The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “We figure that one of the kids—the boy, probably—was in the living room when he was shot, causing mom to run in from the kitchen and dad to run in from the study.”

  “How do you know? You have bullets?” Dagny asked.

  “Two in the kitchen wall, one in the hall. We figure the unsub got in from upstairs and came down the steps. He was firing from the foyer when he shot the first kid, then stepped into the living room while he waited for mom and dad.”

  If the bullets were in the hall and kitchen walls, it meant mom and dad didn’t get very far into the living room when they were shot. The unsub was quick on the draw. Dagny stepped back into the foyer and looked up the staircase. Turning around, she saw that a cluster of family pictures hung on wall at the bottom of the steps. A bullet had shattered one of the photographs that hung at eye level. “This went through the second kid?”

  “We think so. Boy gets home from school before the girl. Maybe our guy kills the son and the parents, then waits for the girl to come in. Piles the bodies on top of each other for the girl to discover, and while she stands there in shock, he shoots her, too.”

  “Was she shot in the front or back?”

  “From the side, right against the temple. So we don’t think she was running. Maybe didn’t know it was coming.”

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “Follow me.” Fabee led her up the stairs, walking as close to the wall as possible. Dagny followed in like manner. If you were going to destroy part of a scene by walking through it, you made sure that you kept destroying the same narrow path.

  There were four bedrooms on the second floor. Fabee led Dagny down the hallway to the girl’s room. Two agents were collecting evidence from the girl’s corpse. She was lying in bed, facing the wall. Her covers had been peeled away, but they were covered in blood. “She was under the covers when we found her,” Fabee explained. Her hands and ankles were tied behind her with a thin rope. Reading Dagny’s thoughts, Fabee said, “Fifteen.”

  Fifteen was so young. Dagny was glad she couldn’t see her face. “Why would he tie her up if she was already dead?”

  “Beats me.”

  Dagny inched closer to the body, until one of the other agents held up his hand, asking her to stop. She saw that it wasn’t rope around the girl’s wrists, but something thinner. A cord, like the kind used to adjust venetian blinds. Dagny walked to the window. The cord to adjust the blinds had been cut. Fabee followed Dagny over to the window. “Okay,” he said. “So he used this cord. But why?”

  “I don’t know,” Dagny said. One of the agents was scraping under the girl’s fingernails. Another was lifting hairs from her clothing. She started to feel better about their chances of catching the killer; there was a lot of physical evidence at the site. Dagny lifted her camera from her bag and snapped a few pictures of the scene. When she finished, she asked Fabee to show her the other bodies.

  Across the hall Jessica Silvers’s body had been propped up on her son’s bed. Her hands were tied in the front and tethered to her ankles. A handkerchief dangled from her left hand. Her head tilted forward, as if in prayer. Dagny walked closer and saw that the cord from her ankles was tied to the footboard of the bed. One of the agents tilted Mrs. Silvers’s head backward. Duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were wide open. Red thumbprints stained her forehead. “He opened her eyes,” Dagny said.

  “Yep. Those prints are from his latex gloves.”

  “No clean prints?”

  “Not yet, but we’re not done.”

  Dagny snapped some more pictures before following Fabee to the other two bodies. She knew they’d be in the basement. She wondered if Fabee had also figured out the staging.

  The basement was cluttered, filled with boxes from the last move—Christmas decorations, an unassembled workbench, baby furniture never passed along. Jack’s body lay in the corner of the basement on a table. Dagny knew that the body was supposed to be on a couch, but the table must have been the best the murderer could do. The boy had been gagged, and his mouth had been taped. His arms and legs were tied like his mother’s. Dagny stepped closer to get a better angle for the photo and Fabee stopped her. “Don’t get too close, Dagny. We haven’t started to process these two yet.”

  Dagny saw a door at the other end of the basement. “That leads to the furnace?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the dad is in there?”

