The Bubble Gum Thief (40 page)

She waited while he savored the moment. “Well?”

“Seven years old. Wanders into Waller’s Food Mart with his father. The original Waller sees Draker remove a piece of gum from a pack and place it in his mouth. Waller demands that Draker’s father pay. Draker insists that it was his pack and that he brought it into the store. Father doesn’t believe him and berates him in front of Waller. Makes him promise to clean the floors of the store for a month. And beats him with a belt when they get home.”

“Jeff Waller remembers this?”

“Jeff Waller has no idea, and the original Waller is dead. I heard the story from Draker’s third-grade teacher.”

“He complained to her?”

“He wrote a twenty-two-page essay on the injustice of it. One of those deals where you have to use up all the spelling words, but he kept going.”

“Why did you end up talking to his third-grade teacher?”

“Because that’s when monsters are made.”

“And the teacher did nothing?”

“It was a different time, Dagny.”

“Well, the man can sure hold a grudge.” Maybe they really could unravel the logic to the crimes. The Luberses’ first dog bit Draker. Melissa Ryder’s father discovered the fraud. Chesley Waxton sued Draker. Silvers turned against Draker. Deardrop sent Draker to a medium-security prison. But there were still some loose ends. “We don’t know anything about the second crime. And then there’s Mike.” She hadn’t said his name often, and once it was uttered, she knew why.

“Again, I think Whitman was his intended target,” the Professor said. “She was killed on the Ides of March.”

“But what was Draker’s motive?”

“Well, she advocated tougher sentences for white-collar criminals. Draker may have wanted to punish her for that.”

“That’s pretty weak. Draker’s crimes are personal.” Dagny sighed, then scanned through the Professor’s list again. “So we have one day before his next crime and a list of two hundred and twelve potential victims. What do we do?”

“Since we think he’s aiming to kill two hundred fifty-six people, there are some obvious targets. The courthouse, for example. The prison. The newspaper. I’ve urged Fabee to close them all for the day, and I hope he does.”

“You can kill two hundred and fifty-six people almost anywhere.”

“That’s true. Which is why Victor’s work is so important.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s in the basement, overseeing the team.”

“The basement?” Wait, did he say ‘team’? “The
team
?”

The Professor pushed a button under his desk, and one of the bookshelves behind Dagny swung open to reveal a hidden staircase.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Dagny said. “Who are you, Batman?”

“I have no idea who that is,” the Professor said. Dagny wasn’t sure she believed him this time.

She descended a wrought-iron spiral staircase into the basement, which looked like a small suburban office—Berber carpet, fluorescent lights, and a couple of desks. Victor sat at one of them, staring at his laptop. A dozen rows of metal shelves ran parallel across the rest of the room, holding neatly arranged boxes. Victor looked up at Dagny and smiled.

“You’re looking good,” he said.

She smiled back. “The Professor said something about a team, but you look like you’re alone to me.”

“Check this out,” Victor said, pointing to his laptop screen. Dagny walked behind him and leaned over his shoulder. The web page listed the forty-eight contiguous states. “When I click on one of them, I get a list of cities,” he said, demonstrating. “And if I click on the city, I get a list of properties that were once held by Draker, his company, and its subsidiaries, or by one of the shell corporations connected to Rowanhouse.”

“Okay, I guess that’s cool.”

“That’s not the cool part,” he said. “Since Draker had a place in Nashville, I’m betting he has a place near all of the crimes. Somewhere he could have schemed without the hassle of credit cards or nosy motel clerks. I figure either Draker is squatting somewhere, or he’s purchased properties under disguised names. If he’s squatting, then I’m not going to find him—hopefully Fabee will. But if he purchased property, the money for it had to come from somewhere, and it has to be in someone’s name. So I thought I’d trace Draker’s assets to see if he could have hidden some land or some money before he went to jail.”

“If he owned the Matisse and sold it through Rowanhouse, then there’s four million right there.”

“Enough for incidentals, maybe, after Rowanhouse takes his cut—but not enough to fund the whole thing. So I figured Draker must have laundered some other assets, not just the painting. I’m tracing all of Draker’s old properties. It isn’t as daunting as it sounds, because the bankruptcy dealt with most things. All of Drakersoft’s assets were sold to Systematic at a discounted price in order to satisfy Systematic’s claims against the company. And Draker’s personal assets were sold at auction—we have detailed lists of that stuff. Fortunately, most of this was kept in electronic format, so it’s easy to search.”

“What about all the smaller companies—”

“That Draker set up to diversify his holdings? They were almost all indebted to Drakersoft—the parent company—which
had lent them start-up money. So the Drakersoft bankruptcy trustee ended up suing most of these companies and foreclosing on their assets. By then, most of the subs had sold off their holdings, so there wasn’t much to foreclose. These holdings included hundreds of pieces of property, scattered all over the country.”

“Let me guess. Rowanhouse bought them.”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get warrants for these properties,” Dagny said.

“Not so fast. All of these properties were immediately resold to legitimate buyers. Draker knew what he was doing. If any of the properties had been sold for
significantly
less than market value, the bankruptcy judge could have set the sale aside under—”

“A theory of fraudulent conveyance?” Dagny said, remembering her bankruptcy law class.

“Exactly. But each property was sold to Rowanhouse for
near
-market value. Maybe ninety-five percent of what it was really worth—consistent with property appraisals. Rowanhouse’s companies then resold the property shortly after the sale, collecting a profit of about five percent.”

“So Rowanhouse and Draker probably had these purchasers already lined up.”

