The Bubble Gum Thief (42 page)

Tragic concerts. It seemed absurd.

“So what’s next for him?” Brent asked.

“Altamont?” Dagny suggested. “It’s probably the most famous concert tragedy of all.” In December 1969, eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was beaten and stabbed to death at the Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway. Cameras filming the concert captured the incident. Some people considered Altamont the bookend to the Woodstock era, so it made sense for Draker to start in Bethel and finish at Altamont. And then it hit Dagny. Draker had already given them the clue: Roberto Altamont.

She ran a search on Altamont. “Oh, my,” Dagny exclaimed, pushing back from the keyboard. “Pearl Jam’s scheduled to play a concert at Altamont on May fifteenth. That’s his final crime.” An
article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
suggested that the racetrack expected to sell sixty to seventy thousand tickets.

“Then what about today? What’s he going to hit today?” the Professor asked. Dagny searched various combinations on the web, pairing “concert” with words like “tragedy,” “murder,” “death,” “stab,” “kill,” and “trample.” There wasn’t much left to find. In 2003, twenty-one people were killed in Chicago as they tried to flee a nightclub after someone used pepper spray in the audience. In 1991, eight people suffocated while trying to get into a gymnasium in New York City for a charity basketball game played by rappers. Three people died—one from a stabbing—at a Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne concert in Long Beach, California, in 1986. One man was beaten to death at a Korn concert in Atlanta in the summer of 2006.

“That company that Draker cheated...” Victor struggled for a second to remember the name. “Systematic! Systematic is in Atlanta.”

Dagny searched Google for Systematic and confirmed that the company’s four-story headquarters was located just south of downtown Atlanta, a few blocks west of Turner Field, along the Ralph David Abernathy Freeway. A recent company profile indicated that 307 employees worked at the building.

“They’re on my list!” the Professor said.

“They aren’t on Fabee’s,” Brent replied.

Dagny looked at her watch. “It’s nearly eight. People are probably arriving at work.”

Brent, Victor, and the Professor called the Atlanta police, Fabee, and Systematic’s main switchboard, respectively. Dagny dialed Harold Booker’s number at CNN.

May 1—Atlanta, Georgia

When he was six years old, Seymour Dutton’s favorite toy was a small rubber ball attached to five feet of elastic rope. He’d tie that rope around his little wrist, throw the ball as hard as he could, and try to catch it when it came rearing back at him. It was a nice toy for a boy who didn’t have any friends. One day the rope snapped and the ball sailed into the china cabinet. Four plates shattered. When he heard his mother coming, Seymour ran to his father’s study and hid under the desk.

Now, more than thirty years later, he was hiding under a desk again.

A second knock at the door—this one louder. He could see the door swing open through a small gap in the front of the desk. It was the security guard, holding on to the doorframe, leaning into the office. What was his name? Wallace. Or Willis, maybe. Friendly black man—said hello to Dutton every morning. Spoke with a funny accent. Maybe he was from Africa.

“Mr. Dutton, are you here? Hey-lo, Mr. Dutton? We must e-e-evacuate. Hey-lo!” The guard leaned back into the hallway, yelling, “He’s not here! Maybe he’s at the gym?”

He left, closing the door behind him.

Dutton crawled out from under the desk, scuttled to his office door, and turned the lock. He was not at the gym, and anyone who’d seen his belly should have known that was a lousy place to look for him. Dutton had gained five pounds each of the last ten years. It was amazing that such a small amount each year could leave him fifty pounds overweight.

Every morning, Dutton flipped through new e-mails, checked the mail pile, and went down the hall to get his first cup of coffee. This morning, he never made it to the coffee. He never made it past that first envelope on top of the stack. There was no stamp on it—it must have been delivered by hand, he thought. Maybe Draker had even placed it there himself.

During the awful hour between the opening of the envelope and the ordered evacuation, Dutton had sat alone at his desk, trembling in fear, compulsively checking the clock on the wall, sweat dripping from his forehead and down his back, praying that God would do something to stop what was about to happen. And then, finally, when his corporate security announced the evacuation over the building’s speakers, Dutton assumed that God had answered his prayers—that God had intervened to save his employees since he lacked the courage to save them.

Dutton also lacked the courage to save himself. That’s why he’d hidden under the desk. That’s why he was looking out the window of his fourth-floor office, watching as workers left the building. Their faces were familiar, even if he didn’t know all their names. He saw the janitor who waited for Dutton to leave each night—no matter how late—so that he could clean his office. They spoke every day, but what was his name? Rudy, maybe. Or Randy. He spotted Brenda—or was it Barbara?—the corporate chef. She’d left one of the best restaurants in New York to oversee dining operations for the Systematic campus. She was standing next to Phil, the new vice president of marketing, who was still in his
first week on the job. He knew Phil’s name, and Rhonda’s, too. She was his secretary. She was leaning against the hood of a Honda Accord. Was that what she drove?

Dutton sat at his desk and folded his hands. Two weeks earlier, a journalist from
Businessweek
had sat across the desk. She was a small, pretty brunette, sharp as a tack, too. Jennifer Walters, was it? Something like that. Had an anchorwoman’s haircut...shoulder-length hair, curling in just a little at the shoulders. She’d wanted to know whether business database systems could compete with open-source products, and he’d proudly described the upcoming release of Systematic Deluxe. It featured videoconferencing, real-time multiuser collaboration tools, desktop syncing, and remote access. He’d nailed the interview. But the woman had asked one question that had nothing to do with her article. It wasn’t really even a question. More of a statement. “If Draker hadn’t cheated you all those years ago, who knows how things would have played out. Maybe I’d be interviewing
him
about this.” Was she just making conversation? Was she just joking around? Or had she pieced something together? Maybe she was working on a different kind of article, and the open-source angle was just a ruse.

