Bad Karma (30 page)

“I don’t know why you want to see me,” he complained.

“How about getting in the car and I’ll tell you.”

He eyed Shannon suspiciously and asked him what happened to his shoulder.

“I was shot. Come on, get in.”

Randall hesitated for a moment, but got into the passenger seat. “Ma’s furious with you,” he said. “The police came yesterday. She knows you don’t work for no
People
magazine. So who do you work for, that guy we’re suing?”

“It doesn’t matter. Your lawsuit’s dead. Why’d you lie to me before, Randall?”

He stared blankly at Shannon while he made sense of his question, then gave a screw-you look and reached for the passenger door handle. “Fuck this and fuck your questions. I don’t have to answer to you. I’m leaving.”

“That’s fine. Leave if you want. It means I’ll talk to the police instead. But you did lie to me. About how often you saw Taylor. And about the porn films you made with your brother.”

He sat back in his seat. “I never made one of those,” he said stubbornly.

“Come on, Randall, I saw them. The ones you made with Linda and those girls from the cult.”

There was no reaction. Nothing but confusion in Randall’s face. Shannon sighed. “You’re going to tell me you didn’t know he was filming you with those girls?”

Randall shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know nothing about it.” He broke into an ugly smile revealing badly receding gums. “You got one of them? It’d be cool to see it.”

Shannon gave him a hard look and decided he really didn’t know about the films. “Why’d you lie to me about the last time you saw your brother?”

Carver’s expression turned sullen. “I couldn’t tell you in front of Ma. She’d want to know what I went there for.” When he saw Shannon’s reaction, a light turned on in his dull eyes realizing what Shannon had been fishing for. “Man, that is so lame,” he said. “You thought I killed Taylor ’cause I found out he was filming me? If that’s what they teach you at Private Eye school you got punked. With the nice-looking hoes Taylor got for me, he could’ve filmed me all he wanted. You think I care?”

Randall showed Shannon a big toothy smirk, got out of the car and laughed softly as he walked back to his house. Even Buttercup stared at Shannon with a look that could only be described as pity.

For the next fifteen minutes Shannon thought about giving up. It would be so damn easy. He certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over Anil Paveeth being wrongly convicted of those murders. But the problem was he kept thinking of Linda Gibson, thinking about everything she had gone through, how she was basically used and disposed of like trash. As much as he wanted to just go home to Susan and give the case up, he knew he couldn’t. Instead he went back to the scene of the crime hoping to find some inspiration there.

***

With everything that had happened on Saturday, he never told the police about buying one of the DVDs, or had a chance to turn it over to them. He had it with him now in the dead students’ apartment. Fortunately, the police still hadn’t released the apartment as a crime scene, otherwise the place would’ve been emptied out by Eunice Carver. He plugged the DVD into the player by the TV, turned up the volume to the level he imagined it was recorded at, then sat down in the same chair Paveeth had most likely used. He closed his eyes and listened to the DVD, hoping to get a better feel for what went on in that apartment when they made those videos. The damn thing was loud with Metallica blaring away. Carver also made a lot of noise when he joined in. Shannon was thirty minutes through the DVD when he heard a banging noise in the background. At first he thought Maguire was banging on the floor above him, but after stopping and restarting the DVD he realized the sound came from the DVD. When the video was originally made, someone had banged a baseball bat or something like that on the floor of Maguire’s apartment and it had gotten picked up. He went back through the DVD to find where the banging first started and timed it. It continued until the DVD ended, lasting twenty-seven minutes.

Shannon called Susan, read her the phone number Maguire had given him for his wife, and asked if she could get on the computer and do a reverse phone number lookup. Her tone had been icy when she first answered, but worry melted away whatever frost had been in her voice. She asked him what he wanted the number for.

“I think I’ve got this figured out,” he told her. “Christ, the guy just about told me why he killed them. He uses a baseball bat and I’m too dense to make the connection. I’ve got a question about Medhorrinum types. Can you tell me more about their tempers?”

“The thing with Medhorrinums is intense passion. They can have that in their tempers also.”

