Текст книги "The Last Alibi"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

63.

Jason

The judge mulls over an afternoon break, but Roger Ogren says he is close to finishing, and the judge clearly wants this witness to wrap up early tonight.

“Proceed, Mr. Ogren,” she says.

“Agent Jumer, let’s talk about Tuesday, July thirtieth. The day of Ms. Himmel’s murder.”

They do their thing, introducing another summary chart and displaying it on the screen for the jury, but this one isn’t much of a chart.

CALL DETAIL RECORDS FOR CELL PHONE OF ALEXA M. HIMMEL

Tuesday, July 30

Time

Destination

Length of Call (minutes)

Originating Cell Site

6:14 PM

555-0150

1

221529

8:16 PM

Kolarich Home

2

221529

“There are two phone calls on here, is that correct, Agent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For the moment, I’d ask you to focus only on calls made to the defendant.”

“Very good. Ms. Himmel only called Mr. Kolarich once that day,” says Agent Jumer. “As you can see, the phone call came at 8:16 P.M. to Mr. Kolarich’s home phone, his landline. And the same cell tower, covering Ms. Himmel’s house, provided service to that call.”

“This is the first time, on any of these summary charts you’ve shown us, that the length of call is different,” says Ogren. “Instead of one, it says two.”

“That’s correct. As I said, Ms. Himmel’s service provider counts the first second of a new minute as a full minute in its billing. So anything from sixty-one seconds to one hundred twenty seconds would go down as a two in this box.”

“So we know from this chart that the cell phone call could have lasted as long as two full minutes,” says Ogren. “But in no event less than one minute.”

“That’s right.”

Too long for a voice mail, in other words, or so Ogren will argue to the jury in summation. It’s hard to fill an entire minute of space on a voice mail; it’s unnatural to talk that long. Sure, it’s conceivable that Alexa would have droned on for more than a minute into a recording device; that’s what Shauna will say in closing argument. She was clearly distraught and obsessive, so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that this call made at 8:16 P.M. went into my home landline’s voice mail and she prattled on for over sixty seconds. But, Roger Ogren will counter, none of the other myriad calls Alexa made to me over the preceding days took that long—why, the charts prove it!

The punch line being: Jason was home at 8:16 on the night of Alexa’s murder. The call didn’t go into Jason’s landline voice mail. Jason was home, and he answered the phone, and he talked to Alexa for anywhere from sixty to a hundred twenty seconds. He didn’t come home after midnight and find Alexa dead, like he claimed. No, no, no. He received a call from Alexa at 8:16 P.M., talked her into coming over to his house—a notion the jury would easily believe, given how desperate she was for his attention at that point—and then killed her with a single gunshot from behind so she wouldn’t wreck his career by going to the Board of Attorney Discipline and ratting him out over his oxycodone addiction.

Then he cleaned up the place, wiped his prints off the gun with a Clorox wipe, probably took a shower and changed clothes to get the gunpowder residue off himself. And then he called 911 and tried to pass off a bullshit story to the cops about how his relationship with Alexa was terrific, peachy-keen, and she must have used a house key—a house key nobody can find—to get in, and some guy named Jim, no last name, yeah, he must have killed her. Yeah, go look for a guy named Jim, there’s only half a million people in this city with that name.

Shauna will cross the FBI agent now, but there’s not much she can do. About the only point she can score is that nobody knows if I received Alexa’s call to my house at 8:16 P.M. or if it went into voice mail; the call detail records just show the call was picked up, not whether it was picked up by a computer or a person. And then she’ll try to convince the jury in closing argument that I wasn’t home, that I didn’t come home until hours later, roughly midnight, like I told Detective Cromartie.

That 8:16 P.M. phone call will go under my list of regrets, my list of wish-I-could-do-it-overs.

I wish I hadn’t been home for that call. And I really wish I hadn’t answered it.

FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL

July

64.

Jason

Tuesday, July 16

Ten minutes to midnight. I’m in my living room, looking out the picture window, a bottle of water and the tin of Altoids beside me. Alexa—my girlfriend, my alibi—is asleep upstairs, but sleep isn’t for me right now. I’m waiting for a call. I’m always waiting for a call.

