The Bubble Gum Thief (13 page)

“Shouldn’t you be playing with women your own age? What are you, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-four, actually.”

“Do you have any idea how old I am?”

“Thirty-eight?”

Dagny ignored this and hoped to ride in silence. Adams wouldn’t oblige.

“So what’s the deal?” he asked. “You have a boyfriend or something? I don’t see any ring.”

She resolved to rent a car the next time she came to Cincinnati. “Yes.”

“A feeb?”

“No.”

“Well, what’s he do?”

“He’s an artist.” She instantly wished that she had said he was a professor.

Adams shook his head and chuckled. “Does he have the earring and everything?”

“You’re one to talk, with that surfer hair.”

“This is a very normal haircut for people my age,” Adams stammered.

“Yeah, I think I’ve seen it on
The Real World
.” She was proud of her dig, though it had no effect on Adams.

Dagny was eager to sit down by the gate and return to her book and the gritty world of detective Hieronymus Bosch, but all the seats were taken. Instead, she leaned against a pole and watched a mother play with her kids. The mom was thirty, maybe younger. Her four-year-old son’s jeans were too big, and they bunched under his belt in the back when he rolled a small fire truck on the carpet, chasing his two-year-old sister. The sister toddled like a penguin, crashing to the ground after every few steps, laughing hysterically each time. The mom helped the daughter up after every tumble, holding her by her hands until she could steady herself. Moments later, when the dad returned with ice-cream cones, all play stopped. The two-year-old started clapping wildly, sometimes missing her hands and hitting her arms. The mother shared her cone with the daughter and a smile with her husband. The son devoured everything that made it into his mouth and wore the rest. When they finished, the mom wiped the kids’ faces clean while the dad tidied the carpet beneath them.

Dagny started to cry. Usually she was able to keep it together. Sometimes she couldn’t. She went to the bathroom and washed her face. When she returned, the plane was boarding. Cheeks still puffy, Dagny took her seat and started to read. A man sat down
next to her and looked at her book. “I love Harry Bosch. Haven’t read that one yet.”

She nodded but continued reading. Mercifully, he pulled out a Jeffery Deaver novel and they took off in peace. A half hour later, the man closed his book with an exaggerated flourish. “Man, that was good. Do you ever read Deaver?” Dagny noticed his shoes—polished brown Oxfords with an impossible shine. “Edward Green,” he said.

“You’re Edward Green?”

“No, the shoes you’re looking at. Edward Greens. From England.”

“Oh.”

She guessed from his salt-and-pepper hair that he was in his late thirties, maybe forty. He was handsome and fit, with cute dimples and a cleft chin. Deep-blue eyes. His voice was calm and soothing.

“So do you read Deaver?”

“I’ve read the Lincoln Rhymes.”

“I love his twists at the end. You know, how you think the story is over, but then you find out there was more going on, and that someone else did something, too. This one,” he brandished the book, “had a triple twist.”

“Sometimes he tacks on one twist too many,” she said.

“Maybe, but it’s always an amazing ride.”

She went back to her book. By the time the plane started its initial descent, Dagny was thirty pages from the end.

“So are you from DC?”

“Yes,” she said, eyes still focused on her book.

He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and pulled out a silver business-card holder. “I’m going to be in town this week, so if you’d like to get together...” He shook the card holder and a card fluttered down on the page of her book. She slammed it shut and closed her eyes. And then she thought about how lucky she had been to find Mike, and how much she missed him after only a matter of hours.

March 14—Arlington, Virginia

If Snoopy’s doghouse could accommodate a pool table and Jacuzzi, maybe it made sense that the Professor’s quaint Tudor could hold his absurdly massive, marvelous study. It was at least thirty feet by thirty, maybe larger. Built-in bookcases—made of dark, rich oak—rose from the floor to the fifteen-foot ceiling along each of the walls, breaking only for the doorway, and even then extending on up from the top of the frame. Sliding ladders graced each of the walls to enable book retrieval at the highest levels. The floor was covered in a plush dark-blue carpet. Tall reading tables with flexible brass lights ran down the left and right sides of the room. Two couches faced each other in the middle of the room, perpendicular to the Professor’s large oak desk. A glass coffee table sat between the couches; the glass afforded a view of an embroidered FBI seal in the middle of the floor.

The Professor was perched on the couch opposite Dagny, chewing the end of his pipe and stroking his beard. He’d ended the class two days early, ostensibly to ponder the bank robbery but more likely because he’d grown bored with it. Dagny had
spent the last hour walking him through the information she had collected in Cincinnati.

“If the third crime was February first and the fifth was March first, it would suggest that the first was January first.”

“It’s a reasonable supposition,” the Professor responded. “If he is as mathematically minded as he seems, the second and fourth crimes would have occurred in the middle of January and February respectively. I wonder...” the Professor said, rubbing his temples.

“What do you wonder?”

“Months are of different lengths, so the middle of January might fall at noon on January sixteenth, while the middle of February is technically the stroke of midnight on the fourteenth. Or is that technically midnight on the morning of February fifteenth? Which way does midnight fall?”

“I think it would fall on the morning of the next day, but—”

“I wonder if he is more concerned with mathematical accuracy or symmetry,” the Professor interrupted. “Would he want the even-numbered crimes to fall exactly within the middle of each month, or would he prefer that they fall on the same numerical day each month?”

“I don’t think we know enough about him to make an educated guess.”

The Professor grabbed a remote from his desktop and pressed a button, causing a large white dry-erase board to descend from the ceiling. He wrote the numbers one through eight across the top of the board. Under the number one, he wrote gum, followed by a question mark. Under three, he wrote dog, and under five, he wrote bank. Then he inscribed a series of dates under each of the crimes. The odd-numbered crimes started with 1/1 and increased to 4/1. The even-numbered crimes began with 1/15 and continued to 4/15. Every date, except for crimes three and five, earned a question mark. When he had finished, the Professor sat back and contemplated the board.

