The Bubble Gum Thief (49 page)

Dagny took a step back. “I was a little blind because of pride. I kept thinking that our team of three was beating your team of hundreds on the merits. But we weren’t. Your team was dysfunctional chaos because that’s what you wanted. You already knew that Draker was committing these crimes, and you didn’t want your team to figure things out. So you made sure that no one was in communication with anyone else, that all of the information was filtered through you, and that no one started putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“When the Professor and I went through the files from the Draker securities investigation in Cincinnati, they were in disarray, things were missing. At the time I figured it was just typical Bureau incompetence. But you’d been through the files the night before, and you’d removed everything that had your name on it. That’s why things were missing.”

Fabee crossed his arms, turning the knife handle over in his hand. “Keep going, Dagny. Your career is over, but I want to see where this goes.”

“When Rowanhouse and Reynolds and Draker himself kept imploring me to keep going, I didn’t know what they meant. But Draker wanted me to go after you. He believed that you had something to do with setting him up. Maybe he thought that Murgentroy was your pawn, that he planted that forged memo at your request. Maybe he thought that Senator—then Congressman—Harrison asked you to do this as a favor.”

“Pure fantasy,” Fabee scoffed.

“No, Justin,” Dagny said. “Harrison’s wife let me look through his calendars earlier today. He kept them in his home office, dating back to the nineties. You met with him during the investigation. Several times. You must have figured it would be good to have a congressman, a future senator, as an ally. You were aiming for director even then.”

“If you’re claiming I framed Draker, that’s not much in the way of proof.”

“You’re right. I don’t think I can prove that you framed Draker. But I do think I can prove you killed Murgentroy.”

Fabee slammed the tip of the knife into the cutting board and marched into the living room. He pushed the curtains aside and looked out the windows to the backyard, then hurried to the front windows and checked them, too. Fabee moved through the dining room and his study, doing the same. When he finished, he returned to the kitchen and grabbed Dagny’s arm, pulling her
gun from her holster and tossing it into the dining room. Then he patted her down. “I’m not wearing a wire,” she said, but he patted her down a second time anyway.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Dagny.”

“I saw Murgentroy fall. He fell facedown. But the autopsy said that the bullet wound was in the chest. I guess Draker could have rolled him over and shot him in the chest, but I checked the crime-scene photographs. There was blood splatter on the side of the house. Murgentroy was standing when he was shot. I don’t think Draker would have waited around for Murgentroy to wake up. Draker was long gone when you shot him. I’d guess that Murgentroy woke up before Victor did, and that Murgentroy called you and told you what had happened. He was spooked by the whole thing, maybe he even said something about coming clean. Or maybe you’d already lost faith in him. That scene you guys put on for me and Victor—that whole interrogation bit—it was a great show, but Murgentroy wasn’t faking the drunk part and that had to have you worried. So you shot Murgentroy, Justin.”

Fabee stepped toward Dagny. His face was red—she could feel the heat radiating off his skin. But his voice was calm. “He was shot with Draker’s gun.”

“He was shot with yours.”

“The ballistics matched Draker’s gun, Dagny.”

“But you were the one to retrieve the bullet from Murgentroy’s body. You broke protocol. You should have left it for the examiner.”

“Under our time constraints, I wanted a quick match. I wanted to check the lands.”

“You retrieved the bullet from Murgentroy’s body because it came from your gun. You needed to replace it with one of Draker’s bullets so that it would look like Draker shot him.”

“And where did I get that bullet, Dagny?”

She noticed that he was twirling the chopping knife in his fingers. It made her nervous, but she couldn’t show it. She
straightened up, standing even taller. “I figured it was the bullet from the dog. The one I brought you the last time I came out here. I figured that you still had that bullet—that you’d never sent it to the file—and that you substituted that bullet for the one that really killed Murgentroy when you sent it for analysis. But when I went through the file last night, Tucker’s bullet was there. So then I thought that maybe you’d taken a bullet from the bank or the Silverses’ house and substituted one of those for Tucker’s bullet, but those bullets were all accounted for, too.”

“So then you were wrong.”

“No, Justin.” Dagny took a step away from Fabee. “Because Draker committed another murder. All of his crimes took place in cities with tragic concerts. And since there wasn’t one in Washington, DC, Draker made one. On New Year’s Eve, Draker went to a rap concert at the 11:30 Club, fired his gun, and killed someone. I didn’t realize this until a couple of days ago, but you figured this out a couple of weeks ago. You went to DC Homicide and got the bullet, and told them it was a match to Draker’s gun so they could close the case. But you kept the bullet—I checked last night. DC Homicide never got it back. It’s not listed in the Bureau’s file contents either, but it’s in the file. Since you’d substituted Tucker’s bullet for the one that actually killed Murgentroy, you simply took the rap-concert bullet and placed it in the file where Tucker’s bullet should have been. Tomorrow, that file was to have been sent off storage, never to be seen again. You would have been in the clear. That’s the great thing about Draker being dead. No trial. No need to keep the file open. That’s why you shot him when I wouldn’t. And that’s why you were desperate to be there to catch him, because you needed to make sure he died.”

Fabee grabbed her wrist and held it tight. “And your proof for this insane theory is that we lost the bullet from DC Homicide? You’d throw away your livelihood on something so flimsy?”

She yanked her wrist from Fabee’s hand and took another step back. “Well, then there’s the baseball. And that’s where you were just plain stupid, Justin. I thought it was strange that you were desperate to get control of this case after Michael and Candice were killed. No one knew at the time how big this case would become. Later, when everything snowballed, I figured that you were just particularly prescient. But that’s not why you wanted in on the case. You knew from the start that Draker was committing these crimes. You knew it before Michael and Candice were murdered. You knew because Noel Draker told you.”

