The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  I stop for Starbucks and make it into the office just past nine. Not bad for me, on a non-court day like this one.

  “So how was your big night alone?” Alexa asks me when she calls me at the office, ten minutes after I hit my chair. “Did you go to strip clubs and eat steak burritos?”

  That sounds a lot more fun than what I did. I stayed home by myself, reading some case law for a motion to suppress I’m filing next week, then giving up and watching half of season two of Arrested Development on DVD, popping Altoids every two hours along the way.

  “Is that what you think guys do when women aren’t around?” I ask.

  “Yes, it is. What do they really do?”

  “Masturbate, eat pizza, and watch sports.”

  “All at the same time?”

  “Sometimes,” I say. “God didn’t give us two hands for nothing.”

  “Did you masturbate last night?”

  “That’s a very personal question, Ms. Himmel.”

  “Did you?”

  “Are you kidding me? After a week with you, I’m sore as hell, woman. I had an ice pack down my pants all night.”

  She laughs hard at that comment, but I’m not kidding about the soreness. I’ve never met someone with this much energy in bed. This old-fashioned girl is going to break me in half.

  “By the way, since we’re being personal,” I say, “I’m out of protection.”

  “Condoms?” There is tapping in the background. Putting a transcript into final form, I assume. I don’t really understand what court reporters do. I should probably ask her.

  “Yeah. I’m out. Remind me to buy some more.”

  “I told you, I’m covered,” she says. “I have birth control.”

  “You sure?”

  “Either that or I’m planning on trapping you into marriage by getting pregnant.”

  I give a good and awkward laugh, heh-heh-heh.

  “Take a breath, for God’s sake,” she says. “I’m covered. You’re not going to get me pregnant. But if it will make you feel better, by all means go buy some—oh—oh, no—oh, Jason—”

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  And then, somehow, I realize it before she says it. She isn’t working on a transcript. She’s tapping her computer. She’s on the Internet.

  “Don’t tell me,” I say, waking up my laptop and heading to the Herald website.

  “Oh, Jason.”

  And there it is, the garish headline:

  NORTH SIDE SLASHER CLAIMS FIFTH VICTIM

  A fifth woman, Samantha Drury, age twenty-five, was stabbed in her car as she was arriving home on the city’s northwest side last night. Ambushed inside her garage, stabbed multiple times.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” Alexa says.

  The bitter venom rushes to my throat. I grab my garbage can just in time as I retch liquids, my stomach in revolt. I take a couple of panting breaths and wait for my pulse to settle. This guy is just having fun now. Toying with me. Killing women as part of a game with me.

  “What . . . what are you going to do?” Alexa asks.

  Dim the lights, mute the sound: A calm sweeps over me, sudden and vivid, like I’d lost my breath but recovered it. Calm, not because I’m feeling peaceful or serene, but because finally I’m making a decision that, in the back of my mind, I always knew I might have to make.

  I’m done with you, I told James on the phone two nights ago. I wasn’t really sure what that comment meant; it was just my turn for a lob in the verbal tennis match, an attempt to regain some momentum in the conversation.

  But now I’m ready to give those words some meaning. I’m done with you, James Drinker.

  “I’m going to call the police,” I tell Alexa. “I’m going to tell them everything. Even if it gets me disbarred.”

  “Oh, Jason, really?”

  No, as a matter of fact, not really, but that’s what I need to tell her, that’s what she needs to think. She can’t be involved in what I’m going to do.

  It’s not that I would mind losing my law license over this. It would be well worth it. The reason I’m not going back to the cops is that it wouldn’t work. There’s nothing I can tell them that I haven’t already told them. James Drinker probably has no more of a connection to Samantha Drury than he has to President Obama. And somehow I know that he has covered his tracks. I just know it.

  No, the police aren’t an option.

  “I’ll call you later,” I say. I punch out the call and dial up another one.

  Joel Lightner answers his cell on the second ring.

