The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “Forget that. I feel great.” Actually, she didn’t feel great, but she felt good enough.

  “It’s not your call, Dagny. Plus, right now, you’re evidence. I don’t want you out there,” Fabee said.

  Dagny turned to the Professor, but he offered no relief. “Sorry, Dagny, but he’s right.”

  “Like you could keep me here,” Dagny muttered, apparently not quietly enough. Fabee whistled, and two agents poked their heads through the door. “You’ve got guards to keep me here?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Dagny, you were kidnapped. This guy obviously has a thing for you.”

  “Are they to keep him out or me in?”

  “A little of both,” Fabee answered, gathering his coat. “Gotta run.”

  Fabee left, but the Professor remained behind. He sat at the edge of her bed. “You look good, Dagny.” And then softly, “We were really scared. You don’t know this, I’m sure, but your disappearance was quite a big deal. A lot of people were out there looking for you. It was a big story—in all the papers.”

  “By name? My name?” Dagny hated the thought of being in the press.

  “Your mom is in the hallway. Don’t know how she tracked me down. Maybe she has an investigative spirit, too. She cares about you a lot.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll send her in,” the Professor said as he stepped out of the room.

  When Meryl Gray walked through the door, her hair seemed whiter than Dagny remembered. She walked slower, and there were more lines on her face. For the first time, Meryl Gray looked like an old woman to her daughter.

  Dagny braced for a lecture. Her mother walked over to the bed and leaned forward, then kissed Dagny on her forehead. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry that—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you’re fine.” It wasn’t the hysterical performance Dagny had been expecting.

  “I know I haven’t called you, but I’ve—”

  “Been dealing with a lot. I know. I understand.”

  “Who are you, and where is my real mother?”

  Meryl Gray smiled. “I don’t want to fight anymore, Dagny. I know you need to be you. If that means you’re not going to sit at a desk, then I guess you’re not going to sit at a desk.”

  “I’m sorry I told you—”

  “I think I always knew. When you were a little kid, I knew. And law school, well, I knew then, too. It was too good to be true. But I don’t want to fight. You and I have both lost people that we loved. Let’s not lose each other.” They talked for a while, about Mike, mostly. After some prodding by hospital staff, Dagny’s mother agreed to let Dagny rest. As she was leaving the room, Meryl turned around and started to say something.

  “Please, Mom. Don’t ruin the moment.”

  “I’m not going to ruin anything. But if you can’t see that this job is crazy after all of this, I don’t know what. Herb Roseman would hire you in a minute, and you’d make good money, too.”

  Dagny grimaced.

  “That’s all I’m saying.” She pantomimed the zipping of her lips and left.

  Dagny fell into a long nap. After she woke, Julia and Jack Bremmer came to see her, followed by less familiar faces, drawn by morning news reports that Dagny had been found. Friends and professors from college she hadn’t seen in years. Former coworkers from the firm in New York. Marjorie Brodsky and Diego Rodriguez.

  Those with past grievances forgave her for the unreturned calls and unanswered e-mails. Eventually the crowd dwindled, and the nurses turned away a few last stragglers, explaining again that Dagny needed her rest. She was surprised at how much she’d enjoyed seeing old friends and colleagues, and at how much she missed the one person who hadn’t yet come.

  “Hey, Lindbergh baby!” Victor was carrying a vase full of red and yellow tulips. “I know, I’m late; I’m completely late. You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get past the nurses.” He set the flowers by the windowsill and walked over to Dagny, reaching out to shake her hand.

  “You idiot,” she laughed. “This time a hug is actually appropriate.”

  She squeezed Victor tightly.

  Victor chuckled. “Are you okay?”

  “Apart from the fact that we let this madman kill sixteen kids, I’m doing okay. What happened at Murgentroy’s?”

  “I was hit by a dart.”

  “Yeah, I know. I heard you scream like a girl. What do you remember after that?”

  “Waking up in an ambulance. And I didn’t scream like a girl. That’s just how a scream sounds.”

  “What about Murgentroy? Did you see him come out with his gun before you were shot?”

  “No. I guess I was down before that.”

  “How long did they keep you in the hospital?”

  “Overnight. Checked out the next morning and went looking for you.”

  “That’s cute.”

  Victor seemed hurt, and Dagny regretted it immediately. “It’s not cute, Dagny. I almost found you. Was a heck of a lot closer than Fabee’s million-man army, too. This morning, in Nashville, I found his place.”

  “You found it?”

  “Just north of Nashville, in Goodlettsville.”

  “And you know it’s the place?”

  “I was standing in the basement when I got the call that you were okay.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. How did you find it?”

  “I kept tracing Rowanhouse’s dummy corporations, looking for property holdings. When he killed those kids in Nashville yesterday”—God, was that only yesterday, Dagny thought—“I figured he might have a place nearby. There were forty properties around Nashville that these companies had purchased at one time or another, thirty-nine of which seemed to be in the hands of legit people. One didn’t—and we hit it this morning.”

  “Who’s we? Fabee and his crew?”

  “You kidding? They weren’t paying any attention to me. I had seven of Goodlettsville’s finest with me.”

