The Bubble Gum Thief (39 page)

And so they ordered dinner at a faux tavern in Nashville International, waiting for the last flight back to DC. Dagny ate a cheeseburger and all of the fries. Nine hundred calories. Forty-eight grams of fat. She’d get back to 125 soon. For dessert, Brent shared a peach cobbler that Dagny did not want, but felt obliged to eat. “You must have some fantastic metabolism, Dagny Gray. To eat like this and stay so thin.”

She gave a fake chuckle in response.

The signboard flashed that the last flight to DC would be delayed another hour. “Wonderful.” The way he said it didn’t sound sarcastic. “The cobbler,” Brent explained. “It’s wonderful.”

It was okay—it was not wonderful.

Dagny excused herself from the table and found an empty gate. Although she had accepted Brent into the team, she hadn’t cleared it with the Professor first. It probably wouldn’t be wise to show up with him unannounced. She dialed.

“Tell me what you found,” he said.

“Nothing. No connection. We’re coming home.” She realized her mistake—that wasn’t the way she wanted to reveal Brent’s presence.

“Nothing at all?”

He hadn’t noticed. “No, nothing.”

“Who is we?” Of course he’d noticed. He noticed everything.

“I’m bringing Brent back with me.” She added, “If it’s okay.”

“Davis?”

“I ran into him out West and then met up with him in Nashville. He wants off Fabee’s team.”

“We don’t need him.”

“So you’ve cracked this case?”

He laughed—probably because no one else spoke to him this way. “Never tell Victor this, but I thought you made the right choice from the start. My impression is that Brent can glad-hand, but I haven’t seen much more than that from him. But if you think he can help, fine.”

“I think he can help.”

“He can help most by feeding us stuff from inside Fabee’s investigation. We need an inside man.”

“Maybe. Why don’t we regroup tomorrow in person?”

“Okay.” He paused, and then hummed the way he did when he was in deep thought. “Yes, yes, yes!”

“What is it?”

“How could we be so dumb? I know why you didn’t get anything today. You talked with the wrong families.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the actual victims bear no connection to Draker, could it really be that he was careless and missed his real target? This is a man who seems to have spent a great deal of time carefully constructing his spree. I think there was a specific child he wanted to kill, and I think this child had the great fortune of being ill on April fifteenth. Stay another day. Go to the school and find out
which students were absent on the day of the crime and start with them. And hurry.”

“We will,” she promised.

“Divide and conquer, if you trust Brent.”

Only eighteen kids had been absent from Haysworth Elementary School on April 15. Brent and Dagny divided the list of names. Dagny took the west side of the district; Brent took the east. They each spoke with five families before noon, then met for lunch, compared notes, and ventured out separately again. At two thirty, Dagny was sitting on Melanie Braxton’s living-room sofa, surrounded by seven circling house cats, when Brent called and told her that he had found the link.

Forty minutes later they were sitting in Herman Deardrop’s office on the thirty-first floor of the AT&T Building in downtown Nashville. Deardrop was in his late thirties. He wore suspenders and a bow tie. His hair seemed to be falling out in clumps, perhaps torn from his head in a fit of rage or anxiety. A short, spry man, Deardrop periodically jumped from his chair and paced in front of his floor-to-ceiling windows during the interview. Dagny might have viewed his behavior as suspicious if she hadn’t worked with a dozen lawyers like him in New York.

“What are you trying to tell me? That he wanted to kill my son?” Deardrop pounded his fist against his office window with frightening force.

“Please, Mr. Deardrop, if you could just take a seat,” Dagny said.

Deardrop walked behind his desk, but he did not take a seat. “I knew he was evil the whole time. He deserved even more than he got. I should have sent him away for twice as long.”

Brent traded a puzzled look with Dagny, then said, “Well, Judge Nagel issued the sentence. You were just his clerk, right?”

Deardrop leaned forward, bracing himself with his palms facedown on the desktop. “Let me tell you something about the law, Mr. Davis.”