  Fabee opened the door and pulled a chain attached to a bare bulb on the ceiling. Dagny peeked inside. Max Silvers’s body lay atop a large cardboard box. Tape covered his mouth and circled the back of his head. His ankles had been tied with cord, but his hands were free. Fabee pointed to the ceiling. A piece of cord hung from a pipe down toward Mr. Silvers’s body. “It’s as if he had been hanging by his hands and his body collapsed,” Fabee explained. “Except there is no cord around his wrists. None of this makes any sense. They were all dead before he moved them in place, so why tie them up?”

  Dagny knew why they had been tied up. It was a performance—a reference or homage to an infamous murder. “How were the bodies discovered?”

  “A boy was supposed to go on a date with the teenage girl. He came by to pick her up at seven, and no one answered. Figured he’d been stood up. Stewed a bit, then called her house at eight and then nine. A little after ten, he decided to stop by again, started to think something was wrong. Banged on the door for a while, then peeked through the living-room window from the back of the house. Police got here a little before eleven. Around midnight, they called in the card.” Fabee pointed to Mr. Silvers’s left hand, which clenched a white business card.

  “No one’s moved it?”

  “Locals lifted a finger just enough to read it. Knew it wasn’t their case anymore and called us.”

  “What do we know about Mr. Silvers?”

  “CFO of an Internet company. Takes restaurant reservations online, or some such thing.”

  “Any enemies?”

  “Never made one. Loved by everyone.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Born and raised here. Never left.”

  “Mormon?”

  “Everyone here is.”

  They went back upstairs. Dagny looked out the window. “Why are the men just standing around outside? Why aren’t they canvasing?”

  “I’ve got forty agents canvasing. These guys are the next shift. You and Walton will be joining them.”

  She hadn’t realized that so many resources had been devoted to Fabee’s investigation. Over the past few days, she’d started to believe that she and Victor were actually ahead of the game, but with so many agents at his disposal, Fabee was undoubtedly in the lead. He probably knew everything she did and much, much more. And now she and Victor would be stuck canvasing, probably for days. “You don’t need us,” she implored.

  “Until we catch this guy, we need everyone we can get.”

  She sighed. “Can I take pictures of the other rooms first?”

  He nodded. “Just stay out of the crime scenes.” In other words, stay away from the bodies. The whole house was a crime scene.

  Dagny wandered into the kitchen. A large pot sat on top of the stove. Mrs. Silvers must have been cooking dinner. She wondered if an agent, or the killer, had turned off the burner. Dagny touched the side of the pot. It was cold. Maybe the killer didn’t want to burn down the scene he had worked so hard to stage. A calendar was affixed to front of the refrigerator by a half-dozen magnets advertising realtors and pizza delivery. On the second of April, Mrs. Silvers was supposed to play bridge. On the fifteenth, just two weeks away, someone had written “taxes” in capital letters. The fifteenth was also the day the killer would kill again, if they didn’t catch him first. Dagny thought of the Ben Franklin quote: “Nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

  She went back through the living room to the short hallway, passing a small powder room and entering the study. Mr. Silvers’s desk was in the middle of the room, facing the hallway door.
His computer was still on, but the screen was dark. Dagny tapped the mouse with a pen, bringing it to life. Three windows were open on the desktop. One was a spreadsheet—it looked as if Silvers had been drafting some kind of financial report. The second was an e-mail with a link to a web page, sent by one of his friends. The third was a web browser, opened to a page with a picture of Paris Hilton. Her dress had fallen off her shoulder, exposing her breast. Good old Mr. Silvers, Dagny thought. He was so worried for his family that he didn’t stop to close the embarrassing web page. Dagny moved the mouse with her pen, placed the arrow over the corner of the browser, and closed the page. He deserved that much, she figured.

