The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  The securities fraud dominated the headlines almost every day for a year. Tonally, they grew from a simmer to a boil. “Earnings Overstatement Alleged.” “Improprieties at Drakersoft?” “Accounting Misdeeds Taint Success.” “Books? Cooked.” “Management Implicated.” “Tales of the Unemployed.” “Pensions Depleted.” “Draker’s House of Cards.” “He Knew.” “One Victim Asks, ‘Why?’” “Childhood Classmates Not Surprised.” “The Party Continues While The House Burns Down.” “Victims Angry.” “Lost Jobs, Lost Savings.” “The Price of Arrogance.” “Draker Admits Guilt, Takes Plea.” “Monster.” Monster—the same headline then as now. The first time, it wasn’t fair. Even if he had been guilty, theft is not equivalent to murder, no matter how rich he’d been.

  One man, Jeremy Hawkins, was quoted in seven different articles as saying, “The more we learn, the madder I get.” An ex-employee, Loretta Stevens, appeared in five different articles, each time declaring, “I knew something was wrong when I worked for that man. The man had a case of the no-good.” Spaced weeks apart, the recycling of quotes probably went unnoticed. Read cumulatively within a few hours, it was astonishing just how lazy the reporting had been.

  The photographs—missing from the online databases—were the real revelation. The earliest photographs of Draker showed a man that was friendly and harmless. Over the months of the scandal, his smiled faded. Draker’s eyes grew hollow. He seemed to shrink. One photograph captured the local US Attorney decrying Draker’s behavior on the courthouse steps, encircled by a throng of reporters and photographers. Another showed Percy Reynolds, looking downright dapper and handsome in his navy pin-striped Armani suit; with short dark hair and a clean shave, he was a far cry from the man Dagny had met in New Mexico. Even Judge Nagel looked almost young in a series of pictures taken in his chambers. Photographs of the FBI’s raid showed Dagny’s brethren at their most Gestapo-like. The scope of the operation amazed Dagny. Dozens of agents were part of the raid. An endless stream of them carried boxes from Draker’s headquarters. In one photograph, Murgentroy was smiling at the camera, mugging with fellow agents.

  Dagny inserted a quarter into the machine and pressed “print,” then packed up the reels and returned them to the counter. She had come to Cincinnati to look for answers, and she had found the biggest one of all.

  CHAPTER 54

  May 13—Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

  A light flashed on, and Percy Reynolds opened the door, hair unkempt, eyes droopy, wearing slippers and an open bathrobe, red-checked boxers, and a torn white T-shirt. Reynolds rubbed his eyes, shook his head, and chuckled. “I figured you’d be back.”

  Dagny followed Reynolds to his living room. “I’ll put on some coffee,” he said. Dagny sat on the sofa and looked around. He’d cleaned up since the last time she’d been there. There were no pizza boxes or wineglasses, just magazines scattered on the coffee table—copies of attorney trade journals and newsletters, mostly.

  “Black?” he called.

  “Yes.” She needed the coffee—adrenaline wasn’t doing the trick anymore.

  A few minutes later, he returned with two mugs and handed her the one that read “World’s Worst Boss.” “Parting gift from my secretary,” he explained. He sat down in a recliner and extended the footrest.

  “Mr. Reynolds, I need to ask you some questions.”

  “I doubt I’ll be much help to you, Agent Gray. I’m afraid the attorney-client privilege survives the client’s death.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to tell me anything that Draker told you in confidence. I’m just going to lay out what I think happened, step by step, and all I want you to do is tell me if you think I’m wrong. Can you do that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Because I can’t afford to be wrong.”

  “I understand.”

  “Let’s start with the baseball.”

  She’d spent the last few days digging even deeper into the Draker case. She spent the next two hours laying out everything she believed about it. When she was finished, Reynolds did not say she was wrong.

  There was a signboard at the front of the terminal. One side showed a map of the various gates, restaurants, and shops. The other featured the retouched photograph of a woman’s face. The model looked familiar in the way that all models do. Her face was symmetrical, neither long nor round. Her chin was neither prominent nor recessed; her eyebrows thick, but not too thick, perfectly shaped, but not too shaped. Her features were average in every way, and therefore spectacular. She was, of course, thin. The photograph was black and white, except for the bright-pink shade of the woman’s lips, and the bright-pink lipstick tip protruding from the tube she clenched in her mouth, the way a dog clenches a bone. Although dozens walked by this advertisement every second, no one seemed to notice it, except for a three-year-old boy who stopped in front of it and stared. It seemed like he was trying to make some sense of it.

  Dagny watched the boy stare at the image, and tried to make sense of it. The Professor’s voice jolted her out of her trance. “You want me to what?”