  “You got a search warrant from a federal judge for that?” Ownership by a dummy corporation hardly seemed to be enough to justify a warrant, and even if it were, it would have taken days to explain the convoluted circumstances to a judge, including Reginald Berry’s sex-change operation and the theft of the Matisse.

  “Heck, no. We got one from a Davidson County judge.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “On the grounds that the local property tax for the house was eight months delinquent.”

  “You’re better at this than I ever imagined.” Dagny playfully punched him in the shoulder. “What did you find there?”

  “Not much. Your hair, his. A couple of prints. He kept it pretty clean. Nice kitchen—really well stocked. Not much else in the house.”

  “ID on the prints?”

  “It’s Noel Draker. It’s him, Dag.”

  That’s all they needed. Between Dagny, the Professor, and Victor, they had a physical ID, profile, and now prints. “Fabee’s got a hundred men on the case,” Dagny said, “and yet the three of us identified him first. How is that possible?” But it didn’t matter—all that mattered was that the man she was going to kill finally had a name.

  “I still don’t get it. What was it all about?” Victor asked.

  “What?”

  “Kidnapping you. Why’d he do it?”

  “He said he was worried about my health.” She paused. “About my eating. He fed me. Gourmet meals, even. Said he could never become accustomed to bad food. I guess he was talking about prison food.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. He tries to run us down in Cincinnati, but now he wants to save your life?”

  “He says he didn’t try and run us down in Cincinnati.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then who tried to run us over?”

  She shrugged. “You got me. Just how upset is your fiancée about you
working this case?”

  He laughed. “Almost that upset.”

  “What about my stuff?”

  “Computer, gun, bag? It’s in my car.”

  “Then let’s get out of here.” Dagny jumped out of the bed and slipped on her shoes.

  “You’re supposed to stay.”

  “Draker killed sixteen elementary school kids yesterday. I’m not going to hang out in a hospital bed. Help me distract the guards.”

  Victor’s stern grimace slowly melted away. “Okay.” He headed toward the door, then turned to Dagny. “So have I reached partner status yet?”

  “You’re up to master apprentice.”

  PART III

  THE WHERE

  CHAPTER 39

  April 17—Cincinnati, Ohio

  Chuck Wells reached down, grabbed the handle of the rolling steel door, and pushed it up. Dagny stepped forward and surveyed the warehouse holdings. “It’s like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

  “Raiders of the what?” the Professor asked. Victor was back in Virginia, tracing through Rowanhouse’s and Draker’s finances, so the Professor had decided to hit the field with Dagny. She was glad he hadn’t said anything about her escape from the hospital, and was worried that he would slow her down.

  “Like the last scene of Citizen Kane.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She surveyed the first row of boxes. All of the boxes had been taped shut, and all of the tape had been slashed. “Fabee’s team has already been through these?”

  “Fabee himself was here last night,” Wells said.

  “Alone?”

  “No, he had an entourage. A fat guy, a skinny guy, and a guy with a high voice.”

  “I’ve met them,” Dagny said.

  “I’m sorry,” Wells replied. She really did like Wells. He wished them luck, then left them to the files.

  There were 451 boxes, stacked five tall and three deep, against the left wall of the room. Two folding tables and a couple of chairs were crammed between these boxes and the first of twenty-eight rows of metal shelves, each filled with more boxes. Fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead. There were no windows. The room smelled like sawdust. Dagny had spent weeks in similar warehouses when she was a lawyer. Back then, she was billing a client over $300 an hour, staying in posh hotels, and indifferent to her work. Now she was staying in a Radisson at the government rate and trying to save lives.

  With less than two weeks until Draker’s next atrocity, it might have seemed absurd to spend several days looking through boxes of old documents. But the government had spent a year investigating Draker’s securities fraud case, and if Dagny and the Professor could spend a few days learning a year’s worth of knowledge, it seemed like a good investment of time.

  They started with the investigators’ documents, poring through case summaries, 302s, grand jury transcripts, warrants, pleadings, and motions. The files were a mess. Pleadings were mislabeled. Folders were out of order. Some of the interview memoranda and photographs listed on the file index were missing.

  When they finished with the Bureau’s case file, they moved to boxes of seized documents and artifacts: photo albums, checkbooks, e-mails and calendars, contracts, pay stubs, tax returns, deeds, tens of thousands of pages of incomprehensible spreadsheets, an equal volume of lines of code. Luckily, most of the financial documents had been scanned or saved in electronic format. Dagny sent copies of the discs by overnight courier to Victor, who stood a better chance of understanding them than they did.

  They sifted through Draker’s personal items—clothes and trinkets and credit-card receipts. While the Professor thought it was useful to know that Draker had once purchased a 1787 bottle of Château d’Yquem, it meant little to Dagny. She was looking for signs of personal animus and finding little. At times, the whole endeavor felt like a waste. Some of her time felt more wasteful than others, like the hour she spent thumbing through Draker’s college yearbooks, wondering how the smiling kid in the pictures had turned into a monster.

  They ate junk, mostly. Pizza and burgers and fried chicken. Deli trays. Egg McMuffins. The Professor tried his first burrito and liked it. Dagny forced herself to eat. Time was slipping, and the stakes were high. She needed her energy and health.

