The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  Beamer took her through the various witness statements, and noted the thief’s strange incantation: “The sins of the devils remain with them in heaven.”

  “The sins of the devils remain with them in heaven?”

  Beamer looked down at his notes. “Yep.”

  It didn’t make sense, she thought. “What about the bullets?”

  He reached down toward the floor, lifted a clear plastic bag from a box, and handed it to Dagny. “We found three in the bookshelf in Waxton’s office. The other he fired through the front door.”

  Dagny held the bag up and studied the bullets. Five lands and grooves twisted to the right. “Smith and Wesson,” she noted. Beamer handed her two more bags. The first contained the bullet casings. The second held the business card and gum. Dagny lifted the bag containing the card and looked at the other side. “No prints, I assume?”

  “Nothing. The guy was wearing gloves. You’ll see in the tape when Goldilocks gets here.”

  The card edges were perforated. Dagny guessed that they had been produced on a home ink-jet printer. She grabbed her camera from her bag and took a picture of it, then flipped the card around and took of picture of the gum, still partially attached to the back in its wrapper. Chewey’s was repeated in capital letters a half-dozen times in shiny lettering diagonally over the matte silver surface of the wrapper. “What’s the flavor?” Dagny asked.

  “I didn’t chew it, Agent Gray.”

  She opened the bag and sniffed. “Cinnamon.” She closed the bag. “Who’s Goldilocks?”

  “Goldilocks is our nice nickname for J. C. Adams. You don’t want to hear the bad ones.”

  “Who is he?”

  “J. C. Adams. The J. C. Adams.” Beamer raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know who J. C. Adams is?”

  Dagny shook her head.

  “He’s a local boy that went off to USC to play quarterback. Went all Hollywood while he was there. Dated an Olsen twin for a minute. Would have been a first-round pick, but he got hurt on the first play of the Rose Bowl in his sophomore year.”

  It sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe she had heard the name before. “Why is he coming here?”

  “After the injury, he came home and joined the force. The chief liked having a celebrity around, and soon the kid started to get his ear on all kinds of stuff. Expensive stuff. And most expensively, the video console. He convinced the chief that we would save money long-term by producing training and recruitment videos in-house. So we sold off the old stuff and bought all-new equipment—cameras and lights, too. Turns out, the kid just wanted to use it for some film he’s making. Then a few months ago, he won a lawsuit with his insurer over the football injury, so he quit the force. Says he’s going to film school in the fall. Now we’re stuck with this stuff, and no one knows how to use it. So we’re always having to call the kid in for help.”

  “At least he comes in, right?”

  “Sometimes. He’ll come in for you, though. I told him you were pretty.”

  Dagny laughed. “You hadn’t even seen me.”

  “Yeah, but I wanted to make sure he’d come. For the record, he won’t be disappointed.”

  While they waited for J. C. Adams, Beamer excused himself to tend to other matters. Dagny called Officer Perez and confirmed that the gum on the back of the card in Chula Vista was Chewey’s Cinnamon. He also confirmed that there were perforations on the edges of the card, and that the bullet (which he had yet to send) had five lands to the right. Probably the same gun, Dagny thought. Maybe the same guy, or maybe multiple unidentified subjects in coordination. No apparent motive. The third crime had occurred on February 1; the fifth, on March 1. Two data points were never enough to draw a conclusion. Still, if forced to place a bet, Dagny would have put her money on January 1 and a pack of Chewey’s for the first crime.

  Beamer returned with J. C. Adams, who looked more like a surfer than a quarterback. He was tall, but skinnier than she’d expected. His curly blond locks hung around his face, forcing him to constantly shove them away from his eyes. “Yeah, she’s hot,” Adams said plainly to Beamer, as if Dagny weren’t there. Then he turned to her and showed off a white-capped smile. “I’m J. C.”

  Dagny shook his hand. “Special Agent Dagny Gray, Mr. Adams.”

