The Last Alibi (26 page)

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.”

68.

Jason

Wednesday, July 17

We sit around Linda’s kitchen table for a while, frustrated and spent, having just witnessed over a week’s worth of preparation and stress, danger, and risk end without anything to show for it. The pizza’s not half bad, the two bites I took before my stomach said stop, pepperoni and garlic. Doesn’t go so well with the bottle of Scotch that is passed around freely, but no one’s complaining.

“Not even a partial?” Linda asks me. “Not even a single letter or number?”

I shake my head. “Didn’t see the license plate at all.”

“He’s smart,” says the guy named Halston, a big Irish redhead. “He played us well.”

“Screw him being
smart
,” Joel says. “We were
dumb
. He tricked us with a prank we used to pull when we were kids.”

Maybe so, but Joel’s being too hard on himself. Everyone was so hyped up, and it was believable, a good ruse for a killer. Everyone answers the door for the pizza man, even if only to say,
Sorry, wrong house
.

“We should have played it out,” Joel says. “Answered the door, seen what he did. We had Linda covered six ways to Sunday. We should have given him a chance to make his move.”

Linda takes the Scotch and pours a few fingers into a glass. “We won’t get another chance like this,” she says.

Silence. Each of us believes what Linda just said. This was our chance, right here.

“On the bright side,” says Halston, “the pizza guy has a great story now.”

That gets a hard laugh, a release of nerves and tension. It feels good to laugh. I can’t remember the last time I laughed.

“The guy shows up to deliver a pie and suddenly he’s got guns in his face and he’s on his knees, begging for his life.” Lightner can hardly contain himself. “He must have been like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’” He buckles over in laughter.

“The poor guy wet his pants,” Linda gets out, wiping her eyes. “All he gets out of this is soiled underwear and a fifty-dollar tip. Is that how much you tipped him?” she asks Joel.

“I didn’t tip him,” he says. “I told you to tip him.”

“I thought you said you tipped him.”

“No, I said, ‘Tip him.’”

“So nobody tipped him?” I laugh. “We just sent him on his way? Did we at least pay for the pizza?”

Another round of laughter. Everyone at the table needs it. We let it linger, savor it, because the alternative is a lot more grim. Eventually it dies down, and we’re back to moody and bitter.

“A silver or white Accord,” Lightner says, shaking his head. “We’ll just run that through the DMV and we can narrow our list of suspects down to about two million people.”

“It’s something,” I say.

“It’s nothing. This guy’s a ghost. He’s nobody.”

I’m nobody.

I stir at the memory, just like that, like the snap of a finger, bursting from the fog of a conversation some six weeks ago. Something “James” said to me when he came to my office. A moment of self-pity, something like,
I don’t matter to people
, and then:
I’m nobody to them.
An odd thing to say, I recall thinking.

“I guess we go back to looking at old case files,” Joel says. “Anybody you prosecuted.”

I’m nobody to them.

And then, yes, I remember, clarity for once, finally, dark clouds parting ever so slightly and allowing in the sun: what he said to me when he left. He approached me, shook my hand good-bye, and said something odd again.

I hope I’m not nobody to
you,
Jason.

The last words he ever said to me, face-to-face.

I pop out of my chair.

I hope I’m not nobody to
you,
Jason.

You’re nobody to me.

“What?” Lightner asks me.

“We’ve been looking in the wrong place,” I say. “He’s not someone I prosecuted.”

“No? Then who is he?”

“He’s someone I
interrogated
.”

“Interr—You mean while you were on Felony Review?”

“Exactly.” I start pacing. Every assistant county attorney does a stint on Felony Review, where you’re assigned to a police station to approve warrant applications and arrests and, at least back when I was there, to interrogate suspects. It was a wild ride, those eleven months, working three days on, three days off, if you were lucky, working day and night with the detectives and patrolmen, hearing their stories, high-fiving them when there was a solve, making friendships, feeling like part of their team. “It was a line I used during interviews to intimidate suspects. I pulled it out when I needed it. ‘You’re nothing to me.’ ‘You’re nobody to me.’ Y’know, breaking them down.”

