The Bubble Gum Thief (45 page)

A large brick warehouse was set back about a hundred yards from the other side of the road. On the right side of the warehouse, rows of trailers were parked at garage bays. The front of the building was bare, save for a gated glass door at the top of three concrete steps. Draker ran up the steps and shook the door. It wouldn’t give; the warehouse was locked. Dagny thought about taking a shot, but she was too far to get off a good one, and it would just slow her down. So she ran instead.

Draker darted to the right side of the warehouse, where two dozen trailers were lined up at garage bays on the right side of the building, twenty feet apart. A large white number painted in a black circle marked each bay. Draker ran behind the closest trailer at bay one.

Draker had cover now, and Dagny didn’t. She ran toward the near end of the trailer and crouched behind the three clustered rear wheels. The sun was setting, casting long shadows on the ground, and Dagny’s stretched well past the second trailer. Draker could see her shadow. She could hear his heavy breaths.

“Hello, Dagny,” Draker wheezed. “You seem to be doing alright.”

“I’ll be feeling better in a few minutes,” she called back.

The trailer was about eight feet wide, with a two-foot clearing underneath. Draker probably expected her to run around the back of the second trailer, but it was faster to roll under. When she got to the other side, Draker was gone. Looking under the next trailer, she saw Draker pushing himself up off the ground. He’d followed her lead and rolled under the second trailer just as she’d rolled under the first.

“You find Waxton’s ball yet?” he called.

“I’ve had more important things on my plate,” Dagny shouted. She ran to the second trailer and dove under it, banging her shoulder into the concrete, then rolling to the other side. Once again, Draker was gone. She heard the scuff of his shoes, yet another trailer over. “I can do this all day,” Draker said from behind the third trailer.

“You’ll run out of trailers,” she yelled.

Draker laughed. “When we get to the end, we can go back the other way.” Dagny heard him dive under the fourth trailer. She rolled under the third trailer and fired her gun toward him. “You missed,” he said, safely on the other side.

Rolling under the trailers wasn’t working, so Dagny tried running around the end of the fourth one, but Draker was too fast—he’d already rolled under the fifth. “You’ve got to go under. It takes too much time to go around.” He coughed.

“Neither of us is having any fun, Draker.” Her shoulder ached, and she was tired. Where was Fabee? “Why don’t you turn yourself in?”

“That would be a pretty lousy ending to all this, don’t you think?”

Dagny ran around the fifth trailer, but Draker rolled back the other way. “You can’t win this game, Draker.”

“Of course I can. You might not know this, but I do have a gun.” Draker fired a shot under the fifth trailer, wide of Dagny, but close enough to make his point. Dagny hid behind the trailer
wheels. She noticed that the fifth trailer had a couple of horizontal handles on the side, one three feet up, another three feet higher than that. The roof of the warehouse was only a couple of feet higher than the top of the trailer. Dagny holstered her gun, then grabbed the lower handle and stood on the top of the tire. From there, she jumped up and grabbed the second handle, then lifted herself until she could reach the top of the trailer. She pulled herself to the roof of the trailer, grabbed her gun, and peered over the other side. Draker had already rolled back under the fourth trailer and was standing a trailer away.

Dagny jumped from the top of the trailer to the roof of the garage, and ran along the edge toward Draker. She saw him roll under the second trailer and fired her gun into the space between the trailers. Draker stayed put.

“You ready to give up?” Dagny called.

“Unless you can shoot through this trailer, I don’t think it’s checkmate.”

Dagny scanned the row of trailers for Fabee, and spotted him. She fired her gun to get his attention, then pointed down at the trailer in front of her. Fabee nodded and crept slowly around to the rear of the first trailer. Draker must have heard him coming. He fired a shot toward Fabee’s feet, and Fabee jumped, then took shelter behind the wheels of the third trailer. “That’s Assistant Director Fabee, I presume?” Draker asked.

“Yep.”

“I can’t believe you invited that guy to your big moment.”

The sun had slipped past the horizon. It was starting to get dark. They had to end the game soon. Dagny took a couple of steps to her right and fired a half-dozen shots into the tires on the left side of the second trailer, then switched out the magazine and shot a half-dozen more, causing the left side of the trailer to dip down. Just as she’d hoped, Draker rolled out from the right side of the trailer, raising his gun toward Dagny. Without breaking his
aim or using his arms, he arched his body, threw his legs into the air, and landed on his feet.

And then Draker spread his arms to his sides and dropped his gun to the ground.

Dagny stood at the edge of the warehouse roof, pointing her gun at Draker, gripping the trigger with her right index finger and steadying her aim with her left hand. Fabee came around the trailer and stood ten feet behind Draker, his gun fixed on him. Fabee looked up at Dagny. “Your shot,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

One simple tug of her finger and Draker would be dead. Half an inch to justice. She’d been waiting for this moment since she learned of Mike’s murder. And yet, she didn’t feel close to relief or joy or closure. Instead, her mind swelled with a thousand questions. “Why the senator?”

