The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)
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Kolarich Cell
1
221529
3:58 PM
Kolarich Cell
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221529
4:45 PM
Kolarich Cell
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5:22 PM
Kolarich Cell
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5:23 PM
Kolarich Cell
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221529
7:02 PM
Kolarich Cell
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221529
8:28 PM
Kolarich Cell
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221529
8:29 PM
Kolarich Home
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221529
8:31 PM
Kolarich Cell
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221529
9:46 PM
Kolarich Cell
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10:37 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:14 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:17 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:21 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:25 PM
Kolarich Home
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11:27 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:32 PM
Kolarich Home
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11:47 PM
Kolarich Cell
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11:49 PM
Kolarich Cell
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“That’s twenty-four phone calls,” says Jumer, when asked. “Twenty-four phone calls in a twenty-four-hour period. Really, a fourteen-hour period.”
“Agent,” says Roger Ogren, “I see that each of these calls says that their duration was one minute. Does that mean that each call was precisely sixty seconds?”
“No, obviously not,” Jumer replies. “This particular service provider—like all of them, I believe—charges you for a minute of time the moment a call is placed. So a ten-second call is charged as one minute. A fifty-nine-second call, charged as one minute. We are limited to what the service provider can give us, and they don’t go lower than one minute.”
“So does this mean that every call made from Ms. Himmel’s cell phone to one of Mr. Kolarich’s numbers was less than one minute?”
“Yes, it does. Sixty seconds or less.”
“Does the service provider differentiate, to your knowledge, between calls that are received by a live person and calls that are received by that person’s voice mail?”
“No, there’s no difference. All this computer knows is that the other line picked up.”
“So it’s possible that some or all of these calls made by Ms. Himmel went to voice mail.”
“It’s possible, sure. Common sense says it’s likely. But it’s impossible to know.”
“Fine, that’s fine.” Ogren clears his throat. He’s sounding a little nasal today, the onset of a cold. Trials can be murder on your health, though I usually didn’t get sick until after it was over, like my immune system knew when it was okay to surrender.
“Agent, the farthest-right column refers to the ‘originating cell site.’”
“Yes. That’s the tower that provided service to her call.”
“And did you estimate the range of coverage of that cell tower?” Ogren puts up a chart of a map of the city and the near-south suburbs, including Overton Ridge, where Alexa lived.
“Yes. This map shows the estimated range of coverage of cell tower number 221529,” he says.
The map has a large red triangle at the location of that cell tower. From that red triangle, a large yellow-shaded area fans out to the east, about a third of a circle, showing the estimate of the range covered by that cell tower.
“This cell tower, like many in urban areas, is directional,” says Jumer.
“What does that mean?”
“Well, in some places, cell towers are omnidirectional, meaning they send radio frequencies in all directions. Imagine dropping a pebble in the water and watching the ripple. The ripple goes in all directions. That’s omnidirectional. But many cell towers in high-population areas, like this one, are sectored. This tower has three sectors. So this area of coverage you see here in the highlighted area? That’s about a hundred twenty degrees, or a third of the circle.”
Ogren uses his pen to point to a small X within the highlighted area of coverage. Popping off that X on the exhibit is a bubble containing the words Alexa Himmel Residence. “Explain this X and this bubble next to it, Agent.”
“As you can see, Ms. Himmel’s home residence is located within the highlighted area of coverage that this cell tower provides,” says Jumer.
“So these phone calls—how many phone calls were there?”
“Twenty-four phone calls,” says Jumer.
“Each of these twenty-four phone calls was made using the same cell tower’s service.”
“Correct.”
“A cell tower that covers Ms. Himmel’s home.”
“Correct. We can’t say for certain that she made those calls from home. We can say for certain that the cell tower feeding her RF on each of those calls covered her home.”
Shauna catches my eye. I give a Who cares? shrug. We could argue with the agent on this point, but twenty-four calls pinging the same cell tower? Of course Alexa made those calls from home.
And that, of course, is one of the nice things about this evidence for the prosecution. They are using this evidence primarily to show Alexa’s desperation, leading her to blackmail me with that letter to the Board of Attorney Discipline, leading me to kill her to cover up my addiction to painkillers. But this evidence also helps them show that, over the days that preceded her death, she was living at home, not with me—a nice reminder to the jury of one of the many things I lied about in the interrogation.
“Let’s move to the next day, Saturday, July twenty-seventh,” says Ogren. “Did you obtain a list of phone calls made from Ms. Himmel’s cell to one of the defendant’s numbers on that day?”
