The Bubble Gum Thief (28 page)

After the photos had uploaded to the server, Dagny initiated an iChat videoconference with the Professor. She reviewed the events of the day, described how she found the fingerprints on the copy of
In Cold Blood
, and complained that Fabee was tying them up with pointless witness interviews. “Sometimes we have to play nice so we can do what we want later,” he explained.

“We don’t have much time. In less than two weeks, he’s going to kill six or eight people, and—”

“Six or eight? That’s if we’re lucky.”

“You think he’s going for—”

“I’d bet on sixteen. I pray it’s only eight.”

“You think he’s increasing exponentially?”

“I pray to God he’s not. If he goes to eight, then he finishes with sixteen and thirty-two. But if he’s going to sixteen—”

“Then he goes to with two fifty-six and...” She tried to do a rough calculation in her head, but the Professor was faster.

“And finishes with sixty-five thousand five hundred thirty-six.”

“My God, that’s an office building
and
—”

“A stadium. It’s like Oklahoma City
and
—”

“Hiroshima.”

April 6—Columbus, Ohio

Melissa sat at the edge of her bed, her feet planted flat on the ground, and her head turned down. Dagny sat across from the girl, on her roommate’s unmade bed. Dagny had ditched her navy-blue suit for jeans and a baggy sweatshirt from the T.J. Maxx down the street, and kicked off her shoes so she could sit cross-legged. Normally she’d be taking notes, but this time she left the notepad in her backpack. Victor waited in the car.

After four pointless days of canvasing in Salt Lake City, Fabee was giving her a real witness. Melissa Ryder had called the Bureau’s BGT Hotline (even the FBI was using the name) the night before. Fabee had interviewed her by phone, but he was letting Dagny have the first crack at her in person.

She let Melissa tell the story at her own pace, only gently pressing for details when necessary. Melissa sheepishly described the Black Out party and her reluctance to go. She told Dagny about the older man who had handed her a drink and whispered in her ear. About going upstairs to talk. And she told her about waking up, certain that something had gone wrong.

“And then I ran back here.
Here
,” she sighed. A cluttered mess of cheap furniture and dirty clothes. It wasn’t much of a refuge. Dagny noticed that the walls on the roommate’s half of the room were decorated with music and art posters, but Melissa’s walls were bare, save for a few stray pieces of tape. Dagny had known a girl in college who’d torn down her posters, too, after she’d been raped.

“You didn’t see him again, when you left, when you were running? Since?”

Melissa shook her head, lifting her knees to her chest and hugging them tight. “I can’t even see him now.”

“Did you tell anyone you were going to the party? Maybe post something about it or tweet it?”

“It was on my Facebook page. Do you think he picked me out specifically?”

“I don’t know, Melissa. I don’t know.” Probably, Dagny thought. “What about the card?”

“When I got back here, I felt it. It was...it was inside of me.” The girl wiped away another tear, determined to finish the story. “It was wet and bloody, and it had gum stuck to the back of it. But I could still read it. ‘This is my fourth crime,’ it said. ‘My next will be bigger.’”

“The gum. What did the gum look like?”

“Just regular chewed gum.”

“It was chewed?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who chewed the gum?”

“No.” Of course not, she seemed to say.

If he’d been the one to chew the gum, then there were would be DNA evidence on it. But it was gone, so they’d never know. “And you threw the card away?”

Melissa nodded. “I tossed it in the garbage can and sat on this bed, hating it. Hating him. Staring at the wastebasket, just
staring at it, until I couldn’t take it anymore, and then I dumped the whole thing in the Dumpster behind the dorm.”

Dagny walked to the window and pushed up the shade. “That one?” Dagny asked, pointing to a big garbage bin in the alley. Melissa nodded. It was suddenly clear why Fabee had sent her to interview Melissa. “Was it in a trash bag when you tossed it?”

“No,” Melissa said. “It was just at the bottom of a plastic trash can. I threw the whole thing away. Can and all. Replaced it with another just like it,” she said, glancing at the trash can by her desk.

It was frustrating. Melissa had seen him, heard him, touched him, smelled him. But another hour of questions yielded nothing. Dagny offered Melissa a hug and invited her to call at any time, even if she just wanted to talk to someone.

As Dagny reached for the door handle, Melissa stopped her. “Hey, I want to apologize.”

“For what?”

“I should have called sooner. I guess I thought maybe you’d catch him, but then he killed that family.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Dagny said. “There’s only one person at fault in all this, and I’m going to kill him.”

Melissa jumped back, startled by Dagny’s promise.

“Catch him, I mean. I’m going to catch him,” Dagny said.

Melissa smiled, most likely her first smile in a long time. “Killing him would be fine, too.”

Victor was leaning against the car, dressed in one of his increasingly right-sized Brooks Brothers suits. He lowered the business section of
The Columbus Dispatch
as Dagny approached. “Well?”

Dagny had bottled up her rage when she was talking to Melissa, but it was time to vent. “What kind of maniac thinks a rape is smaller than a bank robbery?”

“A homicidal maniac,” Victor offered.

She led Victor around to the alley behind the dorm. “You’re not going to like this,” she said, eyeing the Dumpster.

It only took him a moment to guess what was coming next. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“Aren’t there people to do that sort of thing?”

“What people?” Dagny said, looking around. “It’s just us. Sorry, we can’t outsource the investigation.”

“And what are we looking for?”

“A tiny, crumpled, bloody card.”

“From two months ago?”

Dagny nodded. Somewhere, she was sure, Fabee was laughing.

