The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  “Sure, okay,” I say. And then I know. I suspected, but now I know.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she starts. “There’s no longer a reason for all of this. There’s no baby to protect anymore, Jason.”

  Her eyes fill, but her face is strident, determined.

  “That was always the justification,” she says. “We were letting you carry the water for what happened, instead of me, because of the baby.”

  I shake my head no.

  “I want to tell the truth now,” she says.

  “No,” I answer. “Absolutely not.”

  She shakes her head and looks away from me. “Do you have any idea what this is like for me?” she mumbles. “Knowing that I did something and you’re taking the blame?”

  “First of all,” I say, driving a finger into the table, “I’m far more responsible than you are, Shauna. Alexa was my doing, not yours. You were put in an impossible situation, and if it weren’t for me, you never would have been in that situation.”

  She chews on her lip, listening.

  “And second,” I continue, “I can win this case, Shauna. I can.”

  She’s heard all of this before. She doesn’t look convinced.

  “And if you don’t?” she asks. “Who was it who told me that the hardest feat to accomplish in the legal system is to overturn a guilty verdict?”

  I never like it when she says my words back to me.

  “If I’m convicted, then you can tell your story. I’ll back it up.”

  She gives me a sideways look. She doesn’t believe I’d ever do that.

  “Look at it this way,” I say, because I’ve expected this conversation, too. “You go in now, today, and spill it to Roger Ogren. What happens? You’ll be prosecuted and convicted. And me? Oh, they’ll find something for me, Shauna. They’ll convict me of something. Tampering with evidence, lying to a police officer, obstruction—something.”

  She’s listening, at least.

  “In other words, we both go to prison,” I say. “But do it my way, and if I beat this case, we both walk.”

  Her eyes rise over my head as she ponders this.

  “Think about it,” I say. “I’m just sitting here now, in solitary confinement. The detox program the county uses is actually pretty good. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to get off the pills while I’m in here, free of any temptation. So what’s the rush? There isn’t any. There’s no difference between you giving your mea culpa now versus giving it after I’m convicted, if I’m convicted. But let me have my trial. Give me a chance to win.”

  Shauna leans into me. We’ve had this entire conversation in rather hushed tones—it’s a privileged communication and the DOC isn’t allowed to listen, but you never know—but now she speaks even more quietly still.

  “Convince me you can win this case.”

  I touch my forehead to hers. “Better you not know. We’ve been over this. I want to keep you clean on this. You and Bradley.”

  Shauna is quiet for a long time. Then she asks a question I’ve long expected.

  “Why do I get the feeling that it’s not just a coincidence that Marshall Rivers committed suicide at roughly the same time that Alexa died?”

  I will credit Alexa with that feat—she pulled off the fake suicide. She had some help, I think, from the police. The way it’s been playing out in the press, the police had narrowed their list of suspects and were bearing down on Marshall, and Marshall felt that heat, killed himself before they could bring him in. Me, I don’t buy it. I don’t think they were close. But I don’t know. And I don’t care. The suicide theory fits their story line. It makes them look like they were days or hours from solving the crime, they were just about to knock on his door with their guns drawn, as opposed to stumbling upon the killer when he voluntarily ended his reign of terror. It’s good press for the mayor and the police department. Sure, he committed suicide, but only because he felt us coming. We knew it was him. We caught him. We can keep you safe.

  “You have a vivid imagination, Shauna.”

  “Jason.”

  “Do you want to know if I killed Marshall Rivers, Shauna? If you do, ask me. I’ll tell you the truth.”

  She makes a disapproving noise. “I see that the Area Three detectives handled that case. The north side murders.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “And I suppose that’s why you want me to list every single detective on the Area Three roster on the witness disclosure. Because we’re going to be talking about that case, as well as Alexa, at trial.”

  I don’t bother trying to disabuse her of that notion. It would be insulting her intelligence.

  “Jason,” she whispers, “if you have something up your sleeve, which you clearly do, why not tell Ogren now and get it over with? Why rot in here for three more months?”