“Yeah. He came right up to me and—”

“He threw a baseball through your window.” She paused to try to read Fabee’s face, but it wouldn’t betray the thousand thoughts that must have been crowding his head. “Waxton’s ball. You saw the signatures on the ball and realized it wasn’t just some neighbor kid’s. You did what anyone would do—you hopped on the Internet to find out about the ball and found an article about the bank robbery in Cincinnati. And maybe you thought about the only time you’d been to Cincinnati, back at the time of the Draker raid. You either figured out Waxton’s connection to Draker yourself, or maybe Draker taped a note to the ball. The lab found traces of adhesive on the ball, along with tiny shards of glass. You can’t get glass out of anything, Justin.

“You should have burned that ball and buried the ashes,” Dagny continued. “But you kept it. Maybe you thought you could plant it as evidence, if you needed a warrant or wanted to frame someone. Or maybe you just figured it would get you one more picture in the paper when you gave it back to Waxton. But the article noted that the baseball was all scratched and damaged. The first time I came out here, to drop off Tucker’s bullet, I noticed that one of your front windows looked a little different than the rest. I’m betting that there are little pieces of glass in your carpet that match the little pieces of glass in the ball. And I’ve got a
warrant to get those pieces.” Dagny pulled an envelope from her backpack and handed it to Fabee.

He tossed the warrant aside. “Glass is glass, Dagny.”

“No, and you know that. We can match refraction. Break down the chemical composition of the glass, even analyze the sand. But it’s not just the glass, Justin. It’s Tucker’s DNA, which we’re lifting from the bullet you claimed killed Murgentroy, and the DNA on the bullet from the 11:30 Club.”

Fabee raised his knife and lunged at Dagny. She ducked and pushed his arm aside, then barreled into his stomach, knocking him down. Her gun was on the dining-room floor, fifteen feet away. Dagny started toward it, but Fabee rammed his shoulder into her back and she fell forward. He drove his knee into her spine, holding her flat on the ground. “Where will you run, Justin?”

“Away,” he said, raising the knife above Dagny. “Just away.”

The shot hit Fabee in his right shoulder. He dropped the knife and fell to the floor. Victor walked over to him and cuffed his hands behind his back, then pulled him up to his knees and patted him down.

Dagny knelt next to Fabee and smiled. “My partner,” she said, nodding toward Walton, “finally figured out how to fire a Glock.”

Fabee looked over his shoulder at Victor, then turned back to Dagny. “Fuck the two of you if you think you’ll bring me down. I’ve got the whole Bureau behind me. It’ll play like the two of you trying to set me up. Breaking in here and trying to kill me. Fucking self-defense.”

“It’s not just the two of us,” Dagny said.

Brent entered through the kitchen door and caught Fabee’s glare. He smiled, then walked over to Dagny’s laptop and pointed to the small camera lens in the bezel above the screen. “Little movie camera,” he said. “Broadcasting live to the Director.” Brent maximized the chat window that had been running in
the background. The Professor and the Director appeared on the screen, staring back at them. The Director was scowling and shaking his head. The Professor was smiling broadly. “Even if we couldn’t get you on Murgentroy, we’d get you for attempted murder on Dagny,” Brent said, as he grabbed Fabee by his arm and lifted him to his feet.

While Brent read Fabee his rights, Victor fetched Dagny’s gun from the dining room and returned it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem.” He put his hands in his pockets and shuffled from foot to foot. “This was something else, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was.”

“He hit you pretty hard. You okay?”

“I think so.”

“You sure? That knee in the back was—”

“No, I’m good. I feel fine.”

He took in a deep breath, then exhaled. “You know, that was the first time you’ve called me your partner.”

“Yeah, well,” Dagny said. And then she gave him an awkward hug.

May 23—Alexandria, Virginia

The bell rang. They had come to her since she wouldn’t answer her phone.

Bleary-eyed, she pushed herself out of bed, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and answered the front door.

“Your hair is a mess,” the Professor said. Victor and Brent stood to either side of him.

“I just woke up.”

“It’s eleven thirty,” the Professor said. “You’re not a teenager.” Brent laughed at this.

“Noted.”

“Are you eating?” Victor asked.

“Yes.” She’d meant to tinge her reply with indignation, but it didn’t quite come out that way.

“Come back to work,” the Professor said. “It’s been a week.”

“You say it as though that’s a long time.”

“How long do you need?”

“I don’t know. You said I could have as long as I needed.”

“I didn’t think it would take this long.”

She laughed. “What work is there anyway? The case is finished.”

“The Director likes what we did, so I’ve got approval to continue our little ad hoc group. We can pick and choose what we want to look at, and no one’s going to get in our way.”

“So Brent’s included, even after selling us out to Fabee?”

“Hey, I sold him back to you, didn’t I?”

“Probationary member,” the Professor said. “So what do you say, Dagny?”

She hadn’t given the future one thought since her confrontation with Fabee. She wasn’t sure she was ready to now. “Four people can’t solve cases like this, you know.”

“But four people did,” Victor said.

“No. Draker was helping us. We’re not that good.”

“So let’s try,” the Professor said. “And then we’ll see just how good we are.”

“I don’t know that I want to come back.”

“Of course you want to come back,” the Professor said. “This is what we do. We don’t push paper. We don’t—”

“I haven’t even paid my bills yet.” She sighed. “They shut off the cable.”

“You need help with your bills?” Victor asked.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Let me call you when and if I’m ready.”

“
If
?”

“
If
,” she confirmed. “What’s happening with Fabee?”

“Bones and Chunky have flipped. They’re going to testify against Fabee in exchange for leniency,” the Professor said.