by Jeff Miller
Dagny didn’t have the heart to tell him that they already had Adams’s fingerprints on the proposal he’d just given them. Waxton’s prints were a good catch though.
“Can we get some dinner?” Victor asked.
“No.” She backed into the street and threw the car into drive. Finding her way was difficult. Mount Adams was a confusing maze of steep one-way streets, and parked cars on each side made for narrow clearances and tight turns. It was hard to navigate the Impala through the neighborhood, so it must have been nearly impossible for the black Chevy Suburban that pulled up behind them. Four wrong turns made Dagny wish they’d sprung for GPS. When the Suburban followed her on each wrong turn, coincidence seemed unlikely. Darkly tinted windows hid the driver from view, and there was no front license plate. Halfway through an intersection, and without signaling, Dagny spun the wheel left, tossing Victor into the passenger-side door.
“Jesus, Dagny,” Victor cried.
The Suburban was still on their tail. Dagny took another sharp turn down the long slope of Martin Drive, which led downtown. The Suburban only drew closer, filling the Impala’s rear window, then grazing its rear bumper. Dagny floored the accelerator.
“Why are you driving like a maniac?”
“Because we’re being followed, Victor.”
When the light at Fourth and Broadway turned red, Dagny punched the Impala and shot through the intersection, forcing oncoming traffic to screech to a halt. The Suburban followed behind, shooting across traffic. She knew she could lose the tail if she wanted, but catching it would be trickier. Dagny grabbed her phone and called Lieutenant Beamer, running two more lights while they concocted a plan to trap the Suburban. She circled the federal courthouse to give a patrol car time to get into position, then swung back onto Fourth Street and headed west to Vine.
Lining up the patrol car was easy. Getting Victor involved in the plan would be hard. “When we trap him, jump out,” she explained. “Aim at his tires and shoot if he won’t stop.” Victor’s face turned white, but he nodded. She turned left onto Vine, and then turned right into a small alley called West Ogden. It wasn’t as desolate as Dagny had hoped—a drunk had just stumbled out of a bar called O’Malley’s. The Suburban followed.
When they reached the end of the alley, she slammed on the brakes. Dagny and Victor hopped out of the car with raised guns. The Suburban stopped, then shifted into reverse, and the drunk ran back into the bar. A CPD car slid across the back of the alley, blocking the Suburban’s exit. The Suburban crept slowly to the middle of the alley and stopped, a hundred feet behind the Impala. Steadying her gun with both hands, Dagny started toward the Suburban, waving for Victor to follow.
“Hands out of the window!” Dagny yelled. “Hands out!” Eighty feet away, no hands. Sixty-five, and still nothing.
The Suburban lunged toward them when they were fifty feet away. Dagny sent four shots through the windshield. Victor aimed for the tires and squeezed the trigger, but no bullets came out. The Suburban didn’t slow, forcing Dagny and Victor to dive to opposite sides of the alley. It raced past them, plowed through the Impala, and was gone.
Dagny hopped to her feet. “Why didn’t you fire?” she screamed.
Victor stood up slowly, holding his back. “I did. Nothing came out. Maybe the safety’s on.”
“There’s no safety on a Glock.” Dagny grabbed the gun from Victor’s hand and squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet into the brick wall. “The only safety mechanism is a lever that makes it so you have to pull the trigger from the center in order to get it to shoot. You’d have to be an idiot to squeeze the trigger any other way.” She tried to pull from the bottom of the trigger, but even this sent another bullet into the wall. “I have no idea how you couldn’t shoot this thing.”
Victor lowered his head and put his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t want to carry it anyway.”
She’d been rough with him, but he deserved it. “If you want to be an agent, you’ve got to act like one.”
“I’m not an idiot, Dagny. KL9-EZJ. State of Kentucky.” He’d caught the rear plate on the Suburban as it had passed them.
The Impala had been thrown across the street into a light post. The driver’s side was crushed, and when Dagny tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge. She walked around to the other side of the car and climbed through the passenger door. Victor slid in behind her. She turned the key, but the car only wheezed.