She dialed the Ohio State Facilities Operations and Development department and arranged for a clean bin to be placed next to the one they would search. They borrowed jumpsuits and gloves from the city’s hazardous materials unit and bought masks from Home Depot. Once outfitted, Dagny climbed up on the side of the Dumpster and surveyed the contents.

Victor winced as he joined her. “I will never forgive you for this, Dagny.”

Almost any Dumpster would have been better than one behind a college dorm. Little of the garbage was bagged—most of it was loose: pizza boxes, soiled clothes, used condoms, chicken bones, and the like. Dagny stepped carefully onto a rail along the inside of the Dumpster and began to pick up pieces of the garbage, inspect them, and then toss them into the clean bin. By dusk, they had sifted through only half of the contents. They sealed the Dumpster and retired for the night.

After they checked into a motel, Dagny showered until the hot water was gone. She was getting ready for a run when Victor rapped at her door.

“Let’s get some dinner.”

“I’m good.”

“Actually, I don’t think you’re good. C’mon. Let’s go eat.”

“I’m not hungry, Victor.” She started to close the door, but he stuck his foot in the doorway.

“At this point, it doesn’t matter if you’re hungry. I think you need to be eating.”

She was used to conversations like this. Everyone was always trying to get her to eat when she didn’t want to. There were more important things than her diet right now. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“This isn’t over, Dagny.”

Dagny sighed. “It never is.” She closed the door. Too tired and worn to run, she climbed into bed instead.

If anything, the smell was worse in the morning, having festered in a sealed space overnight. There were literally hundreds of pieces of gum stuck to the bottom of the Dumpster, but none stuck to the back of a card. If the crime gum was still there, at least part of the card would still be stuck to it. Still, they collected every piece of gum and placed them in separate bags, marking the time and place found with a Sharpie.

If Dagny had learned anything at the Bureau, it was this: sometimes unlikely leads pay off, but usually you’re just sifting through garbage.

They finished as evening settled, changed out of their jumpsuits, and headed back to the motel. As Victor drove, Dagny checked her phone for messages. She skipped several from Julia and her mother. The Professor had left one: “Still waiting for the fingerprint results from the book—Fabee’s holding it up, I’m sure. Also, your mother tracked me down. She wants you to return her calls.” Her last voice mail was from Chesley Waxton. Dagny dialed his number.

“I found it. I just wanted to let you know that I had one of the girls scan it and e-mail it to you.”

“You found what, Mr. Waxton?”

“The security proposal you wanted.”

“From J. C. Adams?” She already had the copy from Adams.

“Yeah, that one, too, but I forgot about another guy who came through and gave us advice. Name was Roberto Altamont.”

April 8—Cincinnati, Ohio

“Maybe he was tall.”

“Can you give me something besides his height?” She’d asked him this twelve times. They had spent nearly an hour enduring digressions, bizarre non sequiturs, and occasional, inexplicable racist asides. The room was spinning, and Dagny just wanted to lie down.

Victor leaned forward and spoke softly. “Mr. Waxton, this man—Mr. Altamont—may have killed six people, and if so, he’s going to kill even more in less than a week, so you can see why it’s so important that we figure out who he is.”

“He either had a mustache or didn’t. I can’t remember. It was one way or the other.”

“Was he Hispanic? Latino?” Victor asked, since the unsub had used the name Roberto.

Waxton folded his hands together and closed his eyes. “He may have had a dark complexion, but I don’t think he was a wetback, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Did he speak with any accent?”

“No. He sounded normal.”

“How did Altamont contact you?” Victor asked.

“He called me on the phone. I had one of our girls show me the website, and it looked good.”

Slowly, the pieces started to come together. Using the name Roberto Altamont, the unsub, it seemed, had created an elaborate and impressive website for his fake security company. (The site was now gone, but Dagny and Victor found a cache of it at
archive.org
.) When Altamont offered a free security consultation, Waxton jumped at the offer. “Never turn down anything that’s free,” Waxton counseled, though Altamont’s consultation turned out to be rather costly in the end.

Altamont had apparently met briefly with Waxton, who must have told him about J. C. Adams’s previous proposal. This would have given Altamont the idea to frame Adams. Dagny guessed that Altamont had planted a magnetic strip somewhere that Adams was likely to touch—on the handrail leading to his front door, perhaps—and then attached it to the misleading tape measure. On a follow-up visit to inspect the premises, Altamont had placed the tape measure with the magnetic strip containing Adams’s fingerprints along the doorway.

“Next day, he sends me the report. Everything he recommended was overkill, even more stuff than J. C. recommended, so I ignored it.”

“Is there anything else you remember about him? What was his hair like? How did he dress?”

“He had a full head of hair, cut real short, like that actor from around here—you know, his daddy anchored the news.” Waxton rapped his fingers on his desk. “Clooney! That’s it. Dressed very well. Nicely tailored suit. Slick. Hey, you guys don’t think that Clooney kid is the guy, do you?”

“No, Mr. Waxton. We don’t think that George Clooney is the murderer,” Dagny said.

“Nevertheless, could you search Clooney’s house? See if you can find my baseball,” he implored.

“Yes, Mr. Waxton. Of course we will,” Dagny replied, starting to stand. They thanked him for his time and wandered out to the lobby. Dagny called Lieutenant Beamer and requested that a sketch artist meet with Mr. Waxton. Dagny didn’t have high hopes for the sketch, but sometimes people remember a face more clearly when they see it take shape.