“Special Agent Davis,” Dagny corrected.

“Judges don’t write shit. Clerks write their opinions. Every word of every order Nagel signed on the Draker case, I wrote. That’s why the bastard wanted to kill my Daniel.”

“If I might ask,” Brent began, “why didn’t you come forward when you realized that your son’s school had been targeted?”

“Because no one knew that it was Draker then, shithead.”

“Listen—” Dagny began.

“Right.” Brent stepped in, calmly ignoring the insult in a way that Dagny couldn’t. “But after it was known? Draker’s been in the news for the past week.”

“If I knew anything helpful, I’d have come forward. But all I know is that Draker is an evil guy, and you guys know that already. And I’ve got a deposition in twenty minutes, so you need to speed this up.”

“Mr. Deardrop,” Dagny said, “you’re going to stay as long as we need you. This interview is not optional.”

“Don’t try your bullshit on a lawyer, lady. I know the law.”

“So do I.” Dagny looked up at the diploma hanging on the wall behind Deardrop’s desk. “Then again, I went to Harvard Law, so I don’t know what they taught you at the University of Dayton.”

“I had a full scholarship. Bet you paid your way through Harvard, lady.”

She had been on full scholarship, too, but she let it go. “Did you ever interact with Draker? Speak directly to him?”

“I was a clerk, Harvard. Judge does all the talking. We just do the work.”

“Did Draker ever say anything to you?”

Deardrop hesitated before he answered. “No.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, dammit. He never said anything to me.”

“What about his lawyer?”

“Nothing.”

“Draker knew you were his clerk, I assume? That you were writing the decisions?”

“Yes, Harvard. Nagel had two clerks, but I was the one who sat in all the hearings on the Draker case, so I assume Draker knew it was me.”

“Did Nagel tell you how long the sentence should be? Did he give you an idea?”

“You want me to break judge-clerk confidentiality?”

“There’s no such thing,” Dagny said.

“He told me to make it long.”

“Did he tell you to make it ten years?”

“Not specifically. I came up with the justification that got him the full ten.”

“Why were you aiming for ten years?”

“That’s just what the guidelines said, Harvard. You should know you’ve got to follow the guidelines.”

No one was bound to follow the guidelines anymore; the Supreme Court found them unconstitutional in 2004. They had been in effect, however, when Draker was sentenced. “The guidelines gave you some leeway,” Dagny said. “You could have given him less.”

“The guy’s a monster. Are you seriously suggesting he should have been in jail for less time? Christ.”

“I’m not trying to debate the merits of his sentence, Mr. Deardrop. I’m wondering if you went with ten years because that was the minimum to get him out of the federal camp system and into a medium-security prison.”

“That was one of the reasons. And it was a nice round sentence. The double-digit years looked good in light of the public
harm that Draker caused. And the bastard deserved every day of his sentence and probably more. What does it matter?”

Brent spoke softly. “Because we’re trying to determine why Noel Draker would want to kill your son, Mr. Deardrop. Draker seems to have a long list of enemies—scores he’s trying to settle. We’re just trying to make sense of that list, and maybe figure out who he’s going after next.” Brent looked over to the wall, at a picture of young Daniel Deardrop holding a baseball bat; the oversize cap was falling down over his eyes. “In the meantime, you might want to keep an eye on your son.”

“Isn’t that your job, buddy?”

Brent and Dagny rose from their chairs. “No,” Dagny said. “It’s yours. You’re the boy’s father. Good luck with the deposition.”

After they left, Brent placed a call to a friend on Fabee’s team and arranged for someone to follow Deardrop and his son for the next few days.

The ticket agent told Dagny that she had been upgraded to Gold Medallion. In the past two months, she’d flown twenty-five thousand miles and lost the man she’d loved. The SkyMiles were hardly a fair trade.