Nine days. Nine days since we set the Linda trap, when I flirted with Joel’s investigator, posing as a hostess at the Greek restaurant, hoping to gain the attention of the man previously known as James Drinker. Nine days and nothing yet. Joel Lightner’s team has followed Linda, who is continuing her undercover work at the restaurant, dutifully playing the part, showing up at the restaurant every night as hostess, coming home every night to the single-family house where she lives alone. She is everything “James” would want—young, pretty, and with a clear connection to me now. And yet Joel’s team has not had a sniff of him, no suspicious people following her, no cars driving slowly, no casual observer tracking her movements—nothing. Sometimes the North Side Slasher has moved quickly, sometimes he’s taken weeks to make his move. We don’t know when he’ll strike. Or if. Maybe this is all a waste of time; maybe he never even followed me to the Greek restaurant.

It’s been eight days since the night I spent with Shauna, fifteen of the strangest minutes of a strange period for me. She’s out of sight now, having started her trial the day after our interlude, and taking Bradley John with her, leaving our office empty. They probably come back to the firm at night, but I’m not there to see them. I’m not working late these days. I’m not working at all. And I wouldn’t know what to say to Shauna if I saw her, anyway. The last two times we talked didn’t go so well—one where she accused me of being addicted to pills, the other where we ripped each other’s clothes off and then departed about as awkwardly as could be.

And I’m drifting forward, deprived of a decent night’s sleep going on four months now, popping awake more and more frequently, needing those Altoids more and more frequently. I am drugged and edgy, like someone given a sedative but then jolted periodically with electroshock, trying to focus on the real identity of “James Drinker,” searching for anything he did or said that would narrow the field of candidates, always coming back to the same problem: When I’m chewing up these Altoids, I’m not thinking straight. I’m either foggy from the pills or I’m craving them, neither of which lends itself to good focus.

Name a client, I’ve told myself over these last months. Name a client who didn’t get my best effort. And I want to believe that there is no such client. Kerry Alexander got a lesser-included battery conviction, nine months in the pen, when he could have gotten a decade behind bars. I got a not-guilty on the domestic battery case for that woman whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve already forgotten. Billy Braden waltzed out of court altogether after I walked him on a Fourth Amendment argument. Name a client. I can’t. I can’t point to a client and say, If my head had been more in the game, he would’ve gotten this result instead of that one.

But then it comes full circle: I can only remember my conversations with the man who called himself James Drinker as well as I could see through fog: whispers of comments, stray words and phrases, but not the entirety of the conversations, or even full chunks of it. And here’s what gets me: I didn’t realize it at the time; I thought I was doing perfectly fine. So if I’m looking through a cloudy lens, who am I to judge how well I’ve handled any case?

That’s why I’ve begun reassigning cases, referring all my cases out to other lawyers in the private sector, part of the cadre of defense lawyers who kick things to one another. I’ve become a lawyer with no clients. For now. For now, I say to myself. Until I clear things up. Until I get this thing with “James Drinker” resolved, at which point I’ll start cutting back on those happy pills and figure something out. No use trying to take on too much all at once, right? Right. Right, right, right.

My knees bounce up as my cell phone rings. Joel Lightner. I say a quiet prayer.

“Yeah, Joel?”

“I think we spotted him tonight,” he says, breathless. “We were perched at Linda’s house and we think we saw him across the street, between two houses. We saw somebody, at least. I tried with the camera, but I didn’t get anything of value. Pretty much missed him. We tried to double back and catch him, Jason, or follow him, like we said—”

Right. Our best result was to spot him and tail him, follow him back to his home, get his address, then take our time with what we wanted to do. That was Plan A. Plan B, however, was just to snatch him.

“—but there’s only so many of us. By the time we got there, he’d vanished.”

