The Last Alibi (43 page)

110.

Jason

10:40
P.M.

Shauna gets into my SUV, inside my dark garage. Next to her, on the seat, is her purse and computer bag, stuffed with work papers and her laptop.

“Sit tight,” I say to her. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

She nods. Her face is washed out, her eyes vacant. I close the car door behind her. The dome light slowly fades, leaving her in darkness.

I run back upstairs to the second floor, tread carefully around Alexa’s body, and stop and think.

I look away from Alexa’s face, lying in profile. I can’t let sympathy or remorse factor in here. I have to come up with a plan. I need an airtight plan, and I need it right now.

But before my mind even starts the race, it stops. It’s right in front of me.

I don’t need a plan. Alexa already gave me one.

I’ve been planning for this.

I squeeze my eyes shut and recite her fabricated suicide note:

Now u finaly know who I am

Now u will never forgit

Number six was difrent

But she was my favorit

She was going to kill Shauna and pin it on Marshall. I’m not sure what was going to be “different” about the murder of Shauna, victim number six, compared to the other five women he filleted. Using a different knife? Maybe so. Maybe that was it.

But what about
shooting
victim number six in the
back
?

Now
that’s
different. And Alexa would be just as much Marshall’s “favorite” as Shauna would have been, each of them a woman close to me, a bloody parting gift to me before Marshall, his mission accomplished, took his own life.

The needle,
I think to myself.
The needle that Marshall planted in my office.

I race upstairs to my bedroom, to my nightstand, to retrieve that needle. Marshall must have injected it into his victims. There’s no other possible reason for a needle. But he injected them where? In the neck? The arm?
The neck,
I speculate. Women in the summer always have their necks exposed, and it would be harder to ward off than a needle prick to the arm, an appendage that the victim could move, flap, rotate in several directions. If I had one chance to stab someone with a needle, I’d go for the neck.

It’s a guess, but a good guess. And if I’m wrong, then it’s another reason the sixth victim was “different.”

But—
where the hell is the needle?
I put it right here, in the small space under the pullout drawer. There’s no way it could have fallen. Where the hell could it
possibly
—

“Oh,” I say aloud.

I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one who had that idea.

I go back downstairs and walk over to Alexa. She is wearing dark sweatpants, but sweatpants with pockets. I pat her right pocket lightly. Wearing my rubber gloves from Marshall’s apartment, I fish into the pocket slowly. I feel plastic. Yes . . .

Yes.

I pull out the small bag I kept the needle in. There’s the needle itself, undisturbed, still a small trace of fluid in the vial. Alexa really
had
been planning this. She knew where I kept the needle. She took it, probably the last time she was here. She was going to kill Shauna and inject her with this needle. She couldn’t have known when, or even if, we were going to find the notorious North Side Slasher, but she didn’t need to. She would have killed Shauna sooner or later, anyway. Either way, whether we had found him or not, she could blame it on the North Side Slasher. Once she listened to the voice mail Joel left on my cell phone this afternoon, she realized she had a small window of opportunity to actually pull this off—to kill Marshall, type a suicide note that referenced a sixth victim, and then kill Shauna and blame it on Marshall. She just needed me out of the way.

I steady my hand, touch Alexa’s hair softly. “I’m sorry,” I say to her, as if a needle injection into her jugular vein is the worst thing that happened to her in the last hour. I’m sorry about a lot of things, and I’ll have plenty of time to mourn them, but right now, I have only one goal, and that’s to make sure Shauna and our baby are as far away from this as possible.

Once I’ve injected Alexa with the needle, the vial now empty, I drop the needle back into the plastic bag. This is going to match up very nicely with those other syringes in Marshall’s cabinet.

I feel into Alexa’s right pocket again. I felt something else in there, I thought, something I need. And yes, here they are.

Her keys. It’s not easy getting my house key off her key ring with these rubber gloves, but I’m not risking a print. It’s worth the extra effort. It won’t make sense to the police when they come here tonight. If I wasn’t home when Alexa was killed—as I will claim—and nobody else was, either, then how did Alexa get into my house without a key?