  “Because he won’t let me off until he’s sure, and he’ll take his time. He’ll consider every angle.”

  “Every angle,” Shauna says, an edge to her voice.

  “Every angle,” I say. “He’ll look at the time-of-death window compared to the time I called 911, and he’ll say to himself, Boy, Jason might have had two, three hours to play with there. Maybe all this stuff he’s showing me to prove his innocence—maybe he doctored a few things. And we don’t want that, Shauna. We’ll spring it on him at trial, and he’ll have days, maybe, but not weeks and months, to react.”

  Shauna draws back and gives me a look that a mother gives when she disapproves of a child’s actions but also finds them amusing. My mother wore that expression most of my childhood.

  But then she grows serious again. “You think it will work?”

  “Probably,” I say. “You never know for sure. Roger’s head is going to explode at trial.”

  We are both quiet. The smell of her peach shampoo reminds me of better days. I’ve certainly had better ones, but I’m starting to break free of the grip that the OxyContin had on me. I’m still lost in the woods, but now I know the path back. I just have to make sure I stay on that path. This incarceration, ironically, has helped. Being deprived of your liberty eliminates options, removes temptations.

  I still have the dreams, the night sweats, but the craving, that wicked tugging, has diminished. Everything is on a smaller scale now, still present, but dissipating. The medication they give me helps, but it’s talking about it every day that works the most for me, acknowledging it, identifying it for what it is, a sickness, instead of making excuses and keeping the good times rollin’.

  “Lightner sends his best, by the way,” she says. “Talked to him yesterday.”

  “About what?” I give her a look.

  “Don’t worry.” She raises a calming hand. “Joel isn’t talking to me. Or anyone else.”

  For obvious reasons, it would not behoove me if anyone discovered that I knew the identity of Marshall Rivers before his death. Joel understands that, too. So he has forgotten about all that work he did searching for the north side killer, which led him to Marshall Rivers. The police interviewed him about me, but they had no reason to ask him anything about Marshall; they asked him about my relationship with Alexa. I assume he told them the truth, that he suspected she was bad news but didn’t know much about her firsthand.

  They also asked Joel about conversations we had, documented from phone records, but Joel was working for me in my capacity as a criminal defense attorney, so the privilege umbrella extended to our conversations. He kept his mouth shut. And I’m pretty sure that, if a judge forced him to talk, he’d either take a contempt citation or, more likely, make up a story.

  But it hasn’t come to that. Roger Ogren doesn’t consider this a complicated case. His theory is simple: a bad breakup, a grief-stricken woman obsessively tries to reconcile, finally threatening to spill the beans on my drug use, and so I kill her. Marshall Rivers? Or some case I was working on with Joel? They haven’t entered Roger’s mind. He likes his case, and he hasn’t seen any evidence from the defense that would make him think he’s wro
ng.

  Not yet, at least.

  All the same, I told Shauna that I didn’t want Joel visiting me. I don’t want to create any ideas in the prosecutors’ minds if they look at my visitor sheet. As of now, they will only see on that sheet three people: my two lawyers and my brother, Pete, who has come into town a couple of times already to check in on me.

  “Promise me, Jason,” Shauna says. “Promise me, if you’re convicted, you’ll let me tell the truth.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise me. Because if you don’t, I’ll call Roger right now.”

  I detect a tinge of disappointment in her voice. Shauna, I think, wants to confess. Or stated more accurately, she feels wrong not confessing. I think she believes the shooting was justifiable—I hope she does—but hiding it does not sit right with her, regardless of the consequences.

  “Shauna,” I say, “if the jury comes back guilty, I’m going to pop out of my chair and point at you and say, ‘She did it! She did it!’ I swear I will.”

  That seems to do it for her. She probably doesn’t believe me, and her heart is telling her to come clean, but her brain is telling her that I’m right, that the smartest plan at this stage is to give me my day in court.

