“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 bother 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.”