“Do you think he spotted you?” I ask, my pulse slowing, post-adrenaline. I was hoping for an A-plus. This isn’t nothing, but it’s more like a C.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know. By the time we doubled back over there, he was gone. Did he see us coming? God, man, we’re pretty good at what we do. I really wouldn’t think he’d see us. But all I can really say is, I don’t know, and I sure as shit hope not. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Well, our plan worked, at least to a point,” I say. “He must have followed me to the Greek restaurant. But if he knows we’re on to him, then we’re toast.”

“But if he didn’t spot us,” says Joel, “that means he’s about to make a move. And we’ll be ready for him.”

65.

Shauna

Wednesday, July 17

I lean back in my chair and put my head against the wall, daring to close my eyes, knowing that I have hours of work ahead of me. The plaintiffs, the city, rested their case today and we start our defense tomorrow. The heart-pounding intensity that accompanies the birth of a trial has subsided. Now it’s a war of attrition. Each side is soldiering on, trying to keep their wits about them, afraid that any particular moment on any particular day could be the moment that seizes the jury’s attention, and wanting to make sure that when that happens, it’s favorable to their side. Bradley and I are like each other’s coaches, always propping each other up, giving pep talks, positive energy.

I’m alone. I sent Bradley home an hour ago. And Jason is obviously nowhere to be found. We haven’t so much as laid eyes on each other since . . . since . . . that moment.

I call Joel Lightner, whom I gave an assignment over a week ago now, after that friendly encounter I had with Alexa in Jason’s office, when she denied he was an addict, when she actually tried to claim that he still has pain in his knee, and when she accused me of feigning concern for Jason when, in fact, I was just trying to steal him back from her.

“Joel, what the hell, guy?” I say into his voice mail. “Remember me? You were going to do that thing for me.”

I punch out the phone and do what I’ve done for the past week: Push Jason out of my mind and focus on the family business that is depending on me.

A moment later, my phone buzzes with a text message from Joel:

Sorry sorry busy with Jason tracking bad guy stretched thin tomorrow I promise

I sigh. Jason really got himself in a jam with that weird redheaded guy who might be a serial killer. What, exactly, Joel is doing to help Jason, I don’t know.

And knowing those two cowboys, it’s probably better I don’t ask.

66.

Jason

Wednesday, July 17

“You’re sure about this,” Alexa says to me over the phone.

“I’m sure. I’ll be with Joel, and as soon as I get home, I’ll turn on some pay-per-view movie or something or I’ll make a call from my landline. I’ll be covered.”

This is the first time since we realized “James” was framing me that Alexa and I have spent a night apart. She’s been my alibi, kept me invulnerable from a frame-up. It’s had the added effect, of course, of keeping young women in this city safe from a serial killer.

Tonight, Joel and I have decided, is the night to take a chance on “James Drinker,” to give him an opportunity to attack Linda with us watching closely. So tonight, I’m going to stay home alone.

Or at least pretend to.

“Well, have fun, sailor,” she says to me. I haven’t told her what I’m doing. There’s no point in worrying her.

I head downstairs and make a big point of plopping down in a chair and watching a ball game on television. I never played baseball as a kid. Me and my friends, punks, idiots all of us, made fun of people who played baseball.

The game ends at nine-thirty. I stay in my chair until ten, then get up, stretch, and walk upstairs. I turn on the bathroom light and brush my teeth; then I turn off the light, turn off the light beside my bed, and crawl under the covers.

A half hour later, I slip out and crawl, in the darkness, to the staircase. I take dark stairs to the bottom level and sneak out the back door of my house. There is a small area there for barbecuing and not much more, then a high gate. I unlatch the gate and sneak into the alley, where a car is waiting for me. It’s Joel Lightner.

I duck into the backseat and stay down. Joel navigates the interior alley system, making a couple of turns until we come out two blocks away from my house.

Unless this guy is magical, he didn’t see me leave my house.

“Time to party,” Joel says, gunning the engine as we drive toward Linda’s house.

67.

Jason

Wednesday, July 17

Linda Sparks lives in a single-family bungalow on the northwest side that she inherited from her parents. It’s the third house from the corner, on a quarter-acre lot that backs into an alley. She has a six-foot plywood fence around the back and sides of her property, making access from the rear difficult but not impossible. The front of her house, a small lawn and walk-up, has no restrictions on access. Her driveway leads into a two-car garage.