He did, and another summary chart is admitted into evidence. There were more calls for Saturday than for Friday, because it was a full day of calls, beginning at the dawn of the day—twenty minutes after midnight—and continuing all the way until the day’s end, at 11:51 P.M.
“She made forty-seven phone calls to Mr. Kolarich on that day,” Jumer summarizes. “All of them for one minute or less.”
“And then, Sunday, July twenty-eighth, Agent.” They go through the same routine, producing a summary chart, admitting it into evidence.
“Sixty-three calls on that date,” says the agent.
“And Monday, July twenty-ninth, Agent Jumer. The day before Ms. Himmel’s death,” he reminds the jury. Another chart, same basic result.
“Fifty-nine phone calls on that date to Mr. Kolarich’s cell phone,” Jumer says.
One of the jurors in the front row, a schoolteacher, is doing the math on his notepad: 24 calls on Friday + 47 on Saturday + 63 on Sunday + 59 on Monday = 193 phone calls she made to me in four days.
We’ve known this evidence was coming, of course, and I’ve always wondered how it would cut. On the one hand, it makes Alexa look wildly unstable, and I had a glimmer of hope that maybe the jury would start to turn on her—kind of a Jesus, lady, get the hint and move on sentiment—and feel some sympathy for me. Maybe some of the men on the jury, who’ve had messy breakups, might feel a kinship with me. Maybe some of the women, who usually are more critical of other women than are men, would lose patience with her.
That was a possibility, a hope. But it’s one of those things that you can’t predict, dependent on the circumstances, any number of factors; I knew I’d have to wait
until the evidence was laid out and the jury reacted to know its impact.
Now it’s been laid out. Now the jury has reacted. And I don’t see anyone experiencing any pangs of sympathy for Jason Kolarich. Quite the opposite. They are seeing a desperately sad woman who, unbeknownst to her, is about to be murdered, and a cold, unfeeling man who broke her heart. And probably took her life, too.
63.
Jason
The judge mulls over an afternoon break, but Roger Ogren says he is close to finishing, and the judge clearly wants this witness to wrap up early tonight.
“Proceed, Mr. Ogren,” she says.
“Agent Jumer, let’s talk about Tuesday, July thirtieth. The day of Ms. Himmel’s murder.”
They do their thing, introducing another summary chart and displaying it on the screen for the jury, but this one isn’t much of a chart.
CALL DETAIL RECORDS FOR CELL PHONE OF ALEXA M. HIMMEL
Tuesday, July 30
Time
Destination
Length of Call (minutes)
Originating Cell Site
6:14 PM
555-0150
1
221529
8:16 PM
Kolarich Home
2
221529
“There are two phone calls on here, is that correct, Agent?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For the moment, I’d ask you to focus only on calls made to the defendant.”
“Very good. Ms. Himmel only called Mr. Kolarich once that day,” says Agent Jumer. “As you can see, the phone call came at 8:16 P.M. to Mr. Kolarich’s home phone, his landline. And the same cell tower, covering Ms. Himmel’s house, provided service to that call.”
“This is the first time, on any of these summary charts you’ve shown us, that the length of call is different,” says Ogren. “Instead of one, it says two.”
“That’s correct. As I said, Ms. Himmel’s service provider counts the first second of a new minute as a full minute in its billing. So anything from sixty-one seconds to one hundred twenty seconds would go down as a two in this box.”
“So we know from this chart that the cell phone call could have lasted as long as two full minutes,” says Ogren. “But in no event less than one minute.”
“That’s right.”
Too long for a voice mail, in other words, or so Ogren will argue to the jury in summation. It’s hard to fill an entire minute of space on a voice mail; it’s unnatural to talk that long. Sure, it’s conceivable that Alexa would have droned on for more than a minute into a recording device; that’s what Shauna will say in closing argument. She was clearly distraught and obsessive, so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that this call made at 8:16 P.M. went into my home landline’s voice mail and she prattled on for over sixty seconds. But, Roger Ogren will counter, none of the other myriad calls Alexa made to me over the preceding days took that long—why, the charts prove it!
The punch line being: Jason was home at 8:16 on the night of Alexa’s murder. The call didn’t go into Jason’s landline voice mail. Jason was home, and he answered the phone, and he talked to Alexa for anywhere from sixty to a hundred twenty seconds. He didn’t come home after midnight and find Alexa dead, like he claimed. No, no, no. He received a call from Alexa at 8:16 P.M., talked her into coming over to his house—a notion the jury would easily believe, given how desperate she was for his attention at that point—and then killed her with a single gunshot from behind so she wouldn’t wreck his career by going to the Board of Attorney Discipline and ratting him out over his oxycodone addiction.
