The Last Alibi (39 page)

100.

Jason

Standing room only in the courtroom again today, the gallery seats full and people jammed all along the walls. The press requests for this trial, previously modest, tripled over the weekend, including now correspondents from national media outlets. The media’s favorite story of the summer, the North Side Slasher, has returned for an encore.

They all showed up yesterday, Monday, and formed a line that snaked up and down the hallway outside the courtroom, only to learn that Judge Bialek had decided to delay the resumption of trial for another day. She didn’t say why. In the typically mystical ways in which judges often operate, she simply instructed the court clerk to notify everyone outside that there would be no trial testimony today. The spectators all left, disappointed and disgruntled. The reporters, of course, stayed, wondering what this all meant, smelling something big. It wasn’t long before Twitter feeds and Internet blogs were full of speculation, and Shauna and Bradley were ambushed with feverish questions when they came to court this morning.

“What did the detectives find this weekend?” “Why did the police visit Jason Kolarich’s house yesterday?” “Why was Alexa Himmel’s body transferred back to the medical examiner’s office?”

Shauna’s face is drawn. Her movements are a beat slower than usual. She has hardly slept the last four nights since my cross-examination on Friday. She has a habit of doing that, anyway, when she’s on trial, and with everything that’s happened in this case since Friday, I can hardly blame her.

“Ms. Tasker,” says the judge, “is the defense prepared to call its next witness?”

“Yes, Your Honor. The defense calls Detective Vance Austin.”

Vance Austin strides to the witness box in a decent gray suit and black tie. He is a rugged, cop-handsome guy who, according to Joel Lightner, comes from good stock. He looks like an alpha male, a guy to whom others turn. He smooths his tie as he takes his seat in the witness chair after swearing his oath.

“Vance Austin,” he says to Shauna, spelling his last name, as if anyone wasn’t sure how to spell it. “I’m a detective, first grade, here in the city.”

“Detective, at some point this year, approximately in May of this year, did you become involved in the investigation of the murder of a woman named Alicia Corey?”

“That’s correct.”

“Her murder took place within your jurisdiction at Area Three headquarters?”

“That’s correct.”

“Did you subsequently become the lead investigator in a series of homicides involving young women on the north side of the city?”

“That’s correct. I led the task force.”

“And the killer was known in the media as the North Side Slasher?”

“Some reporters called him that. I didn’t.”

Shauna pauses. “What did you call him?”

“I’m too much of a gentleman to repeat it here.”

That gets an unusually hearty laugh from the spectators, all of them hyped up, eager.

Shauna smiles. “Right. But—five women were murdered on the city’s north side within approximately a one-month period this past summer, correct?”

“Five
confirmed
women,” says Detective Austin.

“Yes, thank you. Five confirmed women. Alicia Corey, Lauren Gibbs, Holly Frazier, Nancy Minnows, and Samantha Drury. Are those the women?”

“Yes.”

“And those murders have now been solved, is that right, Detective?”

“Those five have been, that’s correct.”

“Who killed those women, Detective?”

“A man named Marshall Rivers.”

Shauna nods. “When did you solve this case?” she asks.

His head inclines from side to side. “Well, we confirmed it on that Tuesday . . . it would have been the first full week of August of this year.”

Seven days after Alexa was murdered.

“Would Tuesday, August sixth, sound right?” asks Shauna.

“Yes, that sounds right. It took us a couple of days with some lab work to make it official, to confirm things. We probably knew we had our guy the previous Friday, but I think we went public on the following Tuesday afternoon.”

I would have loved to have watched that press conference. But by then, I’d been in county lockup for a full week for Alexa’s murder. Shauna, who visited me as often as she could as my attorney of record, had given me tidbits for several days, rumors that the police thought they had solved the case, the killer was believed to be named Marshall Rivers, there were a lot of details that had to be confirmed, et cetera.

“Do you have any doubt whatsoever that Marshall Rivers was the man who killed those five women this past summer?”

“None,” Austin answers, his jaw high. “Zero.”

“Without going into too much detail,” Shauna says, “can you give us an idea about the evidence you built against him?”