Across the street is pretty much the same story, bungalows backing into alleys, most with fences up in the back of varying degrees of difficulty. This is where Joel saw “James” last night, on the side of the house across the street from Linda’s place. He must have entered through the alley, jumped the fence, and walked along the side of the house. He would have to jump another fence to get to the front, but last night he wasn’t interested in doing that, apparently. He just wanted to scope out the house.

Next door to the south, the house closest to Linda’s garage door, the neighbors have extensive shrubbery circling around their front porch. A good place to hide for an ambush. The papers, and Joel’s source at Area Three, have said that they believe the North Side Slasher likes to ambush women as they enter their houses. One of the women was jumped getting out of her car, presumably because the entryway to her home was too exposed, but the idea is the same. He likes to get them when their guards are down, where they feel safe, having arrived home. Too bad more people don’t realize that this is when they’re most vulnerable.

“If it were me, I’d sit in those bushes to the south, by her garage,” I say into my headphone. “When she pulls into the garage, I rush inside before the door comes down.”

“Why don’t you just announce your position, shoot a flare up or something,” Lightner whispers through my earbud, his tactful way of telling me to put a lid on it.

There are five of us covering Linda, which basically constitutes the entirety of Joel Lightner’s operation. One guy is in the car with her, sitting low in the backseat; one is in her garage right now; one is in her house right now; Joel is watching the alley behind her house; and then there’s me, across the street from Linda’s house, lying flat behind a row of bushes that aren’t very high but will do the trick as long as I stay horizontal.

“I’m five minutes away.” Linda’s voice in my earbud. “Any sign?”

“No sign,” says one of the guys, probably the one inside the house, where it’s safest to speak.

“You want me to keep coming?”

“Keep coming,” Joel whispers, his voice steely. We’re all feeling that way, the butterflies, our senses heightened now. We all figured that “James” would arrive early for the ambush, not being certain down to the minute of Linda’s arrival. Linda’s actually a little later than usual, by design, wanting to give “James” all the time he needs.

The air is thick and moist. The street is quiet, calm, only a handful of cars passing, a residential street filled with blue-collar workers, midweek. Up the street, a gaggle of children, probably middle-school age, are shooting a basketball against a backboard over the garage door, but already parents are calling their children inside. The street lighting is minimal, casting only a very pale yellow interrupting the darkness that hovers like a fog over the house. Linda’s house, in particular, lacks any lighting. The light over her garage and the front-porch light are both off, again by design, making the target more inviting.

My skin is starting its familiar itch, my stomach swimming. I’m overdue on my happy pills, but I need to keep my wits about me. I can feel it, I’d say if I were in a movie. But that sums it up. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to be tonight. And if it’s going to be tonight, it’s going to be now.

“Two blocks away,” Linda says into my ear. “Anybody see anything?”

Nobody answers. I wiggle my toes, clench and release my calves, my thighs.

“Do you pull into the left side or the right side of the garage?” asks one of the guys, presumably the one in the garage.

“Left side,” she says.

“Well, pull into the right tonight. I’m in the left corner.”

“Roger that. Don’t accidentally shoot me, Halston. I’m removing my headset.”

Linda’s Grand Cherokee pulls up to her house, turns, and bounces onto the driveway as the garage door opens. Our guy Halston, in the left corner, is exposed, but only because I know to look for him. If someone’s about to charge into the garage, Halston will see him before he sees Halston.

Linda gets out of the car as if nothing is unusual, doesn’t rush but doesn’t dawdle, either, fishing for something in her purse. My eyes dart left-right, left-right, looking for any movement, any signs of something wrong. Linda walks the long way around the car, toward the driveway, exposing herself as much as she possibly can, walking slowly but not breaking stride, not being obvious about it.

Left-right, left-right, something, anything.

And then she curls around the car and walks up to the interior door and disappears inside.

The garage door grinds back down. Only then, I assume, will the guy hiding in the back of her SUV get out, and the guy in the corner of the garage move.

