Dave Zeltserman - Bad Karma

“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.

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 videotape.”

“Why would they use a hidden camera to videotape themselves?” Susan asked.

“Maybe only one of them knew the camera was there,” he said, but as he thought about the way both Carver and Linda acted while they were having sex and the way both of them played to the camera, he didn’t think that was true. So it was a good question, one that Shannon was beginning to have a hunch about. Something that could explain the money sitting in the empty speaker.

“Susie,” he told her. “I think I’m going to be busy most of the day. I probably won’t be able to see you until dinner.”

“Take your time. I’m going to visit Emily this morning, and I have some other things I’d like to do later. Hon, whether or not that videotape leads to the murderers, you should be proud of yourself for finding it. I’ll be looking forward all day to seeing you later.”

After they hung up, he rewound the tape to where Linda was hit across the face with the bat, then played it frame by frame to see if he could spot a reflection in the surface of the bat. He couldn’t find any. He fast forwarded the tape to the end and placed it back in the camera.

He pulled his latex gloves off, then called Daniels’ cell phone number and left a message suggesting where Daniels should look in the dead students’ apartment.

When he stepped out of the apartment, Maguire was waiting in the vestibule, his face unnaturally pale and his mouth not quite right. His voice sounded somewhat strangled when he told Shannon he thought he heard a woman scream in the neighboring condo.

Shannon put the padlock back in place, then made a decision as he reached for his car keys. “I need to go to Denver,” he told Maguire. “If you want to tag along, I’ll tell you about it.”

Maguire nodded. “Okay, sure.”

Shannon tossed him his keys. “You mind driving? I’ve got some calls to make along the way.”

They sat in a diner, Shannon with a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of him, Maguire still waiting for the corned beef hash and eggs that he had ordered. During the ride to Denver, Shannon squeezed in telling Maguire about the videotape he had found in between calls he needed to make and Daniels calling him back wanting to know how Shannon knew about the speakers. Shannon simply told the lieutenant he had a hunch about them and asked whether Daniels had found anything inside of them, at which point Daniels hung up. Now as he ate his pancakes, he checked his watch and saw it was only twenty-five past ten. He still had a half hour to kill.

Maguire’s hash and eggs were brought over. He played around with his food, then asked Shannon again about the videotape. “I still can’t get over that you found that tape,” he said. “When I heard that scream I almost called the police. You scared the shit out of me.”