  Next to the desk was a wall of bookshelves, meticulously arranged so that the bindings of all the books were perfectly flush with one another. One book had been pulled forward. She walked over to the shelves with a pretty good idea of what book it would be. Sure enough, the spine read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

  Had he found the book on the shelf and used it for reference as he tied and bound the bodies? Maybe he’d brought the book with him for reference. Or maybe he’d brought it with him because he wanted the FBI to find it. Dagny took a photo of the book as it stuck out from the shelf. They’d have to test it for prints. It would probably come back to J. C. Adams somehow.

  Dagny knew what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to tell Fabee that the bodies had been staged to look like the killings from In Cold Blood and let his team test the book for prints. But then she’d never get the results. They had different goals—she and Fabee. He wanted to make a case for trial. She didn’t want there to be a trial.

  Snapping on a pair of latex gloves, Dagny carefully slid the book out from the shelf, turned it so it faced forward, then leaned it against the other books. She removed a canister of ninhydrin from her backpack and sprayed the cover lightly. After a few minutes, a series of prints began to appear in purple. Dagny photographed the cover of the book a dozen times, from different angles and distances, to minimize the glare, hoping that at least one of them would be usable.

  “Fabee!” Dagny finally yelled, after tucking the canister back in her bag. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Fabee appeared a few seconds later, looked over at the book, and saw the prints. “You fuckin’ bitch,” he said.

  “It’s In Cold Blood. It’s the scene he mimicked.”

  “No shit, Dagny!”

  “This book was sticking out from the others. It’s got solid prints on the cover. You guys should check every page.”

  “I’ll decide what the fuck to do in my investigation. Right now, I want you out of this house.”

  Dagny grabbed her bag and headed toward the front door. Fabee followed close behind, stopping at the doorway. Dagny turned around as she walked down the front steps. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He took a deep breath. Or maybe it was a sigh. “We don’t use ninhydrin. Not on a case this big,” he said calmly. “We use the laser light first, so we don’t damage the evidence. We try to be the least destructive we can be.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Fabee said. “Sorry I yelled. It was a good find.”

  “So you knew it was In Cold Blood the whole time?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “For the same reason you didn’t,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  Dagny walked through the crowd of agents toward her car. All of them were men. Though Dagny was used to being in the minority, she would have expected at least a few women on Fabee’s team.

  Victor was down the street, shooting hoops with a couple of middle school kids in a driveway. Dagny tossed her backpack in the backseat of the car and walked over to them, motioning for the ball. The taller of the two kids passed the ball to Dagny, and she took a shot from outside a chalk-drawn three-point line. The ball hit the backboard and dropped in the basket. The shorter kid shook his head. “You weren’t trying to get it off the backboard.”

  “Nope,” Dagny said, “but sometimes you take what you can get.”

  Dagny and Victor spent the rest of the day going house to house, interviewing parents and children who hadn’t seen anything suspicious or relevant the previous day. When it grew dark, they retired to a nearby Best Western. Victor went off to get an “actual meal,” while Dagny showered and then flicked on the television. It had been a few weeks since she’d paid attention to the outside world. She hadn’t missed much. On CNN, Jack Cafferty was ranting about immigration. On Fox, Sean Hannity was kowtowing to some Republican senator. On MSNBC, Ed Schultz was calling people racist. Dagny was about to give up on the television when she flipped to CNN Headline News and caught Nancy Grace on a tirade about the Bubble Gum Thief.

  The unsub had now killed six people, and everyone was still referring to this monster as the Bubble Gum Thief. It made Dagny sick. She fired up her computer and searched Google News for “Bubble Gum Thief.” It returned some eleven hundred hits. Some were even using the acronym BGT, maybe because it sounded a bit like the BTK killer. BGT was idiotic. He hadn’t even stolen bubble gum, Dagny thought. He’d stolen chewing gum.