Victor turned to her and smiled.
“What?” Dagny asked.
“Aren’t you glad I talked you into the insurance?”
They spent the next few hours at District One, waiting for news about the black Suburban. A few witnesses saw the Suburban race through red lights on its way to the I-75 North ramp. Later, a gravedigger reported an explosion at Spring Grove Cemetery. The fireball left little of the Suburban behind. The license plate was a dead end—it had been reported stolen that morning from a car across the river in Covington, Kentucky.
Dagny and Victor spent another hour filling out paperwork for the rental car company. When they finished, she called the Professor and caught him up on the day’s events. He told her that Reginald Berry—the “sins of the angels” bank robber—was an inmate at Coleman prison in Florida.
“We’ll head down now.”
“You can’t. Fabee’s sending you elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Bethel, New York.”
CHAPTER 23
March 19—Bethel, New York
Dagny was curled up in the passenger seat of another rented Impala, sucking on a fat-free sourdough pretzel nugget to keep awake and shielding her eyes from the reflection of the sunrise in the side mirror. Her head throbbed. The air inside the car was stale and smelled like ten years of cigarette smoke. Victor drove with his left hand and shoveled an Egg McMuffin into his mouth with his right.
After they’d caught the red-eye to LaGuardia, they’d spent two hours at a Red Roof Inn—just enough time to nap and shower. The Garmin GPS they’d rented from Avis called out street directions, sparing Dagny the task. Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra” was playing on the radio. It kept Victor awake and alert, so she lived with it.
“So why is Fabee sending us here, Dag?”
“Don’t call me Dag.” She rubbed her fingertips against her forehead in a circular motion, trying to push the pain away. “Because it pulls us off the rest of the case. He knows there’s nothing to find here.”
A stolen pack of gum, two and a half months ago. It was a dead end, but they’d be stuck questioning people in Bethel for days. What could they even ask? Do you remember anyone coming here on New Year’s Day flashing a lot of gum around? It was hopeless.
Victor chuckled. “It’s funny, though.”
“What’s funny?”
“If we find the chewing gum thief, we’ve caught a murderer. Solve the smallest crime in the world and we solve the biggest. That’d be some way to catch him.”
Yeah, she thought. It would be. But Fabee had already had his men take a statement the night before. The boy didn’t remember anything useful. Red Ford Explorer. Maybe the guy was tall. Didn’t see his face. Left behind a card. No video from the security camera. That was it. Dagny hoped to determine how many sticks of gum were in the stolen pack. She didn’t expect much else.
Bethel was two hours and a million miles from New York City. It was a strange town, full of burnouts and soccer moms, hybrids and Hummers, vegans and hunters. They passed twelve American flags, four rainbow flags, and one Confederate flag, painted on the roof of a barn, before they finally found Waller’s Food Mart at a quarter past seven. Victor pulled into the gravel lot and parked. Dagny opened the car door, and the wind caught it, ripping it from her hand. Another burst of wind nearly toppled her as she climbed out of the car. Victor walked around the front of the car, pushed her door closed, and placed his hand on her back, steadying her as they walked toward the entrance.
A chubby, middle-aged man with a round face an
d sideburns looked up from behind the register when the door chimed. “You the feds?” he asked, making his way around the counter to greet them. A pack of Camels peeked out of the pocket of his flannel shirt.
“Special Agent Dagny Gray,” Dagny said, flashing her creds.
“I’m Jeff Waller.” He shook her hand. “I hope this helps. I mean, I just wish he knew more.”
“I’m Victor Walton.”
“Special Agent Victor Walton,” Dagny corrected him.
“I’m new,” Victor explained, shaking Waller’s hand.
“Let me get my boy.” Waller walked to a door behind the counter and called, “Hey, Crosby! Get out here!”
“Crosby?” Victor asked. “Like Crosby, Stills, and Nash?”
“And Young,” Waller admonished.
Crosby came through the door wearing a baggy Yankees jersey and loose-fitting jeans. He brushed the hair out from his eyes and smiled at Dagny. Cute kid, she thought.
