The Last Alibi (18 page)

45.

Jason

Tuesday, July 2

Alexa and I leave Joel’s office and head to the elevator in silence. I don’t like to talk on elevators, so I wait until we’re clear of it, actually until we’ve walked out of the lobby. Joel has given me homework—figure out what it is that “James” might have done to set me up, a smoking gun that will implicate me in these murders. Maybe we’re giving James too much credit, but I don’t think so. Underestimating him has become a hazardous exercise.

The sky continues to spit rain, enough for some people to don umbrellas, but neither Alexa nor I have one. We head into a coffee shop—not a Starbucks—grab some java, and find a table in the lounge, near the foggy window.

I lean in close to Alexa. “I’ve given this a lot of thought since last night,” I say. “About my whereabouts on the nights of the murders.”

I sound like someone in an old courtroom drama or
Dragnet
.
Can you account for your whereabouts on the night of the murder?
I think the word
whereabouts
exists in the English language purely for the purpose of establishing an alibi to a crime.

“You and I weren’t together
any
of those nights,” I say. “Not a single one.”

Alexa, stone-faced, raises her eyebrows, the look of a stubborn girl who’s being told something she doesn’t want to hear.

“Holly Frazier, the third victim, was killed on the night of Friday, June seventh,” I say. “That was the day you came to my office with the court transcript. The day I asked you on a date for the first time. But we didn’t get together again until Sunday.”

In fact, I recall with no shortage of dread, it was right after my trip to Runner’s High, when I bought shoes and running gear from Nancy Minnows, that I first met Alexa at that outdoor café, Twist. It was definitely Sunday, June 9.

“And Nancy Minnows was murdered on Tuesday night, June eighteenth,” I continue. “That morning, you and I had that . . . fight, or whatever you call it. The Altoids incident?”

She allows the smallest and briefest of smiles.

“You made us breakfast, then you left in a cab. I was home by myself that night. And the night after that, and the night after that. You and I didn’t speak again until last Friday, Alexa. And the last girl, the librarian, Samantha Drury. She was killed last Thursday night, and we both know we weren’t together. That was the night we did our own things. Remember? It was your idea. We’d spent, like, almost a whole week together, and you said, ‘Seven days in a row is practically marriage,’ or whatever you said.

“And the first two victims, Alicia Corey and Lauren Gibbs? They were murdered in early May, before you and I even
knew
each other.”

Throughout all of this, Alexa’s expression remains tight, uncompromising.

“You and I were together every one of those nights,” she says. “I would swear to that under oath.”

“You . . .” I take her hands in mine. “Honey,” I say. I’ve never called her any kind of a pet nickname like that. I’ve never said anything but her name, Alexa. It jars me for some reason, like it means something.

“You can’t do that, Alexa. You could get in serious, serious trouble.”

“But I won’t.”

“You will, if it ever comes to that. If they set their sights on me and you give me an alibi, they’ll scour the earth to prove it wrong. They’ll pull your home phone records, they’ll ping your cell phone calls, they’ll look at your computer, credit cards, movies you watched on pay-per-view, food you ordered in, whatever. They’ll ask your friends. They’ll have twenty ways of figuring out whether you were actually with me those nights.”

“I was home, by myself, each of those nights,” she says. “Nobody will say that they were with me. Nobody knows where I was, any of those nights. So as far as I’m concerned, I was with
you
.”

Crazy. This is crazy.

“I’ve already thought about this, too,” she continues. “When I’m alone, I read. Or I work. I don’t make calls from a landline because I don’t
have
a landline, just my cell phone. I don’t even use my cell phone much. I don’t go on the Internet, and even if I did, I have a laptop. I could have been with you when I was using it.” She looks up at me. “I don’t even know
how
to order a movie off the television. And I never,
ever
have food delivered. Except when I’m with you.”

“Seriously, Alexa—”

“Seriously, no one will be able to say I
wasn’t
with you. Trust me, Jason.” She runs her hand up my arm, soothing me.

“Really?” I don’t hide my skepticism. “And how do we explain how we even knew each other before that court hearing on June fourth, when I was representing Billy Braden? What’s your story there? How is it that we didn’t meet until June fourth, but somehow we were dating in May when the first two murders occurred?”

“We met on April twenty-fifth,” she answers, not missing a beat. “
People versus Kerry Alexander
.”

I draw back. I remember the case, of course. My guy was charged with attempted criminal sexual assault. He was convicted on the lesser-included offense of battery, which meant he got nine months inside instead of nine years. That goes down as a loss, but he called it a win. Yeah, that was late April, that sounds right.