It will clearly put suspicion on me, if it isn’t there already. My dead ex-girlfriend, shot in my house with my gun? They probably won’t need any extra help. But if they do, the house key, or more specifically the lack thereof, will make me look even worse.

The knife on the breakfast bar? It probably has Alexa’s prints on it. That won’t help. No. The knife has to go. I will find some sewer and dump it.

I place my Glock on the breakfast bar in place of the knife. It quite possibly has Shauna’s prints on it. That’s no good. I take a sanitary wipe out of the tube and give the gun a good scrub. I’ll blame it on Marshall. He wiped off his prints after he shot Alexa.

I remember one last thing: my phone. Either it’s at Alexa’s house or she brought it here. It’s not in her right pocket. Possibly her left?

The position of her body is such that her left pocket is under her, but I’m able to slide my fingers in there without moving her upper body. It’s there. With two fingers, I slide out my phone. I’ll be sure that the voice mail from Joel is erased, and I’ll check my text messages, too. I know from a drug case I handled that my telecommunications carrier does not retain the content of voice mails or text messages once deleted.

Okay.

I take a moment, assessing everything. Time to go.

The knife, hypodermic needle, and Alexa’s house key in tow, I head downstairs to the garage to drive Shauna home.

Then I stop. One more thing. One more cherry on the sundae. I run upstairs and grab it, then head down to the garage.

111.

Jason

11:00
P.M.

My ex-girlfriend, my house, my gun.

A good start. Hard not to look at me as the prime suspect.

No house key on Alexa. So no explanation for how she got into my house if, as I will tell them, I wasn’t home.

Better. It will be the first lie they catch me in. If I came home and found her dead, how did she get inside in the first place?

Lie about the relationship. Tell them you and Alexa were still a couple.

Even better. It will take them, what, twenty-four hours to get their warrants and see the phone records—her obsessive phone calls to me—and the e-mails, including that horrible one with the letter to the disciplinary board. Line those up with me saying,
Oh, sure, we were doing just swell, Alexa and me,
and you have a liar and a murderer.

Because that is precisely what has to happen. I can’t have the cops starting to get all curious. I can’t have them saying things like,
Hey, let’s take a look at other people close to Jason—like, for example, Shauna Tasker!
Shauna wouldn’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny. She’ll spill everything if they so much as look in her direction in the next few days.

No, I have to be an obvious suspect right here, tonight. So obvious, so glaringly guilty in their eyes that they stop looking anywhere else. My girlfriend, my gun, my house, the lack of any house key or means of entry for Alexa, and my lies. It will be enough.

No doubt,
they will say.
Kolarich is our guy.

I’ll worry later about how to clean this thing up, how to keep myself from spending life in prison. Maybe the cops will end up putting Marshall Rivers together with Alexa’s murder on their own. Maybe I’ll give them a few hints. Or maybe I’ll wait until trial and spring it on them. It will depend on a lot of things. Things I won’t worry about tonight.

I pull the SUV up to the street on which Shauna’s condo building is located. It wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to see my car dropping her off. She can walk the half-block.

“You can sit up now,” I say.

In the backseat, Shauna sits up, rights herself. If anyone, God forbid, saw me drive out of my garage, it had to be only me they saw.

“You okay?” I say.

She gives a flat, exhausted snicker.

“You remember what we talked about?”

“I remember,” she says. “Walk into my building, act tired, don’t talk to anyone.”

“Right.”

“Get in bed and don’t move. Try to get some rest.”

“Yes.”

“Call Joel and tell him to stand down.”

“Say it exactly, Shauna. It’s important.”

She is quiet a moment. I need her for this. I can’t call Lightner tonight. The police are about to become very interested in my phone records.