  “Nothing sexier than a lady with a gun.”

  She ignored that. “I’d like to see the security footage from the Waxton robbery.”

  “Sure.” Adams led them along the perimeter of the precinct floor. When they got to the studio, Dagny laughed at the massive array of video and audio equipment. It looked like the control booth for the Academy Awards.

  “What’s so funny?” Adams asked, defensively.

  “You really pulled a con job here,” Dagny said.

  “This thing could pay for itself if they used it right!” Adams loaded a DVD. The security footage flashed on the screen in front of them.

  “No sound?” Dagny asked.

  “Nope.”

  The camera had been positioned above the tellers, and the wide-angle lens showed Cynthia Johnson and most of the lobby, including the front door. The wide angle came at a cost—the image was stretched and distorted. It was hard to see much detail in the robber’s face.

  “Can I see the other angles?” Dagny asked.

  “That’s the only one,” Beamer answered.

  “What do you mean? They only had one camera?”

  “Only one working.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I know.”

  “Nothing outdoors? Drive-through ATM?” Dagny asked.

  “Nope,” Beamer replied, but he hesitated. Dagny knew he hadn’t checked. Hopefully, he would now.

  “Can we see where the unsub enters the door again?”

  “Huh?” Adams replied.

  “The robber,” Beamer explained.

  Adams rewound the footage to the point where the robber entered the bank. Dagny squinted at the tape measure along the right side of the doorframe. “Six foot exactly?”

  “That’s what it looked like to us,” Beamer said.

  At Dagny’s request, Adams made a copy of the DVD. She thanked Lieutenant Beamer and Adams, then headed toward the exit. Beamer went back to his office, but Adams followed her. “So you’re from DC?”

  “And going back,” Dagny responded, pushing through the door.

  “Right now?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can give you a ride if you’d like.”

  “I think I’ll just hail a cab.”

  Adams laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You think you’re in DC? You can’t just hail down a cab here.”

  “I’m sure I’ll catch one.” Dagny could see a cab a block away, but it was headed in the wrong direction.

  Adams pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, jotted a number on it, and handed it to her. “After a few minutes, when you haven’t seen a cab, call me and I’ll swing back and pick you up.” Adams pointed his remote key toward a red Porsche parked along the curb and unlocked the doors. “Call me,” he mimed as he climbed behind the wheel.

  Adams was right—Cincinnati wasn’t a cab town. Each minute Dagny waited felt like an eternity. She thought about calling information and getting the number for a taxi company, but it was easier to just call Adams. He was there two minutes later. “I knew you’d call.”

  “I see you’re enjoying the insurance money,” Dagny noted as she climbed into the Porsche. “I’d like to make a stop before the airport.”

  “Sure. My bedroom has a great view of the city.”

  “I’d like to stop by Waxton Savings and Loan.”

  “The ATM, right? You think Beamer messed up by not getting the footage. We can go, but you’re wasting your time. The ATM’s on the wrong side to see the front.”

  “They should still check the film.”

  “Beamer will. He was just too embarrassed to admit they hadn’t, but he’s a good cop.”

&nbs
p; “How’d you know where the ATM is?”

  “I helped them with their security.”

  Small town, Dagny thought. “How’d that come about?”

  “Waxton’s a sports nut. He bought one of my high school jerseys and asked me if I’d sign it. I came over to the bank, signed the jersey, and we got to talking. I’d been working with the chief to upgrade the equipment at the station and told Waxton about it. He wanted some advice on security for the bank, so I looked around and gave it to him.”

  Dagny laughed. “Yeah, well, bang-up job.”

  “Hey, I just wrote him a proposal! Spent some time on it, too—looked at what other banks were doing. Made a lot of recommendations, but he didn’t do any of them.”

  “How much did you propose he spend?”

