The Bubble Gum Thief (19 page)

“I didn’t send anyone here, Mr. Adams. I told them what happened, and someone else made that call.” Dagny paused, then added, “But for the record, when a woman asks you to guess her age, always subtract five years from your approximation.”

“I did!”

She ignored that. “I need a copy of the proposal you made for Mr. Waxton.”

“You still think I did this? I was in Columbus—”

“I know. I just want to see what you recommended. Waxton’s security measures were pretty lax, and I’m just curious about what he turned down.”

“Fine.” Adams ran off to his bedroom. After a moment, they could hear a printer churning out pages. Adams returned with the proposal and handed it to Dagny.

Dagny flipped through the proposal. “Did you give Waxton the tape measure that runs up the side of the doorway?”

“No.”

“Was it there when you wrote your proposal?”

Adams shrugged. “Beats me.”

Victor grabbed the proposal from Dagny’s hands. “Can you autograph this for us, J. C.?” Victor handed the proposal and a pen to Adams, who obliged, signing his name in big, round letters.

“How’s that, buddy?” he asked.

Victor grinned like a schoolboy. “Thanks, J. C.”

“Are you really that happy about an autograph?” Dagny asked, settling in behind the wheel. “Because it’s going straight into the evidence file, you know.”

Victor held the pen in front of Dagny, then dropped it into a plastic bag. “We’ve got his fingerprints.” Victor pulled another bag containing another pen from his briefcase. “I swiped one of
Waxton’s pens, too, in case we need to distinguish his prints.” The kid was certainly trying.

Dagny didn’t have the heart to tell him that they already had Adams’s fingerprints on the proposal he’d just given them. Waxton’s prints were a good catch though.

“Can we get some dinner?” Victor asked.

“No.” She backed into the street and threw the car into drive. Finding her way was difficult. Mount Adams was a confusing maze of steep one-way streets, and parked cars on each side made for narrow clearances and tight turns. It was hard to navigate the Impala through the neighborhood, so it must have been nearly impossible for the black Chevy Suburban that pulled up behind them. Four wrong turns made Dagny wish they’d sprung for GPS. When the Suburban followed her on each wrong turn, coincidence seemed unlikely. Darkly tinted windows hid the driver from view, and there was no front license plate. Halfway through an intersection, and without signaling, Dagny spun the wheel left, tossing Victor into the passenger-side door.

“Jesus, Dagny,” Victor cried.

The Suburban was still on their tail. Dagny took another sharp turn down the long slope of Martin Drive, which led downtown. The Suburban only drew closer, filling the Impala’s rear window, then grazing its rear bumper. Dagny floored the accelerator.

“Why are you driving like a maniac?”

“Because we’re being followed, Victor.”

When the light at Fourth and Broadway turned red, Dagny punched the Impala and shot through the intersection, forcing oncoming traffic to screech to a halt. The Suburban followed behind, shooting across traffic. She knew she could lose the tail if she wanted, but catching it would be trickier. Dagny grabbed her phone and called Lieutenant Beamer, running two more lights while they concocted a plan to trap the Suburban. She circled the
federal courthouse to give a patrol car time to get into position, then swung back onto Fourth Street and headed west to Vine.

Lining up the patrol car was easy. Getting Victor involved in the plan would be hard. “When we trap him, jump out,” she explained. “Aim at his tires and shoot if he won’t stop.” Victor’s face turned white, but he nodded. She turned left onto Vine, and then turned right into a small alley called West Ogden. It wasn’t as desolate as Dagny had hoped—a drunk had just stumbled out of a bar called O’Malley’s. The Suburban followed.

When they reached the end of the alley, she slammed on the brakes. Dagny and Victor hopped out of the car with raised guns. The Suburban stopped, then shifted into reverse, and the drunk ran back into the bar. A CPD car slid across the back of the alley, blocking the Suburban’s exit. The Suburban crept slowly to the middle of the alley and stopped, a hundred feet behind the Impala. Steadying her gun with both hands, Dagny started toward the Suburban, waving for Victor to follow.