“Well, we—we found the murder weapon in his apartment, first of all. He used the same knife on each victim, a folding lockback knife with a partially serrated blade. The blood and DNA of each of the five victims was intermingled on that knife’s blade and handle. We had an eyewitness description, a decent one, from one of the murders that matched Marshall Rivers. We brought the witness in and showed her a photo array that included a recent photo of Rivers, and she picked him. We have Rivers on a security camera at Citywide Bank in the Commercial District branch, where one of the victims, Lauren Gibbs, worked, on two different days, never doing any business in the bank whatsoever, just looking in the direction of Ms. Gibbs, who was a bank teller. And we reviewed his Internet searches. He had done extensive research on most of the victims. He’d looked at their Facebook pages, he’d found their home addresses in some cases—things like that.” Austin nods at Shauna. “Then, there’s something that we’ve kept confidential that I think you’re planning on asking me about . . .”

“That’s fine, Detective, we can stop there,” says Shauna. “I’d like to talk a bit more about Marshall Rivers, specifically.”

101.

Jason

“Detective Austin,” says Shauna, “Marshall Rivers had a criminal record, did he not?”

“He did. Three felony convictions.”

“Do you have those committed to memory, Detective? Or would you like me to take you through them?”

“Oh, I know them,” he says, sporting a wry grin. “By now, I know Marshall Rivers pretty darn well.”

I’m reminded of Joel Lightner here. For him, it was Terry Burgos, the college janitor who killed a half dozen women and stowed them in an auditorium basement. Joel worked that case so hard, from start to finish, that he developed some sort of bizarre connection with the guy, some nostalgic affinity as time passed. That’s how Vance Austin is feeling toward Marshall Rivers. Not that Vance Austin can credit outstanding police work to his solving of the murders, but human beings are remarkably adept at cherry-picking the facts most favorable to their egos.

“His first conviction,” says Austin, “was about thirteen years ago, when he was twenty. He tried to coerce a woman into an alley at gunpoint. He pleaded the case down to simple assault in state court. With the plea, he avoided prison. He was arrested on a sexual assault nearly six months later, but the charges were dropped when the victim refused to testify. Another six months later, he was convicted of possession of a firearm and possession of a Schedule One controlled substance, and he served just over three years. Most recently, he was convicted in federal court of possession of a firearm under similar circumstances as his first conviction; he tried to force a woman and her child into his car by threat of a firearm. He got seventy-five months on the weapons charge, or about six and a half years in federal prison. He attacked a prison psychiatrist, a woman, while inside and got another eighteen months added to his sentence. Prison psychiatrists said he was capable of violent and impulsive behavior, that he had no sense of remorse or right versus wrong—so he was pretty high up on our list.”

The way that information rolls off Austin’s tongue, you get the feeling he’s said these things many times—like, for example, to these young female reporters with the movie-star looks, who are just doing their job, sure, but who also can’t help being just a little bit attracted to this strong, powerful man who caught the bad guy and helps them sleep safely at night.

“When was Marshall Rivers released from federal custody?” Shauna asks.

“This past January. January . . . the sixteenth, I believe it was.”

“And that most recent conviction, in federal court,” says Shauna. “He was initially arrested by city police officers. That case started here locally, with the county attorney’s office, not with federal agents, isn’t that correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And in fact, Mr. Rivers gave a statement—a confession—to an assistant county attorney, didn’t he?”

“He did, yes.”

“And that assistant county attorney was Jason Kolarich, was it not?”

“So I’ve come to learn,” he says. “That wasn’t easy information to come by, because Rivers took a plea in federal court. He didn’t go to trial, so there wasn’t much of a record. But yes, over the weekend we were able to track down that information and confirm it.”

He’s sounding a little defensive here, because it’s something he didn’t know until recently, and he wants to be the guy who knows
everything
about Marshall Rivers. Some people, in the coming days and weeks, might say Austin should have known that fact, should have tracked it down at the time when the north side murders were solved. But I’m not one of those people. My name barely crept into that case at all. It was a federal prosecution having nothing to do with a state prosecutor like me, and the case didn’t even go to trial. Rivers pleaded out to avoid a possible ten-year sentence. The police would have no reason to dig any deeper into that file. They had no inkling that Rivers was acting out of revenge—they thought he was a garden-variety sociopath who preyed on young women—so they had no reason to look for objects of his revenge.