  “Fifty thousand.” He didn’t seem to like that she was shaking her head. “Hey, that’s not that much. Motion-sensitive cameras, hard-drive recording, remote monitoring. I think the robbery shows I was right and he should have listened to me.”

  “Counting the baseball, the robber took Waxton for about thirty, maybe thirty-five grand. You were trying to take him for fifty.”

  Adams pouted but had nothing to say. After a couple of minutes, he said, “If you got to know me, you might like me, you know.”

  “Shouldn’t you be playing with women your own age? What are you, twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-four, actually.”

  “Do you have any idea how old I am?”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  Dagny ignored this and hoped to ride in silence. Adams wouldn’t oblige.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked. “You have a boyfriend or something? I don’t see any ring.”

  She resolved to rent a car the next time she came to Cincinnati. “Yes.”

  “A feeb?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what’s he do?”

  “He’s an artist.” She instantly wished that she had said he was a professor.

  Adams shook his head and chuckled. “Does he have the earring and everything?”

  “You’re one to talk, with that surfer hair.”

  “This is a very normal haircut for people my age,” Adams stammered.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve seen it on The Real World.” She was proud of her dig, though it had no effect on Adams.

  Dagny was eager to sit down by the gate and return to her book and the gritty world of detective Hieronymus Bosch, but all the seats were taken. Instead, she leaned against a pole and watched a mother play with her kids. The mom was thirty, maybe younger. Her four-year-old son’s jeans were too big, and they bunched under his belt in the back when he rolled a small fire truck on the carpet, chasing his two-year-old sister. The sister toddled like a penguin, crashing to the ground after every few steps, laughing hysterically each time. The mom helped the daughter up after every tumble, holding her by her hands until she could steady herself. Moments later, when the dad returned with ice-cream cones, all play stopped. The two-year-old started clapping wildly, sometimes missing her hands and hitting her arms. The mother shared her cone with the daughter and a smile with her husband. The son devoured everything that made it into his mouth and wore the rest. When they finished, the mom wiped the kids’ faces clean while the dad tidied the carpet beneath them.

  Dagny started to cry. Usually she was able to keep it together. Sometimes she couldn’t. She went to the bathroom and washed her face. When she returned, the plane was boarding. Cheeks still puffy, Dagny took her seat and started to read. A man sat down next to her and looked at her book. “I love Harry Bosch. Haven’t read that one yet.”

  She nodded but continued reading. Mercifully, he pulled out a Jeffery Deaver novel and they took off in peace. A half hour later, the man closed his book with an exaggerated flourish. “Man, that was good. Do you ever read Deaver?” Dagny noticed his shoes—polished brown Oxfords with an impossible shine. “Edward Green,” he said.

  “You’re Edward Green?”

  “No, the shoes you’re looking at. Edward Greens. From England.”

  “Oh.”

  She guessed from his salt-and-pepper hair that he was in his late thirties, maybe forty. He was handsome and fit, with cute dimples and a cleft chin. Deep-blue eyes. His voice was calm and soothing.

  “So do you read Deaver?”

  “I’ve read the Lincoln Rhymes.”

  “I love his twists at the end. You know, how you think the story is over, but then you find out there was more going on, and that someone else did something, too. This one,” he brandished the book, “had a triple twist.”

  “Sometimes he tacks on one twist too many,” she said.

  “Maybe, but it’s always an amazing ride.”

  She went back to her book. By the time the plane started its initial descent, Dagny was thirty pages from the end.

  “So are you from DC?”

  “Yes,” she said, eyes still focused on her book.

  He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a silver business-card holder. “I’m going to be in town this week, so if you’d like to get together...” He shook the card holder and a card fluttered down on the page of her book. She slammed it shut and closed her eyes. And then she thought about how lucky she had been to find Mike, and how much she missed him after only a matter of hours.

