“You might’ve mentioned that to me once or twice before.”
“I still find it fascinating no matter how many times I read about it.” Eli tossed the book on his desk and smiled broadly as he looked at his watch. “Miracle of miracles,” he said. “You’re on time for a change. Let me guess, you didn’t stop off at home or, more likely, Susan was out.”
“Wrong on both counts. I was just able to exercise amazing self-control.”
“You’d have to walk away from that stunningly beautiful ex-wife of yours.” Eli’s smile slowly faded. “Why don’t you tell me about the job you took.”
“How do you know I took it?”
“I can see the guilt written all over your face.”
“Damn! I washed before coming here.” Shannon pulled a chair up to the desk, sat down and clasped his hands behind his head as he leaned back and rested his feet on the desk.
“Make yourself comfortable,” Eli said.
“Thanks.”
“So tell me about this job.”
Shannon shrugged. His gaze wandered to a framed photo on the wall to his left that showed a herd of elk in a snowy mountain vista, then to one of Babe Ruth in Yankee pinstripes swinging a bat and looking skyward as if he were following the arc of a homerun ball. Turning back to Eli, he said, “You remember those two students who were killed a few months ago? I’m looking into it.”
Eli sat quietly staring at Shannon. The disappointment filling up his eyes gave him a hangdog look. “Jesus, Bill,” he said, breaking his silence. “One of these days you’re going to have to make a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“About the level of spiritual awareness you wish to achieve. At least during this lifetime.”
“Chrissakes, Eli, all I’m going to be doing is investigating a crime.”
“You’re doing more than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like spending your time mired in the worst that people can do.”
Shannon rubbed a hand across his eye. The same old argument, although Eli’s manner now seemed more personal and less academic than all those earlier times. Now there was nothing but disappointment showing in his friend’s eyes. Of course, this was the first double-murder investigation Shannon had taken on since moving to Boulder. When he was a police detective in Cambridge, he had investigated some horrendous crimes that truly did deal with the worst that people can do—including rape, incest and child abuse, as well as murders. Since moving to Boulder and working part-time as a private investigator, the most serious case he handled involved a real estate scam in which several people, at least temporarily, had lost their life savings. Shannon had been able to recover most of their money for them.
“Look,” he said. “This is the world we live in. What am I supposed to do, keep blinders on and only pay attention to uplifting sights, like elk tramping through the mountains?”
“Bill, you’re right, we live in a world where bad things happen, but we can choose what type of energy we expose ourselves to. If you seek out positive energy, it will have an effect on you, just as dark and negative energy will also have its own special effect. There’s a lightness needed to leave your body peacefully and at your own choosing. Dark energy can be like a black hole, pulling you into its own gravitational field. It can be hard to fly when you’ve tied a cement anchor to your waist.”
“Quite a speech.”
“Thanks, I thought so. But obviously not good enough to change your mind.”
“No, not quite.” Absentmindedly Shannon massaged his damaged hand. He clenched his teeth against phantom pains that had started to radiate from his missing fingers up to his wrists. For a long moment it was as if nails were being driven into his joints. “I’m thirty-seven years old. I need to do something. I can’t spend twenty-four hours a day working on my spiritual development.” He paused to look down at his damaged hand. “Anyway, I’m good at what I do,” he added in a tired voice. “And maybe doing this I can help bring justice to the victims and some relief to the families.”
“You don’t sound very convincing with that last part.”
Shannon shrugged. “I met one of the families. Bringing any relief to them is only wishful thinking on my part.”
“Then why do this, Bill? I know it’s not for the money. You’ve got your disability pension and Susan’s making a good income with her practice. I agree, you should be doing something, but don’t try selling me that you’re doing this so you can help people because there are plenty of other things you could do—like working at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen or any number of things that could enrich you. So why detective work?”
Shannon removed his feet from the desk and leaned forward so he could pick up an amethyst geode that Eli used as a paperweight. He ran his thumb along the purple and silver diamond-shaped crystals inside it, studying the intricate pattern that they made. “It’s just something I need to do,” he said as he placed the geode back on the desk.
“I think you need to figure out what you really want.” Eli took a cassette tape from the top drawer of his desk and tossed it to Shannon. “For whatever good it will do you, here are some new exercises. Like the old ones, play these a half hour before going to bed.”
Shannon nodded. “Thanks. Are we still meeting tomorrow morning?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“I thought you might be too pissed at me for taking this case.”
“You want to put obstacles up for yourself, that’s your business. I still plan on working with you. And besides, I’m not ending a friendship over something like this.”
“Fair enough. I’ve got a few things to do over the next hour or so, but any interest in catching the Sox game later?”
Eli made a face as if he had swallowed spoiled milk. “I already told you my thoughts on interleague play. Besides, I don’t see any reason to pay money to watch a second-rate team beat a third-rate team.”
“What are you talking about? The World Champion Red Sox a second rate team? Last I checked they’re two and a half games up on your beloved Yankees.”