“And they probably agreed to split the profit from the resale, hiding it all from the bankruptcy court. Every sale looked legitimate if you looked at the selling price. On average, each resale netted just twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s not much when you’re talking about million-dollar properties, but if you consider that there were about five hundred pieces of property, it adds up to twelve and a half million dollars that Draker and Rowanhouse were able to hide from the bankruptcy court.”

“So you’re tracing the money?”

“There’s no way to trace the money, so we’re tracing properties. That means tracking down the deeds for all of Draker’s old properties and driving out to see who actually lives there. If it’s
commercial, is there a business there now? If it’s residential property, is there a family there now? Then we’re looking at each of the companies Rowanhouse used to buy these properties. What other properties have they owned? Maybe they sold off all of Draker’s properties, but bought new properties with his share of the proceeds of the sale. This means tracking down about two thousand more pieces of property—figuring out who really owns them. Unfortunately, there isn’t a computer database with all of this property information. You can’t even go to a state database for most of it. You have to go to the individual counties—some of which are online, but most of which aren’t. It’s a huge pain.”

“So how are you doing this?”

“That’s what’s so cool. We’re doing it with two thousand helpers. We set up a wiki.”

“Like Wikipedia?”

“Exactly. I figured if you can recruit people to write an encyclopedia online, maybe you could recruit people to solve a crime. So I e-mailed Wikipedia editors, local police departments, and criminology professors, and asked for their help.”

“Criminology professors?”

“College students have more free time than anyone, so I figured that criminology professors would be game for putting them to work on a case. Professors assign the work, and students go out and get the information. Stop by county auditor offices, photocopy deeds, and upload the information to the wiki.” He clicked through a few links to a list of properties around Cincinnati. “If the homeowner checks out as legit, the property gets marked as safe. But if ownership seems questionable, it gets a red flag.”

“And then what?”

“And then I get notified by e-mail that we have a red flag; I call the local police, and they go check it out.”

“What if people make a mistake?”

“That’s what the editors check. They review each entry and the information that supports it. If the deed is missing, for instance, they’ll repost the property with a notation that the deed is missing. And someone will have to redo it.”

“And this is working?”

“Yesterday, we found a safe house in Chula Vista, and Draker’s prints are all over it. Right now we have cops visiting places in Bethel and Salt Lake City. It could be something; it could be nothing. We’ll know within the hour.”

“Does Fabee know about this?”

“We had to tell him about Chula Vista, of course, and we’ll tell him about the others if they check out, too. But he doesn’t know
how
I’m tracking it down. He thinks I did all the work. Probably driving him crazy, since he’s got a huge team of his own sifting through much of the same data. They’ve probably gotten an earful about how one guy found the Chula Vista house by himself. When in fact, it’s not one guy, but an army of Davids.”

“An army of what?” Dagny asked.

“This law professor, Glenn Reynolds, wrote a book called
An Army of Davids
,” Victor explained. “It’s about how technology and the Internet let individuals work collaboratively to compete with big media or big government. Like the way bloggers got Dan Rather fired over the phony memos, or how they dug up stuff on Trent Lott. Reynolds says that Goliath is no match for an ‘army of Davids,’ at least not in the Internet age.”

“And Draker is Goliath?”

“Actually, I think Fabee would be Goliath, in this particular metaphor,” Victor said.

An army of Davids. Maybe it would change law enforcement, just as bloggers had changed the media. It was pretty darn smart—even smarter than her use of chain e-mails, which turned up the third crime.

“Hey, Dagny...something’s been bothering me.”

“Yes?”

“If Draker didn’t try to run us over, shouldn’t we be worried about who did?”

“Right now, we need to worry about the guy who’s actually killing people. We can worry later about whoever tried but didn’t.”

“Two hundred and twelve names?” Brent was wearing a V-neck cardigan over a white T-shirt. He’d stopped home to change after spending a long day at Fabee’s warehouse. They sat at the corner table at Oyamel, sharing ceviche and a view of the street.

“If you think that’s a long list of enemies, you should see the Professor’s.”

He laughed. “You’re joking.”

“No. He showed it to me.”

“How many names?”

“Thousands,” Dagny said. “It looks like the phone book.”

“Remind me not to cross that man.” Brent called over the waitress and ordered two more beers. Dagny looked at her watch. It was almost midnight. “We have time,” Brent said.

“Time is one of the things we don’t have.” Dagny spied a young couple kissing on the sidewalk. “It’s amazing.”

“What?”

“That life goes on.” The waitress set the beers down on the table. “Tell me something comforting.”

“Fabee’s shutting down the courthouse, the prison. Draker’s former schools. A golf club he used to belong to. Half of the Professor’s list, Fabee will be watching. There’s a good chance Draker won’t be able to get near his intended target.”

It wasn’t comforting enough. “Danny Deardrop didn’t show up for school, but Draker slaughtered those kids anyway.”

“I’m just saying that we’ll have people there to catch him, hopefully before he does anything.”

Hopefully
. “Tell me about the warehouse,” she said, needing to change the subject.

“Imagine an aircraft hangar, shelves from front to back, floor to ceiling. Forty tables down the middle, with a hundred agents sifting through documents and evidence.”

“What are they looking for?”

“No real rhyme or reason to it. Mostly trying to trace finances.”

“Are they having any luck?”

“A lot less than Victor, it seems. Which apparently drives Fabee crazy. How is Victor doing it?”

She didn’t have the energy to explain it in full, so she just said, “The boy’s a genius.”

“Yeah, but—”

Her phone rang. When she answered, the man’s anguished words tumbled out. “However many you’re planning to kill tomorrow, you can make it one less. They’ll find my body hanging in my office in the morning.” Click. The line went dead.

May 1—Washington, DC