  “Jason—I was just about to call you. We just saw the news. I don’t know what happened. Our people were on him. They swear he never left the apartment building after he got home from work. They swear it.”

  “He snuck out somehow, Joel. He probably spotted the tail. He probably slipped out a fire escape or something.”

  “My people are better than that.”

  “Well, his better is better than their better, I guess.”

  “Are we sure Drinker was the one who did it last night? I mean, maybe he isn’t our offender.”

  I realize I’ve been holding my breath, my head getting dizzy. “It was him,” I say. “There’s no doubt.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Jason. We fucked up. It won’t happen again, I can prom—”

  “Joel, I think we’re done with the surveillance. I want your guys to stand down.”

  “Stand down?”

  “No more surveillance on James Drinker. Effective immediately.”

  “We won’t lose him again, Jason.”

  “No. I want it over. As of right now. Stop the surveillance.”

  “Why?”

  “Tactical reasons,” I say. “He’s smart enough to know when we’re tailing him. He’ll be smart enough to know when we’re not. Maybe he’ll drop his guard and make a mistake.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s what I want,” I insist. “I’m the client, you’re my investigator. Do what I ask.”

  Joel doesn’t speak. He has a brain cell or two himself, and he knows me too well. He knows I’m not telling him to remove the surveillance detail for any tactical reason.

  “My client sometimes has stupid ideas,” Joel says. “Very stupid ones. What are you planning to do, Counselor? And why don’t you want my people watching when you do it?”

  “Just do it,” I say. I hang up before he can say anything else.

  Because there’s nothing left to say. I can’t involve Joel any more than I can involve Alexa. I have to do this myself and let the chips fall where they may.

  And I can tell myself that I tried. I tried to follow my lawyer’s oath, giving my client the benefit of the doubt, hoping that if Drinker was the offender, the police would figure it out without his own attorney selling him out. When they didn’t, I violated my oath and gave them a very large nudge, pointing them directly to Drinker, and still they’ve turned away from him. I don’t have any other choice, as I see it.

  For a reason all his own, James Drinker is intent on killing women in this city, and the only person who can stop him is me.

  36.

  Jason

  Saturday, June 29

  The problem with summer in the Midwest is that it stays light outside for so long. Just my luck, we’re only slightly over a week removed from the solstice, so today is the ninth-longest day of sunlight in the entire damn year.

  Ideally, the best way to ambush somebody is to catch them outside their house—either inside their garage or on their walk up to their door—when it’s dark. You have the element of surprise, you have the cover of darkness, and you don’t have to hassle with details like house alarms, locked doors, or bolted windows.

  But conditions have to be ideal, and for me, they are not. James Drinker doesn’t live in a house with a garage; he lives in a high-rise. And he leaves Higgins Auto Body at half past five, six at the latest, accord
ing to the surveillance team that has followed him over the last week. So that’s nowhere close to dusk, not this time of year.

  All of which leaves me with only one option: walking up to his fourth-floor apartment, forcing my way in, and taking care of business.

  When I was a kid, the intersection of Townsend and Kensington was a decent place to live, part of a middle-class Eastern European neighborhood called Power’s Park, named after a steel company owner who built a plant here in the 1930s and hired Polish immigrants. There was a place not two blocks away from this intersection where my dad sometimes took us after Mass on Sunday called Magyar that served Hungarian food, my father’s ancestry. We always knew it was coming after Mass when we piled into the beater station wagon and Dad would look at us in the rearview mirror and ask us if we were “Hungary.” Laughed like hell at that joke, he did.

  Dad would speak what little of the native tongue he knew with the owners and would order food like money was no object—which meant he probably had just scammed somebody out of something and he actually had some dough. He went nuts over the paprika stew and dumplings. Mom always ordered the same thing, veal crepes. Pete and I kept it safe with debreceni sausage with mustard and cabbage.