“So they can just fly off the handle and go into a blind rage?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Susie, call me back after you look up that phone number.”

She told him she would, her voice tense. “Bill,” she added. “If you suspect something maybe you should call the police?”

“I will. I just need a little more information first.”

Susan called him back five minutes later. The phone number was registered to a Mary Connor in Medford, Massachusetts. Shannon called the number. The same woman who had told him she was Nancy Maguire days earlier answered.

“Is this Mary, Mary Connor?”

“Yeah, who’s calling?”

“Bill Shannon. I’m the investigator from Colorado who you pretended to be Nancy Maguire with.”

There was a long hesitation, then she said, “Look, I was trying to help Mike out, that’s all. He said you needed to talk to Nancy and he didn’t know where she was.”

“How about you? Do you know where she is?”“

“He told me she took off a couple of months ago. That’s all I know.”

The phone went dead. Shannon started the DVD again, turned the volume up, then left the apartment and knocked on Maguire’s door. After a minute or so, Maguire answered, his face very pale, his mouth and eyes not quite right. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “what’s going on in there?”

“Remember lesson three?”

Maguire shook his head.

“Never be satisfied until the case is closed.”

“Fuck, you’ve got a good memory. But I don’t getcha? This case is closed. I saw on the news they arrested that Indian dude and charged him with the murders.”

“They arrested the wrong guy.”

Shannon picked up on the slight hitch in Maguire’s mouth, but Maguire caught himself, forced a smile and shook his head. “I don’t know, buddy, it sounds like they got the right guy. But if you want to come up and talk about it, maybe we can come up with some ideas.”

“Sure.”

Shannon followed Maguire up the stairs. Maguire headed straight to the kitchen and took a beer from his fridge. He asked Shannon if he wanted one.

“Nah, I’ll skip it this time. The construction’s not as good here as I would’ve thought. That DVD sounds almost as if it’s playing right here instead of in your neighbors’ apartment.”

Maguire opened the beer bottle and took a healthy swig. “You could turn it off if you want.”

“I’ll leave it on. You play softball, don’t you, Mike?”

Maguire forced a smile. “Why, you looking to join a team?”

“Not really. I was just wondering, that’s all. I’m not going to ask to see your bat. I don’t want to give you any excuses to get your hands on it. But I bet you if I did I’d see one that you bought three months ago. The one you had before that you had to throw out, right?”

Another slight hitch showed around Maguire’s mouth. “Come on, quit joking around. This isn’t funny.”

“I’m not joking. We both know you killed your neighbors downstairs. Wait—don’t bother arguing. You’re not going to change my mind, and besides, my problem is I can’t prove it. I have no real evidence. I wish I did, but you’re probably going to skate on those murders.”

“Buddy, you’re not making any sense,” Maguire said softly, his voice strained. “You know I was at work until three in the morning the night they were killed.”

“That couldn’t have been too hard for you to get around. You borrowed someone else’s badge… No, that wasn’t it? Maybe you got lucky and left with a coworker your first time so you didn’t have to use your badge, then after killing those two kids you went back to work, waited until someone else was leaving so you could slip in again without it being recorded, and then hung around until three in the morning to give yourself an alibi.”

Maguire’s eyes shifted enough to tell Shannon that his second guess was what happened. Maguire realized it too and looked away.

“What kept bugging me,” Shannon said. “Was that of the three cult members you supposedly saw hanging around with Carver and Gibson, only one of them showed up on those DVDs. I kept wondering why that was, but the reason was pretty simple. You didn’t see any of them here. You told me that only to throw me off track, and it was only more dumb luck on your part that it ended up pointing the blame towards Paveeth. I’ve got to give you credit, you’ve had an amazing streak of dumb luck so far—especially not being picked up on that videotape. How am I doing so far?”

Shannon waited for Maguire to say something. When he didn’t, Shannon went on, “Your reason for wanting to tag along was to keep tabs on me, see how close I was getting, and of course, try to screw me up given the chance, maybe kill me if I got too close.”