  After seven days, they’d looked through every box, if not every page. None of the documents individually set forth a complete narrative, but altogether they told the story of the rise and fall of Noel Draker.

  The rise: Noel Draker was born in Bethel, New York, on August 16, 1969. When he was seven, his parents moved to Cincinnati, where his father managed a record store, and his mother sold crafts at Findlay Market. Neither parent seemed to know what to make of their extraordinarily gifted son, a chubby and awkward boy who skipped the first, third, fifth, and seventh grades.

  When he was ten, Dewitt Country Day, an exclusive private high school, offered the young prodigy its first academic scholarship, perhaps anticipating that Draker might one day be a valuable alum. On his first day of class, a teacher stayed late to teach Draker how to program in BASIC. Two weeks later, Draker taught the teacher how to program in COBOL, Pascal, and Fortran.

  The computer lab was a refuge for a poor prepubescent kid surrounded by the rich and spoiled scions of Cincinnati’s elite. When Draker was twelve, the school asked him to develop software for recording attendance and grades. Draker’s final product did both, and kept track of the school’s budget, analyzed teacher performance, and generated automated tuition invoices. Draker tinkered with these programs obsessively—slashing unnecessary lines of code and adding new features. During his senior year, the thirteen-year-old sold copies of the bundled software to a few local schools, and then, as word spread, to schools across the country. He used profits from these sales to pay off his parents’ mortgage and buy a plane ticket to Boston, where he enrolled at MIT.

  For Draker, the MIT computer lab was a geek fraternity, full of jokes and pranks, kinship and camaraderie. Fellow students accepted the fourteen-year-old whiz kid as one of their own. It was a welcome antidote to the high school years spent as an outcast. Draker gained contacts and knowledge, and most importantly, confidence. After graduation, he moved to Washington, DC, where he spent two years developing troop- and supply-tracking software for the Department of Defense. Convinced the same tools would be valuable for corporations, he moved back to Cincinnati and started Drakersoft, Inc. Within three years, his company had grown to three hundred employees and was coding complex database software for some of the nation’s biggest companies—billing software for Procter & Gamble, reservations software for Delta, and asset-management software for banks and investment companies. Although his company grew considerably, Draker did not simply recede into corporate management. He was reputed to have reviewed every line of code that left his company.

  With wealth came women—an endless parade he marched into ballrooms and galas. Cincinnati was a family town, so the old-money establishment disapproved. He bought some acclaim with a series of extravagant fund-raisers, philanthropic donations, and a whole fleet of “ships”—sponsorships, fellowships, and scholarships. In 1990, Drakersoft’s long-awaited IPO pushed its CEO’s net worth to more than a hundred million dollars. He moved to a mansion in Indian Hill, the suburb of choice for the city’s wealthy elite. Locals called Draker’s impressive estate “the Playboy Mansion.”

  The fall: At the time of Draker’s IPO, there was lots of money in the company. Revenue had grown exponentially, and investors expected this to continue. Draker knew that it could not. A competitor’s package of database-and-accounting software started to gain market share, and while its database design was inferior to Draker’s, its accounting system was much better. But the best accounting software on the market had been developed by Seymour Dutton, a twenty-two-year-old college dropout who had founded a start-up in Atlanta called Systematic Software.

  Draker and Dutton negotiated a deal; Draker would package Systematic’s billing software with Drakersoft’
s database software and pay Systematic 25 percent of the net profit.

  The deal with Systematic helped Drakersoft maintain its market share, but Draker was hardly assuaged. Convinced that the software industry was headed for a downturn, Draker instructed his financial officers to invest the company’s savings in a diverse array of non-technological holdings. The corporation established separate, affiliated entities to manage these investments. A shopping mall in Columbus. A resort on the coast of South Carolina. An automotive parts factory in Oregon. Dozens and dozens of other varied interests. Draker’s managers served as officers for these corporations, overseeing their operations while continuing to spend most of their time fulfilling their duties to Drakersoft.

  The funds Draker invested in these holdings were recorded as loans to be paid back at a stipulated rate of interest. Draker hoped that these payments would provide a steady stream of income to the company, but many of the businesses struggled to make the promised payments. Under SEC regulations, Drakersoft was obligated to disclose the poor performance of these investments in its quarterly and yearly financial reports, and write off the bad debt on its balance sheets. And if it had, the company’s share price might have dropped a bit, and shareholders could have raised issues with the company’s management, perhaps even scrutinized executive pay. Still, it was something the company could have weathered. But instead, the company committed fraud.

  In order to mask the investment losses, Drakersoft recorded some of the sales of the Drakersoft-Systematic suite as stand-alone sales of Drakersoft’s database software, pocketing Systematic’s 25 percent, while recording this money as though it had come from its affiliated entities as payment of interest on their debts. Eventually, an account manager, Frank Ryder, noticed what was happening and notified some of the company’s large institutional investors. Two days later, lawyers filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Drakersoft’s investors. Chesley Waxton was one of the named plaintiffs. News of the lawsuit prompted the SEC and DOJ to investigate Drakersoft’s books.