“I was referring to the Rockies as the second-rate team. I’ve also decided that the Red Sox never won the World Series last year. We’re either the victims of a massive media hoax or are suffering from some sort of mass delusion. And about the Yankees being two and a half games out—don’t take too much solace from that. In seventy-eight they were fourteen games out this same time of year, and we all know how that turned out.”
Shannon got to his feet and, at the door, told Eli that he would see him tomorrow.
Eli nodded, his long face reflective. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Think harder about why you’re still doing this detective work.”
“You got it, Chief.” Shannon gave him a quick salute and left.
***
The condo complex where the murdered students had lived was off Arapahoe Avenue and was made up of clusters of newer-looking two-story townhouses, with what looked like four townhouses grouped together into each cluster. Driving through the complex, Shannon guessed that the townhouses had been built within the last five years.
Taylor Carver and Linda Gibson had rented a condo in an end unit townhouse that was in the back of the complex and not visible from the street. Shannon found the door to the building unlocked. Inside was a small vestibule leading to two condos. The door to Carver and Gibson’s unit had red smudges on it and some splintering where it had been kicked open. A police notice on the door warned that it was a crime scene and that the area was sealed off to the public until further notice. The other condo had a small metal sign screwed into its door indicating that it was the residence of Mike and Nancy Maguire. Shannon knocked on the Maguire’s door and waited. After several minutes a man in his early forties came out, his face flushed as he gave Shannon a wary look. “Yeah?” he asked.
Shannon introduced himself. “I was hoping you could tell me about the two students who were murdered next door,” he added.
<
br /> “How about you show me some identification,” Maguire said, a thin smile showing that he thought Shannon was full of shit. Shannon handed him his PI license. Maguire studied it and then, coordinated with a sudden jerk of his head, snapped his fingers, a wide grin breaking over his face.
“I knew you looked familiar. I used to live in Medfa,” he said, grossly exaggerating his Boston pronunciation of ‘Medford’. “You were in the news for weeks. A police detective, right? What was the name of that serial killer? Carl… Carl Winters, right?”
“Charlie Winters.”
Maguire snapped his fingers again. “That’s right. Charlie Winters. You killed him, didn’t you?”
Shannon nodded.
“Damn,” Maguire said, still grinning widely. His flushed face showed a deep pink along his cheeks, almost as if he had rouge on and almost matching the color of his red hair. He was about Shannon’s height but wider, carrying an extra forty pounds beyond Shannon’s hundred and eighty. “When I heard you outside I thought you were a reporter. The tabloid ones are the worst. Nothing but a bunch of fucking piranhas.”
“No, I’m not a reporter,” Shannon said. “If you’ve got some time, I’d like to talk to both you and your wife. Is your wife home?”
“She’s home.” He hesitated. “She’s not feeling well, though. She’s come down with some sort of bug and would give me holy hell if I brought you or anyone else upstairs. You also caught me as I was about to head out.” Maguire snapped his fingers again, his eyes brightening. “Look, I’ve got two tickets for the Sox game. Since my wife can’t come, and shit, you’re another Boston guy—as long as you’re a Sox fan, you want the ticket?”
Shannon found himself nodding. “I was planning to go to the game,” he admitted.
“Then come on, man, take my extra ticket. Otherwise I’ll just be scalping it, and with my luck, selling it to some undercover cop. This way I’ll know it’s in the hands of a true Sox fan. Wadda ya say?”
Shannon hesitated as he thought it over. Maguire’s grin turned more into a smirk as he shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “What’s there to think about? It will be fun. Us guys from back east, we take baseball seriously, not like these rednecks and cowboys out here. And you can ask me all the questions you want while we’re driving back and forth to the game. But once the game starts, that’s it. No questions. I go into my gonzo fan mode. So last time, wadda ya say?”
“You talked me into it.”
“Great.” Maguire offered his hand and showed only a slight tic in his grin on realizing that Shannon was missing a couple of fingers. “I’ve got a few things I’ve got to do before we head out. I’d invite you up but my wife would kill me.”
“That’s fine.” Shannon nodded towards the staircase behind Maguire. “Your condo’s on the second floor?”
“Yep. We’ve got the upstairs, they’ve got the downstairs.” Maguire waved a thumb at the other condo. “What do you think, one of these days they’ll take that notice down?”
“Three months is already too long.”
“You’d think so, huh? It cheers my wife up everyday to have to walk past that. Also does wonders for my resale value.”
“You’re thinking of selling?”
“Maybe, not right now.” He sniffed a few times, then froze for a moment as if he were about to sneeze. The moment passed. “Look,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of things I really need to do, then you can fire away all the questions you want. I just don’t want to miss batting practice. With the altitude out here, Manny and Ortiz should be launching some moon shots.”
Maguire gave Shannon a short wave, then turned and headed up the stairs, his feet heavy on the hardwood steps. Ten minutes later he came down wearing a 2004 Red Sox World Championship T-shirt, Red Sox cap and official-looking baseball uniform pants. His face was flushed a deeper red than before as he showed Shannon the baseball glove he was carrying. “Kind of a kid’s thing to do, but maybe I’ll get lucky and catch a foul ball.” They started towards the parking lot, and when he caught Shannon reaching for his car keys he put out a hand to stop him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll drive,” he said.