Maguire took a long drink of his beer and drained it. When he faced Shannon again any resemblance to his former goofy self was gone. His face had become a hard white, his eyes as lifeless as a mannequins. “What’s the point of talking about this,” he said. “As you said, you have no evidence and the police have that cult leader. Why don’t you let this drop?”

“Why? Because you’re my good buddy from Massachusetts? Sorry, not a good enough reason. While I can’t prove you killed those two kids, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble proving you murdered your wife.”

Maguire’s eyes shifted up to meet Shannon’s. He lowered his beer bottle in his hand, holding it like it was a club. “You’re nuts. I didn’t kill Nancy.”

“Of course you did. I talked to Mary Connor. She told me how you asked her to impersonate your wife. I saw your apartment before. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. You probably didn’t clean it once since killing Nancy—at least not until a couple of days ago when I commented about it. What happened, Mike? She wouldn’t keep quiet about you being a double-murderer?”

Shannon waited for an answer. When he didn’t get one, he went on. “I’m sure when the police look into it they’ll find forensic evidence here. And they’ll find out about your wife disappearing off the face of the earth two months ago while you kept up the appearance that she was still living here. It’s more than enough to convict you of first degree murder.”

Maguire edged closer, the beer bottle held at his side. “You should let this drop,” he said.

Shannon laughed. “You’re going to attack me now? Mike, not a smart move on your part.”

Maguire crept closer, his face cautious as he moved. Shannon let himself be walked back into the living room. There was more room to maneuver there. He braced himself. Maguire swung out with the beer bottle and Shannon stepped away from it and kicked Maguire on the back of his knee with a solid roundhouse. Maguire fell to the floor, his knee collapsing under him. With the kick Shannon felt something rip in his shoulder. He also felt a warm stickiness start to spread down his arm and knew something was very wrong with his surgically reconstructed shoulder.

Maguire tried to get to his feet, couldn’t. A siren could be heard off in the distance. Shannon knew it was heading their way—that Susan must’ve called the police. Maguire heard the siren also and knew where it was heading. He looked up at Shannon. “They were killing me,” he said, his voice coming out a mile a minute as he tried to beat the police sirens. “Every night it was like that DVD you’re playing now. I was working twelve plus hour days and then I couldn’t even sleep at night because of their bullshit. I’d try asking Carver to turn it down, and he’d just turn the music louder and make more noise down there. Sometimes it would go on all night. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Work’s killing me, my wife’s killing me by moping around like a zombie twenty-four hours a day, and they’re killing me by not letting me have a second’s peace. I couldn’t sell the place. I didn’t have the money to get out from under the mortgage. So what the fuck was I supposed to do? What the fuck would you’ve done?”

“Something other than beating them to death with a baseball bat. And even if you flipped out with them and couldn’t help yourself, you were rational when you decided to kill your wife.”

The sirens were loud now. Shannon heard car doors slamming, then a police radio going on and officers talking. Someone pounded on the front door. Maguire turned from the noise back to Shannon. “Come on,” he pleaded. “Give me this one break. We could make such a great fucking team!”

Shannon left Maguire to go answer the door.

***

Shannon was admitted to the hospital later that evening and the next morning underwent surgery to repair his reconstructed shoulder. The following Tuesday he took a codeine tablet and accompanied Susan to Les Hasherford’s funeral. There were more people there than Shannon would’ve expected. After a while he realized that most of the mourners were the parents and other relatives of the children Hasherford had helped save. He recognized the parents of the boy who’d been rescued recently in Colorado Springs. At the grave site when the minister gave Hasherford’s eulogy and talked about the gift he had and how he used it so unselfishly, Susan wept. Shannon put his left arm around her and held her tight to his side. He knew why that got to Susan as much as it did. She knew as he did that it was far more than being unselfish, that he had sacrificed himself to save that last child.

After the funeral, Susan took him back to the hospital and he stayed two weeks before his doctor released him. He didn’t put up any resistance during that time—one look from Susan told him he’d better not even think about it. Eli visited him a lot, so did Eddie to play chess. Daniels came by once.

Whatever distance he had briefly felt with Susan had vanished. As she drove him back from the hospital, she turned the wrong way on Pearl Street and headed towards the Boulder mall instead of their apartment.