  CHAPTER 16

  March 14—Arlington, Virginia

  If Snoopy’s doghouse could accommodate a pool table and Jacuzzi, maybe it made sense that the Professor’s quaint Tudor could hold his absurdly massive, marvelous study. It was at least thirty feet by thirty, maybe larger. Built-in bookcases—made of dark, rich oak—rose from the floor to the fifteen-foot ceiling along each of the walls, breaking only for the doorway, and even then extending on up from the top of the frame. Sliding ladders graced each of the walls to enable book retrieval at the highest levels. The floor was covered in a plush dark-blue carpet. Tall reading tables with flexible brass lights ran down the left and right sides of the room. Two couches faced each other in the middle of the room, perpendicular to the Professor’s large oak desk. A glass coffee table sat between the couches; the glass afforded a view of an embroidered FBI seal in the middle of the floor.

  The Professor was perched on the couch opposite Dagny, chewing the end of his pipe and stroking his beard. He’d ended the class two days early, ostensibly to ponder the bank robbery but more likely because he’d grown bored with it. Dagny had spent the last hour walking him through the information she had collected in Cincinnati.

  “If the third crime was February first and the fifth was March first, it would suggest that the first was January first.”

  “It’s a reasonable supposition,” the Professor responded. “If he is as mathematically minded as he seems, the second and fourth crimes would have occurred in the middle of January and February respectively. I wonder...” the Professor said, rubbing his temples.

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Months are of different lengths, so the middle of January might fall at noon on January sixteenth, while the middle of February is technically the stroke of midnight on the fourteenth. Or is that technically midnight on the morning of February fifteenth? Which way does midnight fall?”

  “I think it would fall on the morning of the next day, but—”

  “I wonder if he is more concerned with mathematical accuracy or symmetry,” the Professor interrupted. “Would he want the even-numbered crimes to fall exactly within the middle of each month, or would he prefer that they fall on the same numerical day each month?”

  “I don’t think we know enough about him to make an educated guess.”

  The Professor grabbed a remote from his desktop and pressed a button, causing a large white dry-erase board to descend from the ceiling. He wrote the numbers one through eight across the top of the board. Under the number one, he wrote gum, followed by a question mark. Under three, he wrote dog, and under five, he wrote bank. Then he inscribed a series of dates under each of t
he crimes. The odd-numbered crimes started with 1/1 and increased to 4/1. The even-numbered crimes began with 1/15 and continued to 4/15. Every date, except for crimes three and five, earned a question mark. When he had finished, the Professor sat back and contemplated the board.

  “Is killing a dog three-fifths of robbing a bank?” he asked. Killing a dog seemed worse than robbing a bank to Dagny. People robbed banks because they wanted money. People killed dogs because they were evil. “I wish we knew about the gum he stole,” he said, adding, “if he stole it.”

  “Chewey’s Cinnamon.”

  “No, I mean the number of sticks in the pack.”

  “You think he’s planning to commit crimes until the pack runs out?”

  “Probably.”

  Dagny took out her laptop.

  “I don’t have Internet here,” the Professor apologized.

  So many books, but no Google. “I get the Internet everywhere.” Dagny had a Sprint 4G card, which brought high-speed Internet to her MacBook in most metropolitan areas. She searched the web for the Chewey’s home page. Scrolling through the list of products, she found Chewey’s Cinnamon Gum. “This isn’t very helpful,” she said. “They sell it in packs of five, ten, twelve, and fifteen. I can’t tell if this is an exhaustive list.”

  “I think we can safely assume it wasn’t a pack of five. The card makes it clear that he plans to continue.”

  “You seem to have a lot of faith that he’s sticking to some rules.”

  “Sometimes they cheat,” the Professor said. “But usually not until later.”

  “What do you think is next?”

  “Assuming he started with gum, worked up to dog killing and then bank robbery, I think we’re due for a murder.” The Professor tugged at his beard. “If he didn’t start with gum but started with something bigger, then maybe he hasn’t worked his way to murder yet. Maybe the increments are smaller. Maybe a kidnapping.”