  I have a good chance, I think. But there’s always risk. I’ve set the table for some Perry Mason revelations at my trial, but you never really know how things are going to work out. Because what I said to Alexa when she told me she killed Marshall Rivers was true: She could have made a hundred different mistakes. I could have, as well, in what I did.

  So I will focus on what is most important right now—my recovery—and hold my breath until trial. It’s Shauna who has all the worries. She lost the baby and doesn’t have me around to help her grieve. She has to live with the fact that, whatever the circumstances may have been, she pulled a trigger and ended a woman’s life. And she has the stress of knowing that my fate rests in her hands. A stress that, no matter how much she denies it, was probably responsible for the loss of the baby.

  But she has to be my lawyer, because it makes it so much harder for the prosecution to try to talk to her. They’d have to disqualify her as counsel, and the judge would push back because I have a constitutional right to a lawyer of my choice. If Roger Ogren really wanted to push it, he could, but he doesn’t have any basis for doing so. As long as Shauna is my lawyer, there’s almost no chance that Roger Ogren or Detective Cromartie would put her under the lights. If they ever did so, dollars to donuts that Shauna and I would trade places in this detention center.

  I touch Shauna’s face now. I want to say so many things to her. We’ll have another baby. There’s still time for us.

  But I don’t. Because I don’t know if either of those statements is true. The state of our relationship is not something we’ve discussed. Everything was so bizarre, after all. Things between us were strained, then she told me she was pregnant and I confessed my drug addiction, and we were together, joined at the hip, maybe forever. And then a few days later, she shoots Alexa and I’m locked up. Quite the bumpy hill.

  Can we come back from that? It’s not something either of us is ready to explore at the moment. There are too many other things occupying our attention.

  So instead, I just say, “We’ll get through this, Shauna. One way or the other, we’ll get through this,” and we both pretend to believe it.

  PEOPLE VS. JASON KOLARICH

  TRIAL, DAY 7

  Monday, December 23

  113.

  Jason

  The court clerk gavels the mobbed courtroom to order as Judge Judith Bialek assumes the bench. My case is called, and the room goes silent.

  It’s been six days since Shauna cross-examined Detective Vance Austin. Roger Ogren asked for a continuance of a week, minimum, to consider any rebuttal evidence he might have. Noting that a week would be Christmas Eve, the judge truncated the request by one day, to December 23. That was more than enough time, she said.

  During that time, the prosecutors mobilized their extensive resources to try to salvage their case—I mean, seek out the truth. The word is that Roger Ogren tried to reopen the inquiry into Marshall Rivers’s suicide, to consider the possibility that he’d been murdered. His argument was simple enough: By the coroner’s estimate, Alexa could have died as early as nine P.M., giving me three hours of free time, so to speak, before I dialed 911. Plenty of time for me to have driven to the home of Marshall Rivers and killed him, typed the fake suicide note, planted evidence, whatever, after killing Alexa, or even before killing her. The word I heard back, via Joel Lightner, is that the police detectives told Ogren that his theory was far-fetched, which I find somewhat amusing given that it’s exactly what Alexa Himmel planned to do—fake Marshall’s suicide, kill Shauna, and pin it on Marshall.

  Roger Ogren, in fact, found resistance everywhere he turned. First, the press, more enamored with Marshall Rivers than with me, far preferred the idea that the North Side Slasher had claimed a sixth victim—which meant that I was a man wrongly accused, another cause a hungry media eagerly embraced. I was embarrassed to learn that an entire following built up around this idea of me as the victim, including a “Free Jason Kolarich” website and Facebook page. My role in taking down a corrupt governor, Carlton Snow, which has never been confirmed by me or anyone else, became accepted as fact and Exhibit A in my cause. That’s what I’ve become, a crusade.

