circuit, Fabee wasn’t going to be happy. She rang the bell and waited.

He answered the door looking much as he had the last time she had come to his house—sleeves rolled up, a kitchen knife in his left hand. “Makin’ chili?” she asked.

He smiled. “You must think that’s all I eat.” Dagny noticed that he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring anymore. He followed her gaze, and his smile vanished. “I thought maybe it’d work out, but she says she’s in love with someone else.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Fabee shrugged. “Your call sounded urgent. What’s up?”

“You’re going to hate me, Justin, but I don’t think we’ve closed the whole case yet.”

He sighed. “Well, come in.”

Dagny followed him into the kitchen. Fabee returned to his cutting board and a half-diced onion. Dagny walked to the other side of the counter, swung her backpack onto the kitchen table, and pulled out her MacBook.

“You going all PowerPoint on me?” Fabee asked, chopping through the rest of the onion.

“Something like that,” Dagny said.

Fabee carried the cutting board to the stovetop, dumped the onion bits into a big pot, and brought the cutting board back to the counter. He ducked into the refrigerator, pulled out some green peppers, and carried them to the cutting board. “Well, let me see it.”

Dagny opened her laptop. “I thought I only cared about getting Draker. But there were too many questions and loose ends. For example, I didn’t understand why he targeted Senator Harrison until I found this.” She clicked around a bit, then turned the computer so that it faced Fabee. “Back in the 1990s, when Harrison was still in the House, Seymour Dutton gave him a thousand dollars every year. His company, Systematic, had a PAC that gave Harrison five thousand each year. At least fifteen other Systematic employees gave a thousand each year to Harrison’s campaign. None of them gave money to any other politicians. It seems strange—why would a bunch of Atlanta folks give money to a representative from Rhode Island? Between his own
contributions and the ones he laundered through his employees, Dutton was buying something, right?”

A spreadsheet of campaign contributions that Dagny had downloaded from opensecrets.org was on the laptop screen. Fabee scanned the list.

“And yet, I couldn’t find anything connecting Systematic and Harrison,” Dagny continued. “No favors, no benefit—”

“No
quid
for the
quo
,” Fabee said.

“Until I thought about Representative Brownman, from Colorado’s Second District. You remember him? He held hearings on the Draker scandal. Pushed for prosecution. Called some of Draker’s underlings before the panel. Got a lot of people to plead the Fifth.”

“Sounds vaguely familiar.” Fabee began slicing through the peppers.

“Brownman was doing Systematic a big favor with these hearings, and yet he didn’t take any money from Dutton or Systematic or any of its employees. And although Harrison didn’t hold any hearings about Draker, he had held a bunch of hearings about Microsoft. Hearings that helped out a lot of Microsoft’s competitors. Companies, oddly, that didn’t give any money to his campaign. Companies, oddly, that had given a lot of money to Representative Brownman.” Dagny closed the spreadsheet window. “Obviously, Brownman and Harrison had a deal. ‘You help my contributors and I’ll help yours and—’”

“No one would spot the bribe.”

“Exactly.”

“Brownman’s been dead for years, and Harrison’s dead now, too,” Fabee said. “Even if they weren’t, the statute of limitations would have run out.”

“I don’t care about prosecuting them. I’m just trying to figure out why Draker did what he did.”

“Because he went fucking nuts is why.”

“Yeah. In part. But there’s more. Like Frank Ryder.”

“The accounting clerk?”

“Yeah. He discovers that Dutton’s being defrauded, but doesn’t run to Dutton, the victim. Doesn’t run to the police. He runs to some lawyers, and they round up the investors so they could file suit. But you know what I really think?”

“No.”

“I think Ryder orchestrated the whole fraud. And I think Dutton put him up to it.”

Fabee had a skeptical look on his face. “You think Seymour Dutton paid Ryder to defraud him?”

“I’m guessing that no money changed hands. Dutton was too careful for that. Instead, he sent Ryder to some lawyers who would give him a kickback from the civil suit. Of course, they didn’t call it a kickback. They just called Ryder a consultant and paid him for his time. Nothing illegal about that.”

“Why would Systematic want a clerk at Drakersoft to cheat them out of profits?”

“To bring down Draker, of course, and then to buy off his assets. Which is what Dutton did. Seymour Dutton didn’t want to
partner
with Noel Draker, he wanted to
own
him. But Drakersoft was bigger than Systematic, and Dutton didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money that would take. Dutton struck the bundling deal because that’s the best deal he could get, but he wasn’t happy with the relationship. Draker controlled the bundled sales of
their
products.”

“Even if Systematic wanted Ryder to set up an accounting scandal, couldn’t he have set up some other kind of fraud? A fraud against someone else? Why defraud itself?”

“If anyone else were defrauded, they’d notice it, and they’d probably approach Draker and it would all work out. But if Ryder cheated Systematic, then Systematic could ignore the fraud for a couple of years, letting it bubble up into a bigger deal. Isn’t it
strange that Systematic didn’t discover the fraud on its own? Wouldn’t a company in its position conduct audits to make sure it was being paid correctly?”

“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.”