The Gold Medallion status bumped her ahead of lowly Silver Medallion fliers on the waiting list for the free upgrade to first class. “You’re not going to take it, are you?” Brent asked. “I’m in coach.”

It was a silly question. Of course she was going to take it.

At the gate, Dagny floated something even more controversial. “You know that document warehouse you’ve been scheming to avoid?”

“Yes,” he said with justified apprehension.

She smiled. He shook his head.

“Just one day?”

“You want me to go look through documents?”

“We want you to talk to people. Find out if Fabee has anything we should know about. Pick up on the gossip.”

“You want a Liz Smith?”

“We want an inside man.” She waited for him to relent. “Just one day.”

“Grunt work and you won’t even sit with me.” He tilted his head up and bit his lower lip. “You’re lucky you’re beautiful.”

The man in the seat next to her was reading
The New York Times
. He hadn’t noticed Dagny’s picture on the front page, next to the headline “For One Agent, It’s Personal,” but she had. A few minutes of a
30 Rock
episode on the monitor in front of her helped clear her mind, and she drifted off to sleep.

The plane finally landed at Reagan National at a quarter to midnight. Dagny didn’t bother waiting for Brent—he was stuck in the back of the plane, and Dagny needed to crawl into bed. Although she expected the terminal to be empty, a couple hundred people were there, waiting for delayed flights. Many had their eyes fixed on the flat-screen televisions hanging overhead, tuned to CNN. A woman glanced at Dagny, then back up at the television, and then gasped and pointed at her. Soon, others were looking at her, too; then everyone seemed to be looking at her. Dagny raced past them. She caught a glimpse of the television hanging from the ceiling of the airport bar—her picture was on the left half of the screen, Mike’s on the right.

What had Harold Booker said?
You’re the pretty woman at the center of the biggest story in the country. Use a fake name
, he’d said.
Wear a hat.

A souvenir shop was closed and the chain-link gate had been drawn nearly to the floor. A Hispanic man was stocking the shelves behind the gate. Dagny shook the gate gently. “Hey,” she whispered, catching his attention. “Is there any way I could get a hat?”

“Sorry?” he said in a thick accent.

“A hat?” she said, miming the act of placing one atop her head.

The man smiled and nodded, then went around the corner and brought back a blue cap. He crouched down to the floor and held the hat under the gate.

“Twenty-five,” he said.

A ball cap wasn’t what she had in mind, but it would do. “Twenty?” she countered.

“Okay.”

She folded the money and handed it to him under the gate. He pushed the cap into her hand. Dagny pulled her hair up into a ball and covered it with the cap, then ducked into the restroom to adjust her disguise. Only in DC, she thought, looking in the mirror and laughing at the three letters emblazoned on the cap—FBI. Dagny tossed it to a young boy at baggage claim, then took a shuttle to long-term parking and drove home. A handful of reporters were camped on her lawn. She drove past them to the Professor’s house, wondering if she’d ever reclaim her life.

April 30—Arlington, Virginia

Dagny woke at six, showered and dressed, then made her way down to the kitchen. Mrs. McDougal gave her scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, and Dagny ate it all, as if it were medicine. It
was
medicine. What a revolutionary idea. Food—the cure for the common anorexia.

She wandered into the Professor’s cluttered study. Whiteboards, graphs, charts perched on easels, diagrams, models, even a mobile, crowded every open space and surface. “So you’ve actually been doing something,” Dagny said.

“I’ve got it narrowed down.” The Professor walked behind his desk, picked up a stack of papers, and handed it to Dagny.

“What’s this?”

“Draker’s enemies,” he explained. “It’s funny. I’ve always compiled my own enemies list, but never someone else’s.”

Dagny thumbed through the pages. “You’ve got two hundred and twelve names here.”

“And one of them will be next.”

Dagny wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think you would have guessed about Tucker, and we still don’t know his grievance against Waller’s Food Mart.”

“Oh, I know about Waller’s Food Mart.” The Professor smiled.