The Bubble Gum Thief (11 page)

She turned away from the mirror and looked over to the bathroom scale, pondered its influence and power, and nudged it to the center of the floor. Mike stood beside her. To let him stand there and watch this was as intimate as she could ever be. She stepped onto the scale and watched the numbers flutter: 1-1-8. She’d lost a pound.

“There’s plenty of time,” Mike said.

Back in the bedroom, Dagny dressed quickly—nylon running shorts, a sports bra, and a Libertarian Party sweatshirt she wore only under the cover of darkness. She pulled on her advanced-performance, friction-free, low-cut socks and a worn pair of Nikes she’d soon have to replace. “You coming?”

“Yes.” He pulled on his shorts and put on his sneakers. “Mount Vernon this time?

“You got it.” She grabbed her keys, her iPod, and her gun, and raced him down the stairs.

She knew that a tablespoon of sesame seeds had 52 calories and that 40 of them were from fat. So when she saw the hamburger bun, she tried to guess whether the seeds scattered on top of it amounted to a quarter of a tablespoon, or just a fifth, and even though the difference was only 2.4 calories and entirely inconsequential, she couldn’t stop herself from doing the calculation. And then there was the bun itself—which was impossible to estimate. A kaiser roll at the grocery store, similar in size, registered 180 calories, 20 from fat, but this restaurant bun was probably made with more butter and sugar, so it was probably 220 calories, 50 from fat.

The cheese, which she’d ordered only because of the dire circumstance of Cooper’s ultimatum, was a Vermont cheddar. A normal slice of cheddar cheese was about 80 calories (60 from fat); this slice was thicker than normal, probably more like 120 calories (90 from fat), she decided.

The burger was tricky, too. She knew that three ounces of extra-lean ground beef had 208 calories (116 from fat); doubling that would be 416 (and 232). But this wasn’t extra-lean ground beef, so maybe it was closer to 300 from fat.

As for the toppings, she figured 6 calories for the slice of tomato (none from fat), 10 for the red onion (again, none from fat), maybe 5 for the slice of lettuce (no fat). These things weren’t really worth counting, but she counted them anyway.

The tablespoon of ketchup was easy—15 calories, and just 1 from fat. The sweet-potato fries she took from Mike’s plate added maybe another 200 calories (80 from fat). All told, this
decadent, monstrous meal was about 1,000 calories, and more than 500 from fat.

To do this calculation, Dagny needed neither pen nor calculator. It took no mental gymnastics; she processed it in seconds. She did it while listening intently to Mike’s story and laughing at the appropriate moments. He surely had no idea what was happening inside her head. No one did. She was a Rain Man with calories.

They were eating dinner at Ray’s Hell Burger Too, a gourmet burger joint in Arlington. Dagny preferred chain restaurants, which posted nutritional information on their websites. Usually, she’d peruse the site and select her meal in advance; for the more popular restaurants, she’d committed the relevant information to memory. The point of this wasn’t to avoid the trouble of calculation on the spot; that effort was minimal. The point was to establish certainty, and to avoid the pitfalls of estimation and guesswork. While she believed that there were 1,000 calories on the plate in front of her, she wasn’t certain, and this caused her some anxiety.

Another calculation was causing her anxiety. A runner can determine her calorie burn by multiplying her weight in pounds by three-quarters of the number of miles run. She’d run fifteen miles that morning, which translated into a burn of a little over 1,300 calories. The massive meal in front of her didn’t even offset the calories she’d burned. And she ran this much every day.

Mike had never, not once, chided her for eating too little or running too much. He was simply there for her. And that was enough to both inspire and shame her. Were she alone this evening, she would not be eating a cheeseburger and fries. Most likely, she would not be eating at all. The task of gaining seven pounds in twelve days would have overwhelmed her. With Mike, she just went along for the ride, trusting that it would work, because it had to.

After dinner, they walked up Wilson Boulevard to Boccato Gelato. The thought of eating more disgusted her, but she did not protest or quibble. She did not suggest Pinkberry or lobby for sorbet. The uphill hike cost her another 50 calories, she guessed, so she more than offset that by taking her treat in a cone. They sat on a bench by the street, eating their gelato, watching pregnant bellies and strollers pass by.

“There are times I feel completely alien,” Dagny said. “Where I find myself watching the world with a detached fascination, utterly incapable of relating to it in any meaningful way.”

Mike leaned back and put his arm around her, pulling her closer.

“But I don’t feel that way now,” she said.

March 12—Quantico, Virginia

The Professor slid a piece of paper across his desk. The header indicated that it had been faxed by the Cincinnati Police Department. The paper was blank except for the faint outline of a business card around two lines of rather ominous text.

“Strange font,” Dagny replied. “Bookman Antiqua, maybe? I take it that this was left at the scene of some crime?”

“A bank robbery.” The Professor handed Dagny a printout from
The Cincinnati Enquirer
’s website. “Man dressed as an old woman takes a couple of drawers and an unusually valuable baseball. The bank was understaffed, as one employee had been called away to a fictitious loan opportunity and another had car problems. An inspection of the car revealed tampering.”

“So the thief did some planning.”

“Too much for such small stakes,” he said. “How’d you know it was Bookman Antiqua?”

“Yearbook and paper.”

“What?”

“High-school yearbook editor. Worked for the college paper.”

The newspaper article focused on the stolen baseball. It had been caught by César Gerónimo of the Cincinnati Reds to record the final out of the 1975 World Series, and had been signed by numerous players, including Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, and Tony Pérez. The bank’s owner, Chesley Waxton, had bought the ball for $25,000 at a charity auction thirteen years earlier. He seemed more distressed by its disappearance than by the disruption to the bank’s business or the threat to his employees. The article noted the thief’s mysterious note in passing, adding that the reporter was unable to find accounts of the implied earlier crimes.