“Are you guys special agents?”
“We are,” Dagny replied. “I know you talked to a couple of agents last night, but I was hoping we could go through what happened again. Is that cool?”
“It’s cool.” Crosby stuck his thumbs in his jeans pockets and kicked back his head. He took them through his New Year’s Day, from the moment he woke up, to his dubious claim of having chased the thief out of the store, to his subsequent discovery of the theft.
“Show me where the card was,” Dagny asked.
The kid led them to the candy rack and tapped the front of a Chewey’s Spearmint Gum box on the far left side of the second shelf. “The card was standing up in the front of this box.”
“Spearmint?” Victor asked. “Are you sure it was spearmint?”
“Nah. It could have been any flavor. These things get shifted.”
“Was there a stick of gum attached to the back of the card?” Dagny asked.
“Yeah.”
“What happened to it?”
“I chewed it.” Crosby’s dad shot him an angry look, but Crosby shrugged. “What? Were we going to sell a single stick of gum?”
“Do you remember the flavor?”
“No. Does it matter?”
“It might. If I said it was cinnamon, would that sound right?”
“Could be.”
Dagny studied the cartons of gum on the shelves. All of the packs of Chewey’s held fifteen pieces. “Mr. Waller, have you always sold Chewey’s in packs of fifteen?”
“No, it can vary. Sometimes it’s twelve. Sometimes it’s ten. Depends on the deal we get from the wholesaler.”
“Is there a way to figure out how many sticks were in the packs you were selling on January first?”
Waller led them through a cluttered storage room to a small office in the back of the building. “Whenever we take an empty box off the shelves, we order another box, so we always have one on hand,” he explained. He opened a file drawer and pulled out several thick manila folders. “The orders are in these.”
“So the last order you placed before January first is when the pack in question would have been put out on display?”
“Yeah, that’s right. So the pack you’re looking for would have come from the order before that one.” He thumbed through the first file, then started through it again. “Sorry if I’m going slow. I’m a little nervous. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“I understand. Do you mind if I look through one of the other folders?” Dagny asked.
“Me, too?” Victor added.
Waller handed them each a folder. Though Waller seemed to have a comprehensive set of order forms, they were not in any particular order. “Let’s just pull everything that says Chewey’s,” Dagny suggested. Within a few minutes, they had stacked about twenty forms. Victor put them in chronological order, and they thumbed back through them, looking for an order for Chewey’s Cinnamon Gum.
“December thirty-first,” Victor said. “On New Year’s Eve, you guys ordered another box of Chewey’s Cinnamon.”
“So we need to go one more back,” Waller remarked.
They sifted through the orders and found that another had been placed on September 20. “That’s it?” Dagny asked.
“Should be,” Waller said. “But it don’t say how many were in each pack. I guess that’s not on the form?”
“Can you tell by the price? Five dollars and eighty cents?”
“Nah, it fluctuates. Could be the ten, twelve, or fifteen.”
“Do you have a specific person you deal with at the wholesaler?”
“Just whoever answers the phone. They’ve got a big call center. Lots of people there.”
Dagny glanced at her watch. It was eight thirty. Maybe the call center would be open. She found the phone number on the order form and called from her cell. A bright and cheery female voice answered.
“This is Sandi at HLP Wholesale, can I help you?”
“This is Special Agent Dagny Gray of the FBI. I need to find out some information about an order placed by Waller’s Food Mart on September twentieth, last year. Is it possible for you to look it up on your computer system?”
“I’m going to have to transfer you to the legal department.”
“No, I just think...” It was too late. She heard a few seconds of overwrought instrumental music before an answering machine informed her that the legal department did not open until nine. She hung up her phone.
Victor laughed and grabbed her phone. “Did your rep have a name?” he asked.
“Sandi.”