Draker fell to his knees but kept his hands in the air.

“Why Candice?”

“Just shoot the SOB,” Fabee yelled, but she had another question.

“Why Mike?” Draker lowered his gaze to the concrete. “Why Mike?” Dagny asked again, and Draker just shook his head slowly from side to side. “Why Mike?” Draker didn’t answer. “Why Mike?” She rubbed her finger against the trigger, waiting for the will to pull it, waiting for it to feel right.

Draker lifted his head. “Because.”

The bullet ripped through Draker’s body, and he plunged forward, turned, and fell on his back. His dead face smiled up at her. Not just a smirk, but a big, happy smile. All she’d wanted was for him to show a little fear, a little pain—a fraction of the misery he had caused so many others. But he was smiling.

Fabee blew the muzzle of his Glock like a gunslinger before holstering it. He walked over to the body and picked up Draker’s gun. “He had his gun pointed at you, and I came around and shot him in the back. It’s that simple.”

“Got it,” Dagny said, releasing her finger from the trigger. Staring down at the body, she almost expected Draker to leap up and tackle Fabee, just like in the horror movies, where the first shot never kills the monster. Draker didn’t leap up. He didn’t move. He just lay there dead and happy.

PART IV

May 6—Alexandria, Virginia

Dagny used a tape measure to find the center of the wall and marked the spot with a pencil. She drilled through the mark, then closed the wings of a toggle bolt and threaded them through the hole. After tightening the screw until it was firm against the wall, she lifted the painting and slid its wire onto the hook. Stepping back, she assessed its angle, then made adjustments until it looked even.

Mike’s mother had given Dagny the paintings from his front wall. Dagny had burned the Monet and the Picasso. Mike’s rendition of the portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife was now hanging in her entry hall.

Every time she looked at the painting, she saw things she’d never noticed before. This time, she saw the fruit hanging from a tree barely visible through the open window. The prayerful handclasp of the figure carved into the bed’s headboard. The hint of a face in a small circle of stained glass.

Though each new detail thrilled her, Dagny longed to see a familiar one. She ran upstairs and picked through the boxes in her guest closet, found a magnifying glass she’d inherited from
her grandfather, and carried it back downstairs. Lifting the magnifying glass to the painting, she peered into the mirror behind the Arnolfinis. It was a relief to find Michael Brodsky still there, holding his palette. Seeing his smile brought one to Dagny’s face.

She lowered the glass and looked at the blurred spot in the mirror, then raised the glass again and brought Mike back. Down and up; blurred, then clear. Amazing how a little magnification could transform a clouded dot into the man she’d loved. It was this thought that sent Dagny to her MacBook.

Although it took only a minute to power on, it felt like eternity. Dagny opened iPhoto and scrolled through the pictures she taken, past the photos of the crime scene and the fingerprints, finally settling on the picture she’d taken of the Williamsons’ stolen Matisse. She enlarged the photograph so that it filled the screen. Behind the topless woman playing guitar were curved lines of blurry dots—the woman’s audience. Dagny right-clicked and chose the zoom feature. She zoomed in close, scanning each row of dots, sliding the scroll bar at the bottom of the image to move it along. Every dot remained a blur, every single dot except for one. And that one dot was the unmistakable face of Michael Brodsky.

Noel Draker hadn’t owned a Matisse. He had owned a Michael Brodsky forgery. The fact that Mike had placed himself in the painting meant that Draker and Mike must have been friends. And this meant that Dagny didn’t understand anything that had happened at all.

May 7—Washington, DC

Dagny walked up the steps of the Foggy Bottom row house and rang the bell. When Gloria Benton answered, Dagny noticed that her kinky blonde hair was now accented with red highlights, and she’d replaced her old glasses with a tortoiseshell pair. There was something sad about the publicist’s desperate efforts to stay hip.

Benton greeted her with a smile and a hug. “Hello, Dagny. Come in, please.”

Dagny followed Benton into her cluttered mess of an office, dropped her backpack to the floor, and took a seat. Benton settled behind her desk, cleared some stacks of papers, and then folded her hands on the desktop. “My, my, my. You’ve had quite the time of it, haven’t you?”

“You have no idea,” Dagny replied.

“How are you holding up?”

Dagny leaned back in her chair. “My phone won’t stop ringing. The
Today
show.
Charlie Rose. 20/20
. They show up at my door, unannounced, sometimes at odd hours.”

“It’s awful, what goes on.” Benton leaned closer and spoke softly. “But there are things we can do to make it easier. And
considering how much you’ve suffered, you deserve to come out of this with something for your pain and troubles. The networks pay for interviews these days, you know. Everyone wants to be one of the first to tell your story, and once that chance is gone, everyone moves on.” Benton paused. “Tell me, how do you feel about writing a book?”

“I’d love to, Gloria. I just don’t think I’m ready.”

“You need some time? To decompress and—”

“It’s not that. It’s just that there are some loose ends that I haven’t wrapped up.”