“You were there? Two months ago in court?”

“Yes, I was. I was the court reporter when the jury came back.” A sheepish smile crosses her face. “I wanted to introduce myself to you then, but I didn’t. You were pretty caught up with everything. Your client sure seemed happy with the verdict. You didn’t, though. You seemed . . . troubled, I guess. Like something was bothering you.”

This is the first I’ve heard of a previous time we were together in court. She never mentioned this. She first knew of me in
April
?

“I never had a reason to bring it up before,” she says, reading my thoughts. “But it’s a matter of public record. Anyone can look it up. So,” she says with a shrug, “we could point to that and say that we started seeing each other at that time. Late April, not early June.”

I shake my head. “Even if we could theoretically pull this off—”

“We could. We easily could.”

“—but even so, I’m not making you lie for me, Alexa. That’s not happening.”

She runs her hand up my arm, soothing me. “You’re not
making
me do anything. Last I checked, I’m a big girl.”

I pull away from her. “No. It’s very sweet, but no.”

“Sweet?”
Now she objects, recoiling. “This is no time for
sweet
. This is serious. And
I’m
serious. You didn’t kill those girls, and I’m not going to let anybody say that you did. I appreciate your moral objection, but this will get us to the right result, which is that you’re innocent.”

I don’t have the energy to fight about this right now. It’s not something we have to decide immediately, or hopefully ever.

She seems to understand how I’m feeling. She doesn’t push the subject. She sits with me quietly, caressing my arm. “Is your knee bothering you?” she asks. “It seems like it is.”

I look down at my dress shoes, which I haven’t polished for months. There was a time when I’d keep those things spit-shined, like mirrors. “Actually,” I say, “it’s killing me.”

“You should take a pill, then.” Still running her hand up and down my arm.

So I do, removing the Altoids tin, popping in a tablet and chewing it up, letting out a long sigh.

“I hate that you’re in so much pain,” she whispers. “But I’m here. I’m here for you, Jason. For anything. You know that, right?” She takes my hand and interlocks her fingers with mine.

We sit in silence. We don’t check our e-mail on our phones. We don’t sip coffee. We don’t even look at each other. We just sit, heads together, holding hands, until relief finally comes, heat pouring through my body like warm syrup.

“We have to stay together,” she says. “Every night. You see that, don’t you? Any night that you’re alone is a night that ‘James Drinker’ can pull some stunt and try to frame you. We have to be together every night, Jason.”

I’m not even thinking about that right now. At this moment, I am weightless; my feet have left the ground.

“Okay,” I say.

“We have to go everywhere together.”

“Okay.”

“We have to do everything together.”

“Right.”

“Good,” she says. “We’ll get through this, honey. We’ll get through this together.”

46.

Jason

Tuesday, July 2

Under the new rule that I can’t go anywhere alone, Alexa escorts me all the way to my office before leaving me. Inside, my law firm is a barren wasteland, with Shauna and Bradley John out on a trip to Arangold Construction as they prepare for trial. I walk into my office, poorly lit and overly air-conditioned, and pass the seat where the man who called himself James Drinker once sat and spewed all his bullshit to me.

I put my head back against the seat, thinking about everything that’s happening, and for some reason I feel a little better about things. Surely, I can figure some way out of this mess. There’s nothing that this asshole can do to me that would make the police believe that I’m a killer, right? What could he possibly have on me?

I almost jump out of my chair when my phone buzzes. I’m thinking
James Drinker
every time that phone goes off these days. When I check the caller ID, it reads
Unknown
.

Yep. It’s him.

I answer the call but don’t speak. I don’t need to speak.

“Should I assume you’re paying attention now, Jason?” he asks. He is speaking slowly, without inflection, but it’s not hard to hear the satisfaction in his voice. A game to him. I just wish I knew what the game was.

“I’m paying attention. Why don’t you stop by and we can talk about it?”

“Oh . . . I don’t think I’m going to do that. I was just wondering when you plan to turn yourself in to the police. So you can tell them you’re innocent, but somebody’s framing you.”

I don’t answer. He’s reminding me that this is exactly what I told
him
to do, to go to the authorities and explain that he thought he was being set up.

“You’re not going to the cops, are you?” he asks. “You won’t follow the same advice you gave me.”

“You had a reason for calling,” I say. “Why don’t you just get to it?”

“I just did,” he says. “I want you to turn yourself in to the police and explain that this is all a misunderstanding, that you were set up. Framed! I’m sure they’ll believe you, Jason.”

I don’t say anything.

“Tell them that a guy came into your office wearing a disguise and giving a fake name. They’ll believe that.”

