Bad Karma

He went back to the living room, played a CD of Native American music by Carlos Nakai and sat cross-legged on the floor with his eyes closed. Running and straightening up the apartment had helped slow down his thoughts, but he knew his mind was still too active to get any sleep, and he saw no reason to go back to the hotel and risk waking up Susan. The repetitive beat of the drums helped relax him further and slow down the noise in his head. After a while he felt at peace and became aware of a stillness inside. It was a feeling he didn’t want to leave and he waited a long time before opening his eyes. When he did, he was surprised to see that it was ten past seven in the morning and that he’d been meditating almost three hours.

Outside, the sky had cleared up. The sun felt warm on his face as he looked out towards it. The only sign of last night’s storm were some branches that had fallen down. He walked to Juiced Up and met Eli at a corner table. The place was more crowded than usual with all the tables taken.

Eli gave him his typical deadpan stare, mentioned that Shannon looked refreshed. “I take it the thunderstorms didn’t keep you up.”

“Nope, not one bit. Your usual?”

Eli nodded, and Shannon went to the counter and bought a chai for his friend and a combination apple and carrot juice for himself.

“No coffee this morning, huh?” Eli asked, smiling.

“I think I got all that out of my system.” Shannon stopped to take a sip of his juice, then told Eli that his apartment had been broken into the other day and his neighbor attacked when she tried to investigate.

“Emily?”

Shannon nodded.

“Oh, Jesus,” Eli said. “I like that girl. Very spunky. I hope she’s okay.”

“I think she will be. She regained consciousness last night and outside of a fractured skull it doesn’t seem as if there was any significant damage. Susan had me give her a homeopathic remedy when I found her. I think it helped.”

“And you suspect the True Light cult is behind the break-in?”

“I’m pretty sure of it. I went there yesterday afternoon to talk to Melissa Cousins. They kept me waiting, and I think they used the time to send their Russian goons to my place.”

“What do the police think?”

Shannon took another drink of his juice. “Not worth talking about,” he said.

Eli nodded, his long face somber. “Before we get too far off subject, I’ve been thinking more about your lucid dream slash out-of-body experience the other day. You mentioned something about that girl responding with gibberish when you asked who killed her. By any chance do you remember what she actually said?”

Shannon consulted his notepad and found what he had scribbled down after he had woken up from his dream. He read the words to Eli.

“I’m not sure that’s gibberish,” Eli said.

“After reading it out loud, I’m not sure either. I guess it could be Swedish? Maybe some words I picked up subconsciously from a movie?”

“It’s German,” a thin man with a goatee said. He was sitting at a neighboring table and drinking an espresso. “Mit vergnugen means ‘with pleasure’.” He smiled at Shannon and Eli, then turned back to his New York Times.

“That’s odd,” Eli said. “Why would she answer with pleasure when you asked who killed her?”

Shannon was staring at his notepad. “She actually said that when I asked her if she could give me a clue about the murders. But why would she speak German…”

He stopped cold as the answer hit him.

“What?” Eli asked.

“I know what it means,” Shannon muttered, distracted as he thought about what he was going to do next, “I don’t have time to explain now, but I’ll give you a call later.”

“Jesus, Bill, you can’t leave me hanging like this,” Eli sputtered, his long face growing beet red. Shannon stumbled out of his seat, barely aware of his friend’s protestations. He waved to him weakly at the door, then left the coffee shop and headed back to his apartment to pick up his car.

Chapter 15

As Shannon drove to the dead students’ apartment he kept thinking about Linda Gibson. The image of her from his dream had crystallized in his mind, and he could picture vividly the amused little smile that had cracked her face when she spoke those German words to him. At some point he must’ve heard the phrase in a movie and filed it away in his subconscious. Except-and the thought stopped him cold-for it to be something like that he would’ve had to’ve had that dream after he’d been in the apartment. Otherwise how would he have known what type of stereo speakers they had, if any at all? But he had that dream before he ever set foot in there. Maybe one of the newspapers had shown a picture of the inside of their bedroom. Maybe he had filed it away in his subconscious also…

Or maybe Eli was right.

Whichever it was, he decided he had more important things to focus on at that moment.

He still had the keys to the students’ apartment on him. When he arrived at the townhouse he slipped on a pair of latex gloves he took from his trunk, then unlocked the police padlock and the deadbolt and went to the bedroom. There he looked at the speakers mounted on both sides of the flat panel TV. German brand speakers. He removed the front of one of them. It came off easily. The guts had been removed, and sitting inside the empty casing was a stack of hundred dollar bills. He counted thirteen thousand two hundred dollars, then put the money back and slid the front cover back on. He was only mildly surprised when he slid off the front of the other speaker and found a video camera inside of it pointing towards the bed. A tape was still in the camera. He took it out and plugged it into a VCR by the TV.

The tape showed Linda Gibson and Taylor Carver having sex with Nirvana blasting away in the background. About ten minutes into the tape, a bang could be heard over the music. Carver and Gibson stopped what they were doing, both of them looking surprised as they craned their necks sideways to face the bedroom door. There was another bang, this one louder. Shannon guessed that the first one came from the front door of the apartment being kicked in, the second from the bedroom door being swung hard into the wall. Carver jumped off the bed then, clearly agitated. At that point he had moved outside the frame of the camera. Someone, probably Carver, yelled “what the fuck”, and that was followed by two thuds. They occurred almost simultaneously-the second one louder than the first. Linda screamed then, and scrambled off the bed. Before she was outside of the video frame, the barrel of an aluminum baseball bat caught her on the side of the face and she fell out of view. For thirty seconds the only sound was Nirvana blasting away. Then more soft thuds could be heard over the music. Many more. Some of them accompanied by blood spraying onto the bed and across the video frame. Then the thuds stopped. The music stopped also. After that nothing but silence, maybe for a minute, maybe two, then a loud crack-the sound of a baseball being hit out of the park. Shannon knew it wasn’t a baseball that had found the sweet spot on the bat.

His cell phone rang, jolting him back to the present. He stopped the video and saw that it was Susan calling him from the Boulderado.

“Hi darling,” she said. “I was surprised to see you gone when I woke up.”

“Yeah, I took off last night. I knew if I hung around I’d end up waking you.”

“What’s wrong, hon? You sound strange.”

“Nothing’s wrong, at least not what you think.” Shannon paused, then told her about finding a videotape showing Carver and Gibson being murdered.”

“They actually videotaped themselves killing those two students?”

“Not exactly. Carver and Gibson had a camera hidden in their bedroom. They were filming themselves having sex when the murders happened. The killings were for the most part off camera, and my guess, whoever did it had no idea the camera was there. Unfortunately, due to dumb plain luck the killer never made an appearance on the