Dagny knew that the Professor’s interest had nothing to do with the baseball. “You’re curious about crimes one through four?”

“I’m more curious about crimes six and up,” he said. “The case is being handled in Cincinnati by Lieutenant Ronald Beamer. He told me that no similar cards have been reported. Maybe the crimes haven’t been discovered. Or maybe he’s not just committing them in Cincinnati. Or maybe the card is a hoax.”

“I assume you want a thorough investigation?”

“Just a little information. Don’t make it seem like anything official.”

“I’ll start right after class.”

“Skip class. I’m not talking about anything important this afternoon.”

“How is that different from this morning?”

The Professor sighed. “Why aren’t you afraid of me, Dagny Gray?”

Dagny smiled, then gathered her things and headed for the door.

“Wait.”

When she turned around, a brown paper bag was hurtling toward her. “Lunch!”

This is my fifth crime. My next will be bigger.
Dagny searched Google for earlier permutations, assuming there were earlier cards. When Google came up empty—the FBI had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases, and none of them were as good as Google—she tried Yahoo!, Bing,
Ask.com
, and even HotBot, which she hadn’t searched since 1999.

Still nothing.

Dagny logged onto Westlaw and searched through ten years of newspapers, magazines, and wire services. When nothing came up, she tried the same in LexisNexis. Nothing.

It was time for a more direct approach. Dagny found a list of the hundred most populated American cities on Wikipedia. Then she searched for an e-mail address for each city’s police department, starting with New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and working her way down to Birmingham, Alabama; Gilbert, Arizona; and Rochester, New York—skipping only Cincinnati. After dropping the addresses into the bcc line, she drafted an e-mail describing the Cincinnati bank robbery and requesting any information about crimes involving a similar calling card. She asked that each police department forward the e-mail to smaller neighboring municipalities, and that they in turn pass it along to villages and townships. If chain e-mails worked for Viagra spammers and the “Prince of Nigeria,” maybe they’d work for the FBI, too.

After an hour, thirty-nine cities had responded, none with useful information. A few personal e-mails arrived, too. Julia Bremmer wrote to say that she and Jack couldn’t meet Dagny and Mike for dinner because Jonathan was sick. The Harvard Law School Association of DC announced yet another happy hour that Dagny would skip. A Google news alert told her that Dan Bern was releasing a new album.

More responses came: Albuquerque, Pittsburgh, Tulsa, Buffalo, Newark, and Virginia Beach all responded negatively
before Dagny received Officer Eduardo Perez’s e-mail from Chula Vista, California. She called him.

“Dad putting the kids to bed hears the dog barking in the backyard, doesn’t know what’s going on, then hears a gunshot, runs outside, and the dog is dead. Shooter ran off. Guy left a card with the dog—‘This is my third crime. My next will be bigger.’”

“When did this happen?” Dagny asked.

She heard the rustling of pages. “February first, around nine p.m.”

“Did you guys check the make on the gun?”

“No.” Pause. “It was
only a dog
, Agent Gray. But we do have the bullet.”

Dagny wanted that bullet, which made her realize that she’d been cooped up in a classroom for too long. The Professor just wanted a little information, not an investigation. She absolutely couldn’t ask for the bullet.

“Can you send me the bullet?”

“Sure.”

“Shell?”

“Don’t have it.”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Hmmm,” Perez hummed. “Well, the card was taped to the dog’s head. The dog was a German shepherd. Name was Tucker. And there was a stick of gum on the back of the card.”

“What do you mean?”

“He had taped a stick of gum on the back of the card.”

“Unchewed?”

“If he had chewed it, he wouldn’t have needed the tape, right?” Maybe Perez was still smarting over the unintended implication that he should have checked the make of the gun.

“Was the gum still in a wrapper?”

“It was in the silver foil.”

“Do you know what kind of gum it was?”

“Jesus, lady. It was a doggycide, for Christ’s sake.”

“Officer Perez, I don’t mean to suggest that you
should
have checked the make of the gun or the make of the
gum
, for that matter.” She wanted to laugh, but restrained herself. “I understand that it is a relatively small crime, and that your resources are better used elsewhere. I’m just pursuing information, not insinuating that you haven’t done a thorough and complete job, and I apologize for any implication otherwise.”

Perez seemed to realize that he had overreacted. “Yeah, look, I’m sorry if I snapped. It’s been crazy lately.”

Dagny didn’t ask him what this meant, even though it seemed he wanted her to. “Would it be possible for you to scan the file and send it to me by e-mail? When things settle down?”

“Yeah, of course. And you want the bullet? FedEx?”

“That’s fine.”

“So you think this dog-killer robbed a bank in Cincinnati?”

“Looks like it.”

“Have you heard anything about the other three crimes yet?” he asked.

“No. But I’m still waiting to hear from a lot of departments.”

“Do you think he stole the gum?”

She misheard him. “The gun?”

“No, the
gum
.”

Dagny hadn’t thought about it. “You mean as his first crime?”

“If you were going to start small, could you start any smaller?”

“That’s a good theory.”

Perez seemed pleased with the praise. Dagny thanked him, gave her home address, and said she might call upon him again.

Perez’s theory was good, but it worried Dagny. It would be better if the first crime was grand theft or burglary. Stealing a stick of gum was a long way from bank robbery, and such a steep trajectory made Dagny worry about the nature of crime number six.

She surfed the web while a few more unhelpful e-mails came in. At a quarter to five, she packed up her things and headed back to the classroom. Along the way, she stopped at a vending machine and purchased a pack of Wrigley’s Extra. She fished one of her business cards from her backpack and held the stick of gum to the back of the card. The gum was shorter than the card by half a centimeter on each side. She folded the gum in her mouth and continued to class.