  “I want you to call the president, because we’re going to need more help on this,” she whispered into the receiver. The man in front of her moved forward, and she followed, inching close to the counter.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Professor, it’s time to cash in your chips.”

  “Dagny, there aren’t any chips.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know the president.”

  “But you saved his father?”

  “It never happened.”

  “You never saved his father?”

  “No. It’s just a rumor. Just a glorious rumor.”

  Dagny laughed. “But that’s the only reason we got to work this case.” The person in front of her was collecting his order.

  “That’s why it’s a glorious rumor. But it only works when I threaten to call the president. I can’t actually call the man.”

  “You really don’t know the president?” And then to the woman behind the counter, “Minibon, light icing.”

  “What?”

  “You really don’t know the president?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just a rumor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you start the rumor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then I guess it’s time for plan B.”

  She hung up the phone, ate her cinnamon roll, and called plan B.

  CHAPTER 55

  May 14—Washington, DC

  He was late.

  Dagny sat at the corner table, taking turns with a Carta Blanca and the remnants of a basket of chips and guacamole. She looked at her watch again. Thirty minutes—maybe he wasn’t going to come.

  But he did. A dark man in a polo shirt and chinos entered the restaurant, blew past the hostess, and flashed a sheepish grin at Dagny. “Sorry,” he said when he got to her table.

  “For what? Showing up late, or selling me out to Fabee?”

  He slid into the seat across from her. “Now this is exactly why I was afraid to come.” And when Dagny said nothing, he added, “Sorry for both.”

  “You said I was your lottery ticket when I was your meal ticket.”

  “How long you been saving that one?”

  “Since about ten minutes after you drove out of that garage.”

  “It would have been better then.”

  “I was too busy processing your betrayal to come up with the zinger.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Dagny? Ignore orders from my superior?”

  “Yes. Yes. Exactly that.”

  “That’s not realistic.”

  “When did you start selling me out? Was it when I ran into you in New Mexico? When you gave me the Matisse? Was it at the diner in Bethel?”

  Brent laughed. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “It started in the Professor’s classroom, Dagny.”

  That hadn
’t occurred to her. “Why?”

  “HQ wanted someone to keep an eye on what the Professor was doing. And don’t be all shocked about it. You yourself asked how a blue-flamer like me could make a mistake like taking that class. Well, the answer is I couldn’t.”

  “I thought we were friends, Brent.”

  “We were. We are. I gave you the Matisse, by the way, on my own and at my peril. And anyway, some moral authority you have. You wanted me to be an ‘inside man,’ ratting out Fabee. Yet I don’t sit in judgment of you.”

  “This case was personal.”

  “You got what you wanted. You got Draker.” It wasn’t going as she’d hoped. She needed some sign of remorse—some indication she could trust him. And then he gave it to her. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve lost sleep over this. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I like you, Dagny Gray. I like you a lot, actually. Enough that this tore at me.”

  “Enough to want to heal the wound?”

  He sighed. “You’re not going to ask me to do something that could get me fired, are you?”

  “Fired?” she laughed. “If I’m wrong and we’re caught, we’ll go to jail.”

  Brent flashed his badge in front of the sensor and the door unlocked. “You’re lucky this stuff is still here. In another day or so, it’s all being sent to deep storage.”

  Dagny wondered what “deep storage” was, because this warehouse, as big as a football field, seemed deep enough. Thousands of boxes filled dozens of rows of tall shelves. A tall, periscoping ladder was placed at the end of each row. “This is a bit overwhelming.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” Brent said. “Everything is indexed. Ninety-nine percent of this stuff is just financial documentation, deeds, canceled checks. The stuff you want will be up front.” Brent paused for a second, looking puzzled. “Wait. What do you want?”

  “I want the bullet that killed Tucker.”

  “The dog?”

  “Yeah.”

  Brent walked over to a set of binders, flipped through the first one, and called out, “B-ninety-one-point-sixty-three.” Dagny walked to the second aisle and worked her way down until she found the right box, then slid the ladder into place. She climbed up to the top shelf, opened the lid, and thumbed through the box. When she came to a folder marked “B-91.63,” she found a bullet, wrapped in a clear plastic bag, marked with a sticker identifying the date and location of Tucker’s death.

  “Is it there?” Brent asked.

  “It’s here,” she said, dejected.

  “Sorry, Dag.”

  She stuffed the bag with the bullet into her backpack, closed the box lid, and climbed down the ladder. “How about the bullet that killed Murgentroy?” Brent walked back to the binders and called out “E-forty-one-point-thirty-two.” Dagny tracked down the box, grabbed that bullet from the file, and stuffed it into her backpack, too. Then she collected the bullets from the Silverses’ murders and from Waxton Savings and Loan. Every bullet was accounted for; she had been sure that one would be missing.

  “Now what, Sherlock?”

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

  CHAPTER 56

  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?”