“And wouldn’t you agree, Detective, that the reason that Mr. Rivers took a plea in federal court, instead of fighting the charge, is because he had no chance after Jason secured his confession?”

“Objection,” says Roger Ogren. “Foundation.”

“Sustained.”

“Isn’t it fair to say that he had Jason Kolarich, and
only
Jason Kolarich, to blame for being sent away for over six years?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. Move on, Ms. Tasker.”

Fair enough. Shauna made the point, anyway.

Shauna nods, waits a beat or two, sneaks a peek at the jury. “Detective, how did Marshall Rivers subdue his victims?”

“In each case, he assaulted the victim as she was returning to her home. In most cases, he gained entry to the victim’s dwelling, and in one instance the attack took place within the victim’s automobile. But generally, he would lie in wait and ambush the victim.”

Just like he ambushed Alexa Himmel as she walked into Jason’s town house,
Shauna will argue in her final summation to the jury. She won’t have every single answer. She won’t be able to explain why this particular ambush-murder didn’t go according to script, how it was that he ended up shooting her in the back on the second floor of my town house instead of carving her up with a knife on the ground floor. But it’s not the defense’s job to dot every
i
and cross every
t
. We just have to kick up enough dust to get reasonable doubt.

“Detective, was there anything else that connected these murders? Anything in particular that Marshall Rivers did to his victims that would serve as some kind of trademark or calling card or . . . signature?”

“There was,” says the detective.

“And before you tell us about that signature, let me ask you: Has this information ever been publicly revealed?”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“Is that common, when you have a string of murders that appear to have the same trademark or signature—is it common to keep that signature out of the press, away from the public?”

I assume most people already know that the answer is yes, based on what they’ve seen on television.

“That’s correct,” says Austin. “Particularly when the string of murders has received significant media attention. When that happens, we tend to get a lot of bogus confessions, people just looking for attention. You can tell real from fake confessions when you hold back information, so only the real killer would know it.”

“I see. It also helps you distinguish between crimes committed by that killer versus crimes committed by a copycat.”

“That’s also true. You can’t be a copycat if you don’t know the killer’s signature in the first place.”

“So, Detective, what was Marshall Rivers’s signature, his calling card, never before made public?”

Shauna laid that on pretty thick. Detective Austin doesn’t seem impressed with the melodrama. Or maybe he’s just pissed off he has to make this information public. Maybe he wanted to save it for the book he’s going to write.

He says, “The offender injected a drug called fentanyl into each victim.”

“Can you tell us what fentanyl is?” Shauna asks.

“I’m not a chemist or a coroner, but, generally, yes. It’s a very powerful narcotic, kind of like morphine or heroin, but typically much more potent. It mostly comes here illegally from Mexico. We see it a lot here in the city as ‘China white’ or ‘AMF.’ It’s not the biggest drug problem we have, but it’s definitely out there.”

“Isn’t it true that fentanyl can also be used as an incapacitating agent?”

“Yes, it can be.”

“Meaning it can be used to knock out or paralyze a victim.”

“That’s correct.”

“And it’s powerful, isn’t it? It’s more powerful as an incapacitating agent than, say, GHB, the date-rape drug.”

Detective Austin hedges, his head moving side to side. “You may be going past my knowledge base. I’ve heard people say what you just said, but I don’t know it to be true. It’s powerful, I’d agree with that.”

Shauna can live with that. “And in fact, Detective, didn’t you come to believe that Marshall Rivers used the fentanyl injection to incapacitate his victims?”

Austin bows his head, a curt nod. “That’s correct. Now, whether he incapacitated them immediately with the fentanyl injection or whether he first subdued them and then used it to prevent them from fighting back—that’s a difficult thing to know.”