“I will tell Joel that you and I talked, and I’m calling at your request, and he shouldn’t do anything about that voice mail this afternoon. And he shouldn’t believe what he sees on the news tomorrow.”

Close enough.

“What was on the voice mail he left you?” she asks.

“Later,” I tell her. “Nothing for you to know tonight. Now, listen,” I say. “I’m going to be calling you later on tonight. Right?”

“Right.”

“It will be hours from now. Maybe the middle of the night.”

“Yes.”

“And what am I going to tell you?”

She takes a breath. “You’re going to tell me that the police are placing you under arrest.”

“Correct. And what are you going to do then?”

“I’m going to call Bradley and have him go down to Area Three headquarters.”

“Correct. It has to be Bradley, not you,” I say. Shauna is in no position to sit in on an interrogation over the next few hours. The police would get a confession, but it wouldn’t come from me.

“Okay.”

“So if anyone tries to talk to you in the next few days, you and Bradley are counsel of record. You’re my lawyer.”

“I understand.”

“And you’re not going to worry about me, because I have this under control. I’m going to let them think I killed her, but it’s not going to stick. I’m going to make sure of that.”

She doesn’t speak. I’m not sure she can. I want to reach back there, touch her, but she doesn’t need more emotional avalanches right now.

“Shauna,” I say. “This is all my fault. I’m the one who let Alexa into our lives, and I badly underestimated her. Make no mistake, she planned this tonight. She tricked me into being away from home so she could go to my house and kill you. If I’d gotten home fifteen minutes earlier, I’d have shot her myself. So remember that tonight. I don’t care if her back was turned. I don’t care if it was tonight or tomorrow or a week from now—”

“She wasn’t going to stop.”

“That’s right, she wasn’t going to stop, Shauna.”

“I get it,” she says quietly. “I know.”

A police car passes by us, slow and steady. I watch it until it disappears, two blocks down, with a left turn.

“You . . . need to get going,” says Shauna.

“Okay, kiddo.”

She pushes the door open, lifting her bag and shuffling out of the car. She stops before she exits. “Tell me you know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I promise her. I watch her make the half-block walk to her condo building. It must be the longest and loneliest walk of her life. Finally, she turns in to her building and disappears into the lobby.

Then I pop the car back into gear and drive to Marshall Rivers’s apartment.

112.

Jason

The visitation room at the Alejandro Morales Detention Center is about as nondescript as they come, pale gray walls and an old maple desk, mismatched wooden chairs. Whoever designed the “Morales Palace” had an eye for soul-crushing blandness.

Shauna, my lawyer and pipeline to the real world, walks into the room. She has visited three times a week—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—often to discuss the case and sometimes just to see me. Three weeks ago, we waived our preliminary hearing, and Judge Judith Bialek found probable cause to send me to trial on one count of murder in the first degree. Then, with a trace of apology on her face, she denied me bond.

The case would normally be in its infancy, but we’re on a fast track. Shauna demanded a speedy trial, putting the prosecution on a constitutional clock, and the judge set December 9 for trial.

Shauna moves a chair to the side of the square table next to me and takes my hand. She has brought nothing with her. No major discussion of the case today. We didn’t discuss the case when she visited two days ago, either. That was a Tuesday. The day after Labor Day.

That was the day she burst into tears before she even said hello. That was the day she told me that she’d lost the baby.

The spotting on her underwear, then the cramps, then the trip to the emergency room because her doctor’s office was closed on Labor Day. Labor Day—of course it had to be
Labor
Day that she miscarried. It wasn’t enough to put that tiny dagger through Shauna’s heart, but let’s have it happen on Labor Day so we can sprinkle in some irony, too, and remember it every year.

Today, Shauna is different. The mourning is still all over her, the slump to her shoulders, the lifelessness in her eyes, but there is something different in how she addresses me.

“How are you?” I say, my hand on her arm.

“Don’t,” she says, tightening up. “I don’t want to talk about that today. It’s too . . . it’s too much for me. Okay?”

“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 wrong.

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.