  My dad was always happy there, probably because he only took us there after he’d scored in some way or another—the track or a card game or some grift he’d pulled. My dad’s moods went up and down that way, depending on that week’s income. He was a pretty good con artist, I assumed, but he was even better at conning himself into believing he was a winner on those rare occasions when his takings outgained his expenses. Would have been nice if he’d left a little of that money for Mom. But in the Kolarich household, it was all about Jack’s mood. Would it be dinner at Irish Green and brunch at Magyar and flowers for Mom? Or would it be cold cuts and leftovers and Jack staggering home at two in the morning, half in the bag, looking for a boy to swat?

  This neighborhood is no longer called Power’s Park; now it’s Old Power’s Park. The steel plant moved out in the seventies, and Magyar is now a pawnshop, next to a payday loan center, next to a secondhand clothing store. The whites mostly fled this neighborhood when the mayor decided, twenty years ago, that this area would be an excellent location for subsidized housing projects—far, far better than, say, the available acreage on the near-north side close to all the affluent white neighborhoods.

  So now it’s a forgotten neighborhood, the streets littered with potholes and busted-up curbs, drug deals taking place in open view in dingy alleys or drive-ups at street corners. I can blend into this neighborhood if I wish—my hair’s pretty long now, I have two days’ growth on my face, and with an untucked T-shirt over blue jeans, I can basically play the part of the down-on-his-luck white guy.

  I’m being overly cautious, but I don’t have a surreptitious route into James Drinker’s apartment, so the least I can do is make sure I’m in disguise while I case the neighborhood. I pass by his apartment building at 3611 West Townsend long enough to realize that there’s a door controlled by a buzzer, but it seems to be broken and people are freely entering and exiting. I see an elevator, a necessity for an eleven-story building, but I don’t plan on using it. I see mailboxes and a beat-up tile floor in the entryway.

  The sun has fallen now, but I need to wait a little longer, because there’s nothing to the west of this neighborhood that will offer any cover, so the beautiful sunset, with its fluorescent colors lighting up the sky, still provides illumination.

  I walk around the place a couple of times and then head back toward my car, parked three blocks away in a lot secured by a high fence. I pay the fee to the guy at the gate and get my key. I leave the lot and park on a side street a half mile away.

  I use my electric razor to shave. I squeeze out some hair gel that I bought at the store to grease back my hair. In the SUV’s backseat, I use the extra legroom to change into a shirt and tie and suit.

  When I was a prosecutor, I once lost my badge, which was a big no-no. Authentic law enforcement badges are a real treasure for the gangbangers; they trade them like currency. So I got docked some pay, but eventually they had to give me a replacement. Lo and behold, I found my original badge several weeks later, but I’d already paid the price for it, and I figured the odds of my getting through the paperwork to recoup my fine were about as good as my setting foot on Mars, so I kept the stupid thing. I wasn’t supposed to do that. Sometimes I do things I’m not supposed to do. Tonight might be one of those times.

  I make the decision to leave my SUV where it is on the side street. It’s a small gamble. It’s a pretty nice ride, but I shouldn’t be too long, and I’d rather have my car at the ready without having to pay somebody cash to get my key. I don’t know if I’m going to be walking or running when I leave James Drinker’s apartment building tonight.

  I’m wearing my trench coat, the shirt and tie showing through the nape, and the county attorney’s office badge clipped to my coat. I walk with confidence. You don’t do that, you’re a sitting duck. But you keep your chin up, make eye contact with passersby, and look serious but disinterested, and with the trench coat and badge, nobody messes with you.

  Unless they do.

  I approach the building. There is really no turning back now. I’ve made the decision and I have to abide by it with full force. If I back down now, I could be in a world of shit. I don’t know what James Drinker is capable of, but several people have underestimated him so far, me included, and I’m not going to do it tonight.