I close my eyes.

“And tell them you violated your oath as a lawyer and gave up that guy to the cops. What was it you did, by the way? An anonymous phone call to the hotline, your voice concealed? An anonymous note like you see in the movies, with words cut out from a newspaper?”

I don’t say anything.

Then I do: “You better hope the police catch you before I do.”

“Oh, I
do
hope that,” he says. “For me, it’s the difference between exoneration and death. But it’s the same result for you, Jason. Either way, you go down for five murders.”

“Do I?” My heartbeat kicks up. If he has something on me, I need to know what. But I can’t seem too eager. I have to let him come to me.

“You’re wondering what it is, aren’t you? You’ve been scrambling your brain trying to figure out what’s going on. Just play it out, Jason. I mean, you’re the one who advised me on how to frame somebody, aren’t you?”

I do a slow burn, thinking back to when we talked the first time, so ridiculous in hindsight, when he asked me how I would frame somebody and I laid out a list for him.

Motive
, I told him. Close enough—I met all of the victims, or at least was in the same area with them; if I then became obsessed with them, which is what the theory would probably be, there’s my motive. People have killed for less.

Opportunity
, I recall saying. Check. I was home alone each of the five nights the women were murdered.

Means.
The killer used a knife. I don’t know what kind, but I’d be willing to bet it was something ordinary. Something anybody could easily purchase.

What else did I say to him? I’m not thinking clearly these days. I haven’t been thinking clearly for months. I try to focus back to that conversation and come up with fuzz.

On the other end of the phone, it’s dead air. “James” is actually considering telling me, I think. That’s more than I expected. More than
Go fuck yourself
or
Use your imagination
.

“What evidence do I have against you? Just some souvenirs I collected from you,” he says. “Nothing you’d miss. Remember, Jason, you left me alone in your office for a few minutes.”

I move in my chair. The office around me comes alive, as if animated, no longer a place where I work but a crime scene of sorts. And now I remember another piece of advice I gave him during that conversation.

I told him that someone framing him would leave clues at the crime scene, things that belonged to James, or some trace evidence from his house or workplace.

He’s right, too. I remember now, during our meeting, taking a trip to the men’s room so I could pop an Altoid in private.

He stole things from my office and planted them at the crime scenes. Nothing too obvious, like a piece of my office stationery, or the police would already be at my door. But something effective. Something with my fingerprints, or better yet my DNA. Strands of my hair off my couch in the corner. A water bottle I drank out of. A pen—

Oh, shit.

A pen cap I chewed. It comes back to me now, a white-hot blast up my spine. I’d been chewing on a cheap Bic pen while we talked. I refused to use that nice pen my brother had given me, refused to waste expensive ink on “James Drinker,” so I went with the cheap Bic.

And I couldn’t find that pen when I returned to the office.

He took my fucking pen. It would have bite marks and saliva. He could make good use of that. The story would be that it fell out of my pocket during a struggle. Nothing I would have noticed, while I was butchering poor Holly Frazier or Nancy Minnows or Samantha Drury. The cops would do a DNA search and come up empty, because my DNA isn’t in the system. But if someone handed them the name Jason Kolarich, it would be a simple matter of obtaining a DNA swab from my cheek and pulling my dental records, and suddenly I have a lot of explaining to do.

And that’s probably not all. I spend half my life in this office. I wipe my nose, I sleep on the couch, I have extra shoes and ties. Hell, he could have emptied my wastebasket into his bag while I was out of the office. There could be ten used tissues for him to strategically place. He could have ripped the label off one of my extra ties hanging on my door, something that wouldn’t mean anything to the police—until they got my name, searched my office, and found a tie with a missing label.

It could be anything. Anything anything anything—

But I’ll never know what he took. I’ll never know.

“If the cops find me, I give them you,” he says. “Maybe directly, or maybe anonymously. If you find me and kill me, I have a last will and testament that will direct the authorities to a safe-deposit box filled with all sorts of fun facts about you. It will be a step-by-step guide to the prosecution of Jason Kolarich.”

“I
will
find you,” I say. “And I’m going to kill you.”

“You might. But I doubt it. But here’s the thing, Jason. There’s one very easy way to stop the murders of these poor women. Turn yourself in to the police. Pitch your story to them. It’s totally up to you. Maybe you’ll be able to talk your way out of it.”

Maybe so. But I’d bet everything I own that he’s lined up enough evidence against me that I
couldn’t
talk my way clear.

“So the ball’s in your court,” he says. “Are you willing to risk your ass to save innocent young women?”