Victor hit redial and then held up his hand for silence. “Hi, this is Crosby Waller,” he said in an inexplicable Southern drawl. “Hey, Barbara, I’m so glad you are there. My daddy owns Waller’s Food Mart here in Bethel, and I work here. I think I did something wrong, so I was wondering if you could help me out?...Yeah, you see, when I order stuff, I’m supposed to write down exactly what was ordered, and my daddy’s going through the papers and checking, and I realized I didn’t write down some information on one of them, and I know it’s stupid, but if that information isn’t there, I’m going to get a whuppin’ like you wouldn’t believe...September twentieth of last year...Yeah, I know, it’s completely stupid. My dad’s insane—likes to rip that belt off mighty fast.” Mr. Waller frowned, but Victor shrugged. “I know I ordered Chewey’s Cinnamon, but I don’t know if it was a ten- or twelve- or fifteen-pack, or what...Order number two-one-two-three-three-eight...Yeah, thanks...Okay, I got it. You have no idea what you’ve saved me from.” Victor ended the call and handed the phone back to Dagny. “It was a ten-pack. But if you want,” he said, “you can send a subpoena to their legal department to confirm it.” Dagny was impressed; her potted plant had some skills, after all.
Ten sticks, ten crimes? Maybe.
Dagny turned to Waller and his son. “Thank you for your help today, gentlemen. I would like to ask one more favor—that you don’t talk to the press about this.”
“Of course we won’t,” Waller said. “That’s what we told the man last night.”
It was strange that Fabee had sent only one agent the night before. “You remember his name?”
“Brian, I think. Black guy.” Waller reached to his back pocket and pulled out an overstuffed wallet. A few loose papers fluttered to the ground when he opened it. He leaned down to pick them up and found the card he was looking for. “Not Brian. Brent.” He handed the card to Dagny. “Keep it. He gave Crosby one, too.”
She smiled. Brent Davis was working for Fabee.
They spent the rest of the day canvasing Bethel homes, inquiring about a man in a grey hooded sweatshirt who stole some gum on New Year’s Day. In the evening, they checked into the Econo Lodge in nearby Monticello. Victor dropped his suitcase in his room, then joined Dagny in hers.
“Time to learn something,” she said, withdrawing a fingerprint kit from her bag. She put on a pair of nitrile gloves and removed the doorway tape measure they’d bagged at Waxton’s Savings and Loan. The magnetic strips at
each end were about six inches long and an inch wide. She brushed the magnets with a white powder, coating the entire surface.
“What kind of powder is that?”
“Lanconide,” Dagny replied.
“Why not carbon black?”
“You can’t use black on black. You use carbon black on white or clear surfaces.” Dagny lifted the top magnet by its edges and tapped the side gently against the table. “To create an even distribution,” she explained. She blew softly over the top of the strip, but the powder didn’t adhere.
“No prints?” Victor asked.
“None.” The top magnet was of no help. She tapped the bottom magnet against the table, revealing a couple of prints—a thumb and an index finger. Dagny photographed the prints with her digital camera, then lifted them with a long piece of transparent tape, which she stuck to a piece of black card stock.
“The photographs actually work better,” she explained, “but you always keep a copy.” Dagny placed the tape measure back in its bag and retrieved the pen with Waxton’s fingerprint. It was a Bic—white plastic with recessed black lettering. “Round surfaces are always tricky.”
She grabbed another brush and dusted the pen with carbon black. “Partial thumb, partial index. That should be enough.” She photographed the pen, then lifted the prints with tape and stuck them to a white piece of paper.
“Since the prints are rounded, they might not show well in the photographs, so the paper is actually the more important record in this case.” She compared the features of the fingerprints on the black paper with those on the white. It wasn’t even close.
“Those prints aren’t Waxton’s.” She repeated the process with the pen Adams had used to sign an autograph for Victor, but the prints were too smudged to be of use.
“Drat,” Victor said.
“Drat?” Dagny removed Adams’s security proposal from her bag, tore off the front and back pages, and set them down on top of a newspaper. She coated the pages lightly with ninhydrin. “You use ninhydrin with porous objects—paper, cardboard, fabrics. You can’t use too much pressure, though, or you’ll destroy the print.”