“And here I was hoping this would be my last night sleeping on Linda’s couch,” one of them says—the guy inside the house.

“Stay in role,” Lightner whispers harshly. He’s right. This may not be over. If he’s watching, he can’t see a bunch of silhouettes in the house along with Linda.

Everything goes quiet again.

My mind races. Have we missed something? Didn’t we think of everything? Has he outsmarted me again? I find myself ascribing superhero traits to our killer: He’s on the roof, rappelling down into her bedroom. He’s hiding in the dirt and will pop out of the soil like Rambo. He managed to evade Linda’s alarm and is hiding inside, beneath her bed.

Five minutes. Ten minutes.

We were wrong, I think to myself. He’s not here.

Then a red beater Toyota turns down the street, the car slowing, and pulls to a stop across from Linda’s house. Kills the headlights. Kills the engine.

A boxy sign atop the car. Can’t make out the name, but it’s a pizza place.

The car’s rear hatch pops open. The driver emerges, wearing a baseball cap. I can’t make him out from my position. Decent-sized man, dark hair I think, best I can do.

“Heads up, heads up,” I whisper, later than I should have. “Car stopped by me.”

“This our guy?” someone asks, breathless.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “Did anyone order a pizza?”

The man pulls something out of the hatch. A pizza, it’s gotta be, carried in one of those thick warming covers.

“After we shoot this fucker, can we keep the pizza?”

The man crosses the street, quick-stepping it toward Linda’s driveway. His back to me, I rise and try for a better view. He looks big enough, I guess. I can’t tell. It’s dark, and I don’t have his face.

“Joel, I’m coming around the south side.” Sounds like Halston’s voice.

“I’ve got the north, then,” Joel says. “Nobody answers the door.”

The man waltzes up the driveway and turns for Linda’s walk. He steps up on the porch and rings the doorbell. Halston, his gun drawn, shuffles along the south side of the house, approaching the front. The gate on the north side opens, Lightner with his gun facing upward.

“Count of three,” Joel says. “One . . . two . . . THREE!”

At once, the front-porch light goes on and both Joel and Halston are within a few yards of the front door, guns poised on the man as they shout at him and into my ear, their words—“Show me your hands!” “Get the fuck down!”—echoing through my head in stereo.

The man, instantly shaken, drops the pizza and has a moment of What the fuck? before he drops to his knees, palms outward, head swiveling between the two armed men.

No, I instantly recognize.

My head shoots left-right, left-right, and then I stand, and then it happens, in my peripheral vision, movement to my right, we have startled each other simultaneously, just a quick flash of movement several houses down to my right, buried in the shadows.

A man turning and running?

I bolt from my position around the house and race to the fence leading to the backyard. I jump and climb it with some effort and don’t stop running until I hit the fence to the alley. I climb it and land hard in the alley, looking north.

The alley is motionless, quiet save for my heavy breaths.

Then a figure crosses my line of vision, from a house through the alley in a flash and then out of sight.

I run with everything I have. It was always what I did best, even more than my hands, that speed, fastest white guy I ever saw, my teammates at State said, and I forget my knee and I motor like I never have before.

“The alley . . . across the street,” I shout into my headphone, far too late for anyone to assist me, the sounds of the ruckus in front of Linda’s house still playing in my earpiece, as these guys finally begin to realize that they’ve been baited every bit as much as we tried to bait “James.”

I reach the fork in the alley system where he crossed, eastbound, and start running again. I didn’t bring my gun. Why didn’t I bring my gun? I splash through a puddle, turning my ankle in a pothole, and then I hear a car’s ignition, somewhere forward and to my right. I run to the next alley, running north-south, and see the car speeding away down the alley, headlights showing the way. I run toward it, losing ground badly, hoping for a partial license plate or a make and model, a smaller car, something like an Accord or Camry—

It passes under an alley light, and I—I can’t make out a plate, the color is something light, white or silver, yes, it’s an Accord—

And then it bounces into a left turn, tires squealing, and it’s gone.

“Where are you, Jason?” Lightner calls out.

“He’s . . . gone,” I say, my hands on my knees, panting. “He’s gone.”