He led Shannon to a dark blue BMW Z3 convertible. “Before you get any ideas I’m loaded, this beauty’s eight years old and has almost two hundred thousand miles on it. I bought it during the boom times of the late nineties. Before nine-eleven changed everything.”
Maguire put the top down. As they drove from Arapahoe Avenue to Twenty-Eighth Street, he explained how he’d been a software engineer in the networking equipment sector during the nineties. “It was a magical time back then,” he said. “For a while it looked like we were all going to make millions. But it was an illusion. There was nothing backing these companies up, no real fundamentals anyway. So when nine-eleven happened, the whole damn bubble burst.”
The pink in his cheeks dropped a shade as he thought about it. “While it looked like everybody in my industry was making millions, the reality was most of us made nothing. Worse than that, a lot of people got wiped out buying worthless stock options and then having to pay taxes on paper gains that never existed. The small startup I was at had an offer for two billion before nine-eleven. The greedy son-of-a-bitch founders and venture capitalists turned it down thinking they could go IPO and make ten billion. Want to guess how much I would’ve made if they took that two billion dollar offer?”
“A million dollars,” Shannon said.
“Try six million. Instead, the company goes belly up. They closed their doors the day before Christmas Eve, 2001. I didn’t even get a severance package out of the deal.”
Maguire became quiet, appearing to lose himself in his thoughts. After taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long exhalation, he went on, “At that time there was nothing in Massachusetts. The job market for guys like me was completely dead. Worse even than in California, which was a nuclear meltdown. It took me nine months to find a job here in Boulder and I considered myself lucky to’ve found it. A year later that company went out of business. But for once my luck didn’t completely stink and six months after that I was able to find another job down the same street from where I was working. At least I didn’t have to pack up and move again. With all the outsourcing going on, it’s looking like my days as a software engineer are winding down.” He showed Shannon a half-hearted smile. “C’est la vie,” he said. “Maybe my next career will be doing PI work like you. I’m always reading PI novels. I can’t get enough of that stuff, and I’d have to think I’d have a blast being a PI.”
“It’s a little different in real life,” Shannon said.
“Maybe.” Maguire pulled onto US 36 heading to Denver, his smile hardening as he stared straight ahead. “But it still has to beat sitting at a desk twelve hours a day working on the most bore-ass software imaginable. After twenty years, it gets old.”
As Shannon waited for Maguire to start up his monologue again, he saw what looked like a group of dogs off in the distance. Even though they were too far away to make out any details, he could tell by the way their backs were hunched and the feral way in which they moved that they were coyotes. He watched them until they faded from the horizon. When it became clear that Maguire had talked himself out, he asked how long he had lived in his condo.
“Time for the questioning, huh? Since we moved here. I guess almost three years.”
“How about Taylor Carver and Linda Gibson?”
“What about them?”
“When did they move into your building?”
He thought about it. “Over a year ago. Probably the beginning of last summer.”
“Did you know them?”
“Not really.” He showed a pained grimace as he thought about it. “They were sort of standoffish,” he said. “Not the friendliest types. Plus they were students while me and my wife are past forty. I tried inviting them over a couple times for barbecue, but they didn’t seem interested. Then school started for them and work got crazy for me, and I just didn’t b
other after that. I guess I could’ve put in more of an effort. I feel bad about it after what happened. Terrible thing.”
“Any of your neighbors friends with them?”
“I don’t think so. Most of us living there are working types. These were college kids. They seemed to want to hang out with their own kind.”
“A lot of people going in and out of their apartment?”
“I don’t know if I can answer that. Tonight’s pretty unusual for me. Most days I’m working until ten and that usually includes Saturdays and more and more Sundays now, but yeah, I’d hear people over there while I was home.”
“Were they selling drugs?”
Maguire chewed on his lower lip as he thought it over. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never saw anyone smoking crack outside the building, if that’s what you mean. But could they’ve been selling drugs? I never really thought about it before.”
Shannon gave him a long look. “You never thought they could be drug dealers?”
“Nope.”
“Even after they were beaten to death?”
“What can I say? The thought never occurred to me.”
“You better forget about being a detective then,” Shannon said.
“Hey, I don’t think that’s fair.” A hurt look formed over Maguire’s mouth. “I just never saw anything that made me think they were drug dealers.”
“Why were they killed?”
“What?”
“I’m giving you a chance to play detective. Why do you think they were killed?”
“Jeeze, that’s some question. To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought. The last six months work has been totally nuts. We’re trying to get our next round of funding and the stress has just been unreal. And now when I’m home, I’m having one reporter after the next bugging me.”
“You’ve got some time now. Give it some thought. If you want, you can think of this as a job interview.”
“Hey, I wasn’t entirely kidding before. If my current job washes out, I might just want to do something different like PI work. Why the fuck not do something fun for a change?”
Bad Karma Page 5