  James Drinker—the real James Drinker, the one whose apartment door I crashed through, complete with the mop of red hair and the protruding stomach—came forward and told his story of how I accosted him before realizing that I had the wrong guy. That corroborated my story that Marshall had used that fake name. It also showed me as the conscientious defense lawyer who was trying to stop his client, the serial killer, only to realize that he didn’t know his real identity. Drinker also said that he’d seen Marshall several times at a burger joint that was located between Higgins Auto Body and the dry cleaner’s where Marshall worked. Not hard to imagine Marshall sizing up Drinker, thinking he was roughly the same size, that with a red wig and a belly suit, he could pull off a decent impersonation. Good enough for his purposes, at least.

  The police also got around to remembering that, among the thousands of anonymous tips they received, someone had sent a letter to Detective Vance Austin identifying James Drinker as the north side killer. The letter leaked out and became public fare, the words cut out of a magazine like some ransom note in a 1950s mystery movie. There might have been some suspicion that I was the one who sent that letter. But that’s not how it all came out. Why?

  Because there was one more thing I left in Marshall Rivers’s apartment that night, when I fitted Alexa’s key on his key ring and placed that hypodermic needle alongside the others he had used. I remembered it just before I drove Shauna home on my way to Marshall’s apartment.

  It was the Sports Illustrated magazine I used to cut out the words for the anonymous note. When the cops first found it, after responding to Marshall’s suicide, they thought nothing of it. Marshall just had a copy of an SI magazine, no big deal. Compared to the bloody knife and the hypodermic needles and the packets of fentanyl, who cared about a sports magazine? But after they remembered the “James Drinker” anonymous note over this last week, they searched through the inventory of his apartment and found it, with words cut out of several pages.

  This proves it, wrote one columnist in the Herald who had taken up my cause. Marshall Rivers used the same name in the anonymous note that he gave to Jason Kolarich—James Drinker—to throw the police off the scent.

  Roger’s other problem was simply the lack of proof to corroborate his theory. He couldn’t prove that I knew the identity of Marshall Rivers before his death. He couldn’t even prove that Marshall died before I was taken into custody, given the vagueness of the time-of-death window for Marshall, whose body wasn’t discovered until August 2. It was possible that he was still alive when the police responded to my 911 call, which would obviously r
ule me out as his killer. And even if he could show that I knew Marshall’s identity by then, and that Marshall was dead by the time the cops hauled me in, they had no proof that I had, in fact, killed him. The medical examiner wasn’t willing to come off her finding that the manner of death was suicide, and I don’t think the police department wanted her to. Even if Roger got the coroner to flip, they would be stuck with her first report, her initial conclusions, which would make her revised opinion open to considerable criticism.

  And every step Roger tried to take, he had a county prosecutor facing reelection who wasn’t happy about looking like the heavy in this melodrama. A not guilty was all but certain now, so wouldn’t the county attorney look a lot better if he dropped the charges in light of these new revelations? An elected prosecutor more concerned with Truth, Justice, and the American Way than with mounting another head on his wall?

  My biggest fear was that Marshall had followed through on his threat to me, that he was planting evidence at the crime scenes to implicate me, and that the police would now go back and find those clues. I found the hypodermic needle in my office, so I did check Marshall on that one move, but I knew he’d swiped that Bic pen that had my bite marks and saliva on it, and probably other things like used tissues from my wastebasket, anything that might have my DNA. Did he plant those things? I don’t know. If he did, the cops didn’t attach any significance to them. Or they didn’t find them. Or maybe I just gave Marshall too much credit. Or maybe he was waiting until he was done with the killing spree and he was going to put it all at the final crime scene, one gigantic final present to me.

  I’ll never know. Nor will I ever know when that final day was going to arrive, when Marshall was going to be finished killing women on the north side before lowering the boom on me. I’m not sure that day was ever going to come. He was just having too much fun doing it, with the added bonus of torturing me in the process.

  “The People move for a dismissal of the charges with prejudice,” Roger tells the judge. He could have given a speech about the interests of justice. Presumably, his boss wanted him to. But Roger Ogren won’t do it. He thinks a very clever killer just walked free. So that high-minded speech will come from his boss, on the courtroom steps, a few minutes from now. And Shauna, if she says anything at all, will praise that boss for said high-mindedness.