  I take the stairs slowly, deliberately, not trying to conceal my steps but not going out of my way to be loud, either. I pass two people on their way down, both of them young men—late teens, early twenties—who show me some respect by keeping on their side of the staircase and then some. They could be badasses, for all I know, but why mess with law enforcement unnecessarily? They pick their spots like anyone else.

  I get to the fourth floor and walk down to number 406, on the left side of the dimly lit hallway—dimly lit is good. The door is old, cheap wood, but probably on the thick side. There is no peephole, which is significant. I could work around it either way, but it’s easier this way.

  I rap my fist three times on the door and call out, in a voice not my own, “James Drinker. County Attorney Special Investigators.”

  Then I take one step back and hold up my badge.

  “Who is it?” a voice calls through the door. It’s a thick door, or he was sleeping and his voice is weak. Or he’s wary, as he should be when someone knocks on his door at ten o’clock at night, and the fear alters his voice.

  “I’m a special investigator with the county attorney’s office, Mr. Drinker. We have a couple more questions to ask you. A couple things you told us on Wednesday.”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “Do you want me to shout my questions to you in front of all your neighbors, or do you want to let me in? It’s your choice.”

  My heartbeat kicks into full throttle. There could be anything awaiting me behind that door. He could have made my voice. He could be expecting me. He could have that butcher knife or any other kind of a weapon.

  Which is why I’m glad I brought my gun.

  Two locks unbolt, a total of four clicks. Then the door pops open a couple of inches, straining the rusted chain lock, still attached. I make sure that the first thing he sees is the badge, front and center in his narrow line of vision.

  And I make sure that the first thing he feels is a blast against the door, sending him backward as I charge into the room, the chain lock snapping away easily.

  Not the most original of moves, but he clearly wasn’t ready for it. He’s in the midst of completing an ungraceful fall backward onto the hardwood floor, his body rocking backward, feet in the air, his shirt rising up to reveal the beer gut, his flaming red hair everywhere on the floor. Hands are free. No weapon that I can see.

  “Hi, James,” I say.

  Long, kinky red hair, check. Spare tire in the m
idsection, check. Horn-rimmed glasses, check. Muscular build, not as toned as I would have thought, but I never saw him in a short-sleeved T-shirt.

  He checks all the boxes.

  But the face is wrong. From a distance, sure, the prominent features all check out. But his nose is bigger. His teeth are straighter. His eyes are smaller, his cheeks rounder.

  “James Drinker?” I say.

  “Who the hell are you? Don’t . . . What do you want to know? I didn’t do anything. I already told your cops.”

  The voice is all wrong, too.

  He sits up, his arm over his body. He took a hard fall and he’s scared out of his mind.

  “I know you didn’t,” I say. “This is a misunderstanding. I’m sorry.” I fish a bunch of twenties out of my pocket. “That’s for the chain lock. And a few drinks, on me. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  I turn for the door, my head buzzing. I played this out twenty different ways in my head, good outcomes and bad. I didn’t plan for this.

  Whoever this guy is who walked into my law firm, and who has killed five women in this city, he isn’t James Drinker.

  Who goes to an attorney’s office to confess his sins wearing a disguise, and with an assumed identity? I never saw that one coming.

  Not a fake name, either—a real person, with a real apartment, a real job, a clean criminal record. And with distinctive features like blazing red hair and thick black glasses and a beer belly, all of which he could easily mimic, that he would be remembered for, and that, from a distance, would make the real James Drinker indistinguishable from the fake one. So if I happened to send someone to look in on James, my people would have every reason to think that the person they were tailing was the same person who walked into my law office.

  Whoever he is, he’s smart. Smarter than I ever imagined.

  I exit the building and start walking east on Townsend toward the big intersection, toward my car parked down the way.

  He’s been watching James Drinker, I now realize. When the cops showed up at Higgins Auto Body the other day and put the real James Drinker into the back of a car and drove him down to headquarters for questioning, he was watching. And he knew Drinker had absolutely no connection to the murders of five women. He knew that the only way the cops would have his name is from me.