“Hands out of the window!” Dagny yelled. “Hands out!” Eighty feet away, no hands. Sixty-five, and still nothing.

The Suburban lunged toward them when they were fifty feet away. Dagny sent four shots through the windshield. Victor aimed for the tires and squeezed the trigger, but no bullets came out. The Suburban didn’t slow, forcing Dagny and Victor to dive to opposite sides of the alley. It raced past them, plowed through the Impala, and was gone.

Dagny hopped to her feet. “Why didn’t you fire?” she screamed.

Victor stood up slowly, holding his back. “I did. Nothing came out. Maybe the safety’s on.”

“There’s no safety on a Glock.” Dagny grabbed the gun from Victor’s hand and squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet into the brick wall. “The only safety mechanism is a lever that makes it so you have to pull the trigger from the center in order to get it to shoot. You’d have to be an idiot to squeeze the trigger any other
way.” She tried to pull from the bottom of the trigger, but even this sent another bullet into the wall. “I have no idea how you
couldn’t
shoot this thing.”

Victor lowered his head and put his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t want to carry it anyway.”

She’d been rough with him, but he deserved it. “If you want to be an agent, you’ve got to act like one.”

“I’m not an idiot, Dagny. KL9-EZJ. State of Kentucky.” He’d caught the rear plate on the Suburban as it had passed them.

The Impala had been thrown across the street into a light post. The driver’s side was crushed, and when Dagny tried to open the door, it wouldn’t budge. She walked around to the other side of the car and climbed through the passenger door. Victor slid in behind her. She turned the key, but the car only wheezed.

Victor turned to her and smiled.

“What?” Dagny asked.

“Aren’t you glad I talked you into the insurance?”

They spent the next few hours at District One, waiting for news about the black Suburban. A few witnesses saw the Suburban race through red lights on its way to the I-75 North ramp. Later, a gravedigger reported an explosion at Spring Grove Cemetery. The fireball left little of the Suburban behind. The license plate was a dead end—it had been reported stolen that morning from a car across the river in Covington, Kentucky.

Dagny and Victor spent another hour filling out paperwork for the rental car company. When they finished, she called the Professor and caught him up on the day’s events. He told her that Reginald Berry—the “sins of the angels” bank robber—was an inmate at Coleman prison in Florida.

“We’ll head down now.”

“You can’t. Fabee’s sending you elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“Bethel, New York.”

March 19—Bethel, New York

Dagny was curled up in the passenger seat of another rented Impala, sucking on a fat-free sourdough pretzel nugget to keep awake and shielding her eyes from the reflection of the sunrise in the side mirror. Her head throbbed. The air inside the car was stale and smelled like ten years of cigarette smoke. Victor drove with his left hand and shoveled an Egg McMuffin into his mouth with his right.

After they’d caught the red-eye to LaGuardia, they’d spent two hours at a Red Roof Inn—just enough time to nap and shower. The Garmin GPS they’d rented from Avis called out street directions, sparing Dagny the task. Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra” was playing on the radio. It kept Victor awake and alert, so she lived with it.

“So why is Fabee sending us here, Dag?”

“Don’t call me Dag.” She rubbed her fingertips against her forehead in a circular motion, trying to push the pain away. “Because it pulls us off the rest of the case. He knows there’s nothing to find here.”

A stolen pack of gum, two and a half months ago. It was a dead end, but they’d be stuck questioning people in Bethel for
days. What could they even ask?
Do you remember anyone coming here on New Year’s Day flashing a lot of gum around?
It was hopeless.

Victor chuckled. “It’s funny, though.”

“What’s funny?”

“If we find the chewing gum thief, we’ve caught a murderer. Solve the smallest crime in the world and we solve the biggest. That’d be some way to catch him.”

Yeah, she thought. It would be. But Fabee had already had his men take a statement the night before. The boy didn’t remember anything useful. Red Ford Explorer. Maybe the guy was tall. Didn’t see his face. Left behind a card. No video from the security camera. That was it. Dagny hoped to determine how many sticks of gum were in the stolen pack. She didn’t expect much else.