Outside, police and fire sirens wailed. Helicopters hovered overhead. They were there to protect the workers and the building, so why did he feel like they were coming for him? Dutton felt his cell phone vibrate against his waist. He checked the number. It was his wife. He didn’t answer it.

He picked the envelope up off his desk and pulled out the card. Dutton thought about the years that Draker had spent in prison, the way he’d been treated in the press, how he’d lost everything he had built. Why didn’t Draker just kill himself? Was it courage, or something else, that had kept him alive? Dutton turned the card over in his hand and pulled away the piece of
gum that was taped to the back, unwrapped the foil, and folded the gum into his mouth. Cinnamon.

Dutton tossed the empty envelope back onto the desk, and then realized the poetry of it all. He’d had the desk for so long he’d forgotten. It used to be Draker’s—Dutton had bought it at auction during the Drakersoft bankruptcy. How could he have forgotten this? He’d been so proud of it at the time. It had been his trophy. His spoils. And yet, over the last ten years, he’d slowly forgotten that it ever belonged to Draker. He’d forgotten about Draker entirely, in fact.

His cell phone vibrated again, and Dutton tossed it onto his desk. He looked down at Draker’s card, still in his hand, and then looked up at the clock on the wall. It was almost nine. Would it be a bomb? He assumed it would. But what if Draker wasn’t coming after him at all? What if Draker was just playing a joke? How would Dutton explain the fact that he’d stayed in the building? Maybe he’d say that he’d fallen asleep. But then why didn’t they see him when they opened his door? Because he liked to nap under his desk. Just like George Costanza. Still, could he have slept through the sirens, the loudspeaker? Sure, if he wore earplugs. What if they asked to see his earplugs? Christ, why would they ask to see those? It isn’t a crime to stay in a building that’s about to blow. They wouldn’t care why he stayed. They’d just be happy he was alive.

Could a man wearing earplugs really sleep through the commotion of the morning? If he didn’t go with the napping story, he could claim he’d had a stroke, couldn’t he? No, of course not—there would be medical evidence of a stroke. They’d make him go to doctors, and they’d call him a liar. Okay, so if it wasn’t a stroke, what was it? Maybe he just blacked out. Something generic. Doesn’t even remember it happening. Amnesia. He could fake amnesia. All he would have to do is—

The floor tore open, and Dutton fell through broken pipes and wires, crashing into the office below. A flashing fireball raced through the room, burning Dutton’s face and body. Though he’d closed his eyes, the light from the fire seared his eyelids. Every part of his body was in pain. Maybe he was dead and this was hell. Though debris burned around him, the worst seemed to be over.
I’m going to live
, he thought, just as a steel beam crashed from above and crushed his skull.

The card fluttered in the rubble, then settled in the growing flames.

THIS IS MY NINTH CRIME.
MY NEXT WILL BE BIGGER.

Seymour Dutton had thrown a ball on an elastic rope, and it had come rearing back at him.

May 1—Arlington, Virginia

In an instant, the bright-orange fireball filled the screen and overflowed its edges, only to disappear just as quickly under a black cloud of soot and smoke. Victor was sifting through his pile of papers, but the rest of them stood in front of the television, transfixed by the spectacle. The Professor took a step closer to the monitor, then shook his head. “It takes a man years to build something and another man seconds to destroy it. If there were a benevolent God, wouldn’t the opposite be true?”

“You don’t believe in God?” Brent asked.

“Not a benevolent one,” the Professor replied.

Over the next few minutes, CNN news anchors interviewed Systematic employees, local politicians, former special agents, psychologists, and profilers. The network moved so deftly and effortlessly from one interview to the next that it felt like a choreographed ballet. They’d even managed to create a three-dimensional computer animation of the explosion that had occurred only minutes before. “It’s sad,” Dagny noted. “We’ve become so used to crisis and disaster that they can do it in their sleep.”

The only hitch in the broadcast was the network’s unsuccessful attempt to track down Seymour Dutton, whose on-air denunciation of Noel Draker would have added a richer layer of personal drama to the day’s events. But Dutton was nowhere to be found. “He was in his office,” his secretary sobbed. “I assumed he was leaving with everyone else.”

“I checked his office,” Walter Davies, a security guard, explained. “He wasn’t there. Unless he was hiding under his desk,” he chuckled, until he realized that chuckling wasn’t appropriate in the aftermath of an explosion.

“Dutton stayed behind,” the Professor noted.

“But why?” Dagny asked.

“Another suicide,” the Professor said. “First the senator and now Dutton.”

Victor wasn’t listening to any of them. He was sorting through his documents. “Got it!” he exclaimed, waving a piece of paper in his hand. “A property in Tracy, California. Probably only a couple of miles from the Altamont racetrack.”

Dagny grabbed the page from Victor’s hand. “I’m off to Dulles.”

“I’m coming, too.” Brent said.

The Professor grabbed Dagny’s arm before she could reach the door. “Can I talk to you in private for a second?”

He led her down the hallway to the kitchen.

“I know what you’re going to say, Professor.”