“Right? But . . .”

I shake out of my funk. “This guy, ‘James’ or whatever, when he came to my office, he repeated that phrase back to me. He said, ‘I hope I’m not nobody to
you
.’ It’s probably something I once said to
him
.” I blow out air. “He’s someone I interrogated.”

Lightner nods. “And you wouldn’t be an attorney of record for something like that, right?”

“Right,” I say. “I didn’t prosecute this guy. I never filed an appearance because I never stood in a courtroom opposite him. I just handled him at the police station and then dished him off to people more senior than me.” I pin my hair back off my forehead, a show of exasperation handed down from my mother. “How did I not think of this before?”

“Because it wouldn’t occur to you,” Joel says. “Because it’s like a revolving door on Felony Review, suspects coming in and out and then you wash your hands of it. You probably spent no more than an hour with most of these guys, give or take. One hour, out of a one- or two-
year
process for them. You forget about them and you assume they forget about you.”

He’s being charitable, cutting me some slack. He’s not wrong, either, but still this should have occurred to me sooner. These suspects really were blips on the screen to me, and I to them, but that doesn’t mean that something didn’t stick in one of their craws.

“You must have gotten a confession,” Linda says. “If you stand out to this guy that much, it means you made him talk.”

I wag my finger at Linda. “You’re right. And then, it’s not necessarily a one- or two-year process. If I got a confession that stuck, his lawyer would probably tell him to take a plea. A confession could close down that case right away.”

“And then he’d have one and only one prosecutor to thank for his time in prison,” says Joel. “That prosecutor might stick out to him.”

“I’ll bet you used deception,” Linda says. “That always pisses them off, like they forget about all the shit they really, truly did and focus on how unfair it was that you tricked them into admitting it.”

She’s right. That’s exactly how it works. And I was the master. I’ll bet I somehow twisted him up and got him to cop to something he hadn’t planned on admitting. There’s more than one way to do that, and I mastered them all.

“So we forget about Gang Crimes and felony courtrooms, even the misdemeanors, and we focus on Felony Review,” I say. “That’s the good news. Wanna hear the bad news?”

Lightner already knows the bad news, I think. He gives a solemn nod.

“I don’t remember any of those interviews,” I say. “I mean, bits and pieces, some memorable moments, but names? No names. That was, what, eight years ago? And we were seventy-two on, seventy-two off back then.”

“I remember that,” Joel says. “The prosecutors looked like hell by the third day. We’d let them shower in our bathroom and sleep on a roll-down mattress in one of the interview rooms. I don’t know why they had you stay on for seventy-two hours straight.”

“You were
lucky
if it was seventy-two,” I remind him. “If we caught a case that was ongoing, we stayed on it. I was once on for six days straight on a kidnapping.”

Lightner sighs. “The point being, it’s all a blur to you.”

“Pretty much, yeah. And that’s just the bad news. Here’s the
worse
news,” I say. “Records. You think it’s hard to track down cases where I filed an appearance and prosecuted someone? Try finding Felony Review records. Forget computers. Back then? We’d be lucky if my name was scribbled at the top of a sworn statement, which would be clipped to a pressboard and thrown into some box. Who knows if those paper records even exist anymore? For closed cases? The appeals exhausted? I’m not sure they exist at all.”

That takes the air out of the room. Everyone looks fried. I’m sure I do, too.

“Still, it’s a start,” Joel says. “We started with the most logical step, remember? We looked at violent ex-cons who were released in the last year. We thought we struck out because you didn’t prosecute any of them. But now we can look at them again, right? Maybe you got a confession from one of them.”

He’s right. We have a fresh start. We’re in the game, at least.

“This guy has definitely pissed me off,” Joel says. “I’m not letting this go. I’m seeing it through.”

“Me, too,” says Linda.

The others join in, too.

“We’re going to catch this prick,” Linda says. “Nobody sends pizza to my house I didn’t ask for.”