“And it’s also possible that he wasn’t using it to subdue them at all. That he was just injecting them as some kind of branding, to put his personal stamp on the murders. Isn’t that also possible?”

“You can never rule that out,” says Austin. “Sometimes with these sociopaths, they do strange things like that. They want ownership over the murders.”

Good. Well done, Shauna.

“Now, Detective, fentanyl doesn’t show up on a routine toxicological screen performed on someone during an autopsy, does it?”

Austin grimaces, chuckles to himself. “No, it surely does not.”

“You know that from firsthand experience, don’t you, Detective? From your investigation into the north side murders?”

“That’s correct. Our medical examiner performed a routine tox screen on these victims, and that test doesn’t check for fentanyl.” He makes a face, indicating his opinion of that routine drug screen. “We only came upon this because we found a broken hypodermic needle at one of the crime scenes. I think it was Holly Frazier, the third victim . . . Yeah, it was, it was Holly’s. So we had the needle tested, and it contained traces of fentanyl. Then we sent the medical examiner back to specifically test the other victims for the presence of fentanyl. Those tests came back positive every time, going back to the first two victims and going forward to the next two. All five victims tested positive for fairly high doses of fentanyl.”

“Judge,” Shauna says, “at this time, I’d like to refer the jury to the stipulation previously entered into between the parties and read to the jury, in which it is stipulated that the autopsy of Alexa Himmel included a routine toxicological screen.”

Which made sense, to be fair to the government, especially when the cause of death in Alexa’s case was a bullet to the head or neck region. It’s not like they had any reason to think this was connected to the knife murders committed by Marshall Rivers, not back then in late July.

“Very good,” says the judge.

“Detective Austin, were you aware of additional testing performed by the county medical examiner this weekend on the blood and body of the victim in this case, Alexa Himmel?”

“Yes. I oversaw it. Dr. Agarwal performed the tests.”

“Dr. Mitra Agarwal is the chief deputy medical examiner?”

“Yes.”

“A very competent pathologist?”

“The best.”

“And was it your understanding that Dr. Agarwal’s charge was to search for the presence of fentanyl in Alexa Himmel’s blood?”

“Yes, that was the reason for the additional testing.”

“And was it, Detective? Was the drug fentanyl found in Alexa Himmel’s body?”

“Yes, it was,” he says.

The jury reacts. Everyone reacts. The same chemical injected into the other five victims was injected into Alexa, too. It’s the first piece of hard evidence tying Alexa Himmel’s death to Marshall Rivers. We just got back the ME’s report yesterday. Shauna said that she was waiting over at the county attorney’s offices when Roger Ogren came storming out of his office and passed her without saying a word, his face flushed—
like he’d just swallowed a bug,
Shauna said. Katie O’Connor, the second chair in the trial, was actually the one who broke the good news to Shauna. Roger Ogren, no doubt, had been sure that the test would come up negative. But when it didn’t, he was obligated to tell us so.

Now he’s probably kicking himself, thinking he shouldn’t have ordered the additional test. But it wouldn’t have mattered. Shauna, in her closing argument, would have blistered the prosecution and police so hard for not doing the additional testing—
What are they hiding? If the government is so sure that Marshall Rivers didn’t kill Alexa, here’s their chance to prove it! Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if the government doesn’t have that level of confidence in their case, how can you?
—that Ogren probably would have been shamed into doing it, anyway. This way, at least, he’s wearing the white hat, ordering the test voluntarily.

“Dr. Agarwal found traces of fentanyl, injected postmortem, in Ms. Himmel’s jugular vein,” Austin says.

That is a point Austin has added, no doubt, at the request of Roger Ogren. The other victims were injected antemortem—prior to death—while their blood continued to circulate, carrying that drug into the far reaches of their bodies, easily detectable as long as your toxicology test was looking for it. A drug injected postmortem, as it was with Alexa, obviously does not travel; the blood has stopped circulating. Instead, the drug tends to pool in the vein or muscle where it was injected, in this case the jugular vein in Alexa’s neck. So Roger Ogren will try to drive a truck through this distinction:
The others were injected while alive, but Alexa Himmel was injected after death.