Bethel was two hours and a million miles from New York City. It was a strange town, full of burnouts and soccer moms, hybrids and Hummers, vegans and hunters. They passed twelve American flags, four rainbow flags, and one Confederate flag, painted on the roof of a barn, before they finally found Waller’s Food Mart at a quarter past seven. Victor pulled into the gravel lot and parked. Dagny opened the car door, and the wind caught it, ripping it from her hand. Another burst of wind nearly toppled her as she climbed out of the car. Victor walked around the front of the car, pushed her door closed, and placed his hand on her back, steadying her as they walked toward the entrance.

A chubby, middle-aged man with a round face and sideburns looked up from behind the register when the door chimed. “You the feds?” he asked, making his way around the counter to greet them. A pack of Camels peeked out of the pocket of his flannel shirt.

“Special Agent Dagny Gray,” Dagny said, flashing her creds.

“I’m Jeff Waller.” He shook her hand. “I hope this helps. I mean, I just wish he knew more.”

“I’m Victor Walton.”

“
Special Agent
Victor Walton,” Dagny corrected him.

“I’m new,” Victor explained, shaking Waller’s hand.

“Let me get my boy.” Waller walked to a door behind the counter and called, “Hey, Crosby! Get out here!”

“Crosby?” Victor asked. “Like Crosby, Stills, and Nash?”

“And Young,” Waller admonished.

Crosby came through the door wearing a baggy Yankees jersey and loose-fitting jeans. He brushed the hair out from his eyes and smiled at Dagny. Cute kid, she thought.

“Are you guys special agents?”

“We are,” Dagny replied. “I know you talked to a couple of agents last night, but I was hoping we could go through what happened again. Is that cool?”

“It’s cool.” Crosby stuck his thumbs in his jeans pockets and kicked back his head. He took them through his New Year’s Day, from the moment he woke up, to his dubious claim of having chased the thief out of the store, to his subsequent discovery of the theft.

“Show me where the card was,” Dagny asked.

The kid led them to the candy rack and tapped the front of a Chewey’s Spearmint Gum box on the far left side of the second shelf. “The card was standing up in the front of this box.”

“Spearmint?” Victor asked. “Are you sure it was spearmint?”

“Nah. It could have been any flavor. These things get shifted.”

“Was there a stick of gum attached to the back of the card?” Dagny asked.

“Yeah.”

“What happened to it?”

“I chewed it.” Crosby’s dad shot him an angry look, but Crosby shrugged. “What? Were we going to sell a single stick of gum?”

“Do you remember the flavor?”

“No. Does it matter?”

“It might. If I said it was cinnamon, would that sound right?”

“Could be.”

Dagny studied the cartons of gum on the shelves. All of the packs of Chewey’s held fifteen pieces. “Mr. Waller, have you always sold Chewey’s in packs of fifteen?”

“No, it can vary. Sometimes it’s twelve. Sometimes it’s ten. Depends on the deal we get from the wholesaler.”

“Is there a way to figure out how many sticks were in the packs you were selling on January first?”

Waller led them through a cluttered storage room to a small office in the back of the building. “Whenever we take an empty box off the shelves, we order another box, so we always have one on hand,” he explained. He opened a file drawer and pulled out several thick manila folders. “The orders are in these.”

“So the last order you placed before January first is when the pack in question would have been put out on display?”

“Yeah, that’s right. So the pack you’re looking for would have come from the order before that one.” He thumbed through the first file, then started through it again. “Sorry if I’m going slow. I’m a little nervous. I don’t want to miss anything.”

“I understand. Do you mind if I look through one of the other folders?” Dagny asked.

“Me, too?” Victor added.

Waller handed them each a folder. Though Waller seemed to have a comprehensive set of order forms, they were not in any particular order. “Let’s just pull everything that says Chewey’s,” Dagny suggested. Within a few minutes, they had stacked about twenty forms. Victor put them in chronological order, and they thumbed back through them, looking for an order for Chewey’s Cinnamon Gum.