  Dagny downloaded the photos she had taken in the Silverses’ home to her MacBook and imported them into the iPhoto library, then created a photocast folder in the left pane of the program, which automatically uploaded the photographs to a server and generated a hyperlink that she sent to the Professor. When he clicked on the link, the photos would download to the iPhoto library on his laptop, and he’d be able to view the pictures in full resolution. If she had simply e-mailed the photos, Dagny would have had to reduce their size, and these pictures, gruesome as they were, had to be seen at full resolution. The photographs of the fingerprints on the book were particularly important—she wanted the best quality possible for IAFIS matching.

  After the photos had uploaded to the server, Dagny initiated an iChat videoconference with the Professor. She reviewed the events of the day, described how she found the fingerprints on the copy of In Cold Blood, and complained that Fabee was tying them up with pointless witness interviews. “Sometimes we have to play nice so we can do what we want later,” he explained.

  “We don’t have much time. In less than two weeks, he’s going to kill six or eight people, and—”

  “Six or eight? That’s if we’re lucky.”

  “You think he’s going for—”

  “I’d bet on sixteen. I pray it’s only eight.”

  “You think he’s increasing exponentially?”

  “I pray to God he’s not. If he goes to eight, then he finishes with sixteen and thirty-two. But if he’s going to sixteen—”

  “Then he goes to with two fifty-six and...” She tried to do a rough calculation in her head, but the Professor was faster.

  “And finishes with sixty-five thousand five hundred thirty-six.”

  “My God, that’s an office building and—”

  “A stadium. It’s like Oklahoma City and—”

  “Hiroshima.”

  CHAPTER 32

  April 6—Columbus, Ohio

  Melissa sat at the edge of her bed, her feet planted flat on the ground, and her head turned down. Dagny sat across from the girl, on her roommate’s unmade bed. Dagny had ditched her navy-blue suit for jeans and a baggy sweatshirt from the T.J. Maxx down the street, and kicked off her shoes so she could sit cross-legged. Normally she’d be taking notes, but this time she left the notepad in her backpack. Victor waited in the car.

  After four pointless days of canvasing in Salt Lake City, Fabee was giving her a real witness. Melissa Ryder had called the Bureau’s BGT Hotline (even the FBI was using the name) the night before. Fabee had interviewed her by phone, but he was letting Dagny have the first crack at her in person.

  She let Melissa tell the story at her own pace, only gently pressing for details when necessary. Melissa sheepishly described the Black Out party and her reluctance to go. She told Dagny
about the older man who had handed her a drink and whispered in her ear. About going upstairs to talk. And she told her about waking up, certain that something had gone wrong.

  “And then I ran back here. Here,” she sighed. A cluttered mess of cheap furniture and dirty clothes. It wasn’t much of a refuge. Dagny noticed that the walls on the roommate’s half of the room were decorated with music and art posters, but Melissa’s walls were bare, save for a few stray pieces of tape. Dagny had known a girl in college who’d torn down her posters, too, after she’d been raped.

  “You didn’t see him again, when you left, when you were running? Since?”

  Melissa shook her head, lifting her knees to her chest and hugging them tight. “I can’t even see him now.”

  “Did you tell anyone you were going to the party? Maybe post something about it or tweet it?”

  “It was on my Facebook page. Do you think he picked me out specifically?”

  “I don’t know, Melissa. I don’t know.” Probably, Dagny thought. “What about the card?”

  “When I got back here, I felt it. It was...it was inside of me.” The girl wiped away another tear, determined to finish the story. “It was wet and bloody, and it had gum stuck to the back of it. But I could still read it. ‘This is my fourth crime,’ it said. ‘My next will be bigger.’”

  “The gum. What did the gum look like?”

  “Just regular chewed gum.”

  “It was chewed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who chewed the gum?”

  “No.” Of course not, she seemed to say.

  If he’d been the one to chew the gum, then there were would be DNA evidence on it. But it was gone, so they’d never know. “And you threw the card away?”

  Melissa nodded. “I tossed it in the garbage can and sat on this bed, hating it. Hating him. Staring at the wastebasket, just staring at it, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I dumped the whole thing in the Dumpster behind the dorm.”