“Is killing a dog three-fifths of robbing a bank?” he asked. Killing a dog seemed worse than robbing a bank to Dagny. People robbed banks because they wanted money. People killed dogs because they were evil. “I wish we knew about the gum he stole,” he said, adding, “if he stole it.”

“Chewey’s Cinnamon.”

“No, I mean the number of sticks in the pack.”

“You think he’s planning to commit crimes until the pack runs out?”

“Probably.”

Dagny took out her laptop.

“I don’t have Internet here,” the Professor apologized.

So many books, but no Google. “I get the Internet everywhere.” Dagny had a Sprint 4G card, which brought high-speed Internet to her MacBook in most metropolitan areas. She searched the web for the Chewey’s home page. Scrolling through the list of products, she found Chewey’s Cinnamon Gum. “This isn’t very helpful,” she said. “They sell it in packs of five, ten, twelve, and fifteen. I can’t tell if this is an exhaustive list.”

“I think we can safely assume it wasn’t a pack of five. The card makes it clear that he plans to continue.”

“You seem to have a lot of faith that he’s sticking to some rules.”

“Sometimes they cheat,” the Professor said. “But usually not until later.”

“What do you think is next?”

“Assuming he started with gum, worked up to dog killing and then bank robbery, I think we’re due for a murder.” The Professor tugged at his beard. “If he didn’t start with gum but started with something bigger, then maybe he hasn’t worked his way to murder yet. Maybe the increments are smaller. Maybe a kidnapping.”

“You think that it’s clearly one person? Even with the geography?”

“Can I see the security footage?” he asked.

Dagny placed her computer in front of the Professor and inserted the DVD. The Professor occasionally nodded, but remained silent until the end of the recording. “Either this person had some help or is very talented with makeup—maybe even a background in theatrical arts.” He paused. “Or he just did his research.” The Professor scrolled back through the footage and stopped on the culprit’s face. The man’s cheeks were uneven and seemed to sag. One of the brows extended a little farther forward than the other. “The prosthetics on his face make him appear much heavier than he actually is.”

He walked to his desk, picked up the phone, and mumbled something. “Getting a snack,” the Professor explained. A short while later, a striking grey-haired woman walked into the room carrying a tray with an assortment of cheeses and grapes. She set the tray down on the coffee table and offered her hand to Dagny.

“I’m Martha McDougal. You must be Dagny?”

“Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Is he being nice to you?”

Dagny looked over at the Professor, who pretended not to be paying attention. “Very much so.”

“Well, that’s unusual.” She smiled at Dagny and then turned to her husband. “You keep playing nice.”

The Professor shrugged off the admonition. “I’ll be however I damn well want.” It came out meeker than he must have hoped.

“If he acts up, Dagny, let me know,” she said, before leaving them to their work.

“Eat something,” the Professor ordered.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Today of all days, you’ll eat it. You’re of no use to me on medical leave.”

He professed only self-interest, but she sensed some underlying affection. Dagny grabbed a handful of grapes. “Professor,
what do we do now? He’s probably going to commit another crime sometime in the next couple of days, maybe even today. It may be a murder. That doesn’t give us much time to—”

“We wait, Dagny. We have to wait.”

“Wait? Until someone dies? Shouldn’t we try to do something?”

“I’ll send a fax to field offices suggesting that a crime is expected, and asking them to report it to me. You should send a similar e-mail to the local police you contacted the other day. But there’s nothing else we can do. It’s not our case. And no one is going to take us seriously until someone is dead.”

The man was friends with the president; surely he could pull some strings. “Can’t you use your sway with—”

“Even if we were given the authority to move forward with an actual investigation, we don’t have the time. Sometimes you have to wait.”

“But—”

He held up his hand. She nodded, then composed her e-mail and sent it off. “Done.”

“Take the afternoon off. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning. I’ll call you if something happens before then.”

Dagny slipped into the auditorium and scuttled across the back row to an empty seat. The lights were dim so the students could study the Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting projected onto the large screen at the front of the room. It was a portrait of a nobleman—except the man’s face was composed of various vegetables, fruits, and flowers. His eyebrows were peapods; his ears were, appropriately enough, ears of corn. Dagny guessed that his nose was a pear, but it was hard to tell.

“He didn’t just paint this one painting. He painted hundreds like it,” Mike said, flashing a few more examples of Arcimboldo’s work on the screen. Upon first glance, the portraits looked like inverted bodies, as if the organs were on the outside. Only when
they came into focus were the fruits and vegetables evident. “Born in Milan in 1527. Died in 1593. Spent most of his early years rendering window designs and tapestries. And then in 1562, he moved to the imperial court in Prague and began painting like this,” he said, gesturing toward the screen.

“You might think he was mocking the elites of the day,” he continued. “Maybe he was, but the privileged lined up for the honor, paying Giuseppe handsomely to depict them like this. His work became so popular that it spawned a number of imitators, and to this day, it’s hard to tell whether some paintings were done by Giuseppe or one of his contemporary forgers.” Mike turned up the lights and raised the screen.

He lectured with a smooth, lulling cadence, and Dagny forgot about the bank-robbing dog-killer and his calling cards. When they were together, he made her forget everything else. It sounded simple, but it was what she needed, and no one else had done it.

Dagny studied the faces of the girls around her, with their forlorn glances and bobbing heads and longing sighs. Who wouldn’t love him? Strong, rugged, smart, talented. Kind, gentle. Tender.