Then he cleaned up the place, wiped his prints off the gun with a Clorox wipe, probably took a shower and changed clothes to get the gunpowder residue off himself. And then he called 911 and tried to pass off a bullshit story to the cops about how his relationship with Alexa was terrific, peachy-keen, and she must have used a house key—a house key nobody can find—to get in, and some guy named Jim, no last name, yeah, he must have killed her. Yeah, go look for a guy named Jim, there’s only half a million people in this city with that name.
Shauna will cross the FBI agent now, but there’s not much she can do. About the only point she can score is that nobody knows if I received Alexa’s call to my house at 8:16 P.M. or if it went into voice mail; the call detail records just show the call was picked up, not whether it was picked up by a computer or a person. And then she’ll try to convince the jury in closing argument that I wasn’t home, that I didn’t come home until hours later, roughly midnight, like I told Detective Cromartie.
That 8:16 P.M. phone call will go under my list of regrets, my list of wish-I-could-do-it-overs.
I wish I hadn’t been home for that call. And I really wish I hadn’t answered it.
FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL
July
64.
Jason
Tuesday, July 16
Ten minutes to midnight. I’m in my living room, looking out the picture window, a bottle of water and the tin of Altoids beside me. Alexa—my girlfriend, my alibi—is asleep upstairs, but sleep isn’t for me right now. I’m waiting for a call. I’m always waiting for a call.
Nine days. Nine days since we set the Linda trap, when I flirted with Joel’s investigator, posing as a hostess at the Greek restaurant, hoping to gain the attention of the man previously known as James Drinker. Nine days and nothing yet. Joel Lightner’s team has followed Linda, who is continuing her undercover work at the restaurant, dutifully playing the part, showing up at the restaurant every night as hostess, coming home every night to the single-family house where she lives alone. She is everything “James” would want—young, pretty, and with a clear connection to me now. And yet Joel’s team has not had a sniff of him, no suspicious people following her, no cars driving slowly, no casual observer tracking her movements—nothing. Sometimes the North Side Slasher has moved quickly, sometimes he’s taken weeks to make his move. We don’t know when he’ll strike. Or if. Maybe this is all a waste of time; maybe he never even followed me to the Greek restaurant.
It’s been eight days since the night I spent with Shauna, fifteen of the strangest minutes of a strange period for me. She’s out of sight now, having started her trial the day after our interlude, and taking Bradley John with her, leaving our office empty. They probably come back to the firm at night, but I’m not there to see them. I’m not working late these days. I’m not working at all. And I wouldn’t know what to say to Shauna if I saw her, anyway. The last two times we talked didn’t go so well—one where she accused me of being addicted to pills, the other where we ripped each other’s clothes off and then departed about as awkwardly as could be.
And I’m drifting forward, deprived of a decent night’s sleep going on four months now, popping awake more and more frequently, needing those Altoids more and more frequently. I am drugged and edgy, like someone given a sedative but then jolted periodically with electroshock, trying to focus on the real identity of “James Drinker,” searching for anything he did or said that would narrow the field of candidates, always coming back to the same problem: When I’m chewing up these Altoids, I’m not thinking straight. I’m either foggy from the pills or I’m craving them, neither of which lends itself to good focus.
Name a client, I’ve told myself over these last months. Name a client who didn’t get my best effort. And I want to believe that there is no such client. Kerry Alexander got a lesser-included battery conviction, nine months in the pen, when he could have gotten a decade behind bars. I got a not-guilty on the domestic battery case for that woman whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve already forgotten. Billy Braden waltzed out of court altogether after I walked him on a Fourth Amendment argument. Name a client. I can’t. I can’t point to a client and say, If my head had been more in the game, he would’ve gotten this result instead of that one.
But then it comes full circle: I can only remember my conversations with the man who called himself James D
rinker as well as I could see through fog: whispers of comments, stray words and phrases, but not the entirety of the conversations, or even full chunks of it. And here’s what gets me: I didn’t realize it at the time; I thought I was doing perfectly fine. So if I’m looking through a cloudy lens, who am I to judge how well I’ve handled any case?
That’s why I’ve begun reassigning cases, referring all my cases out to other lawyers in the private sector, part of the cadre of defense lawyers who kick things to one another. I’ve become a lawyer with no clients. For now. For now, I say to myself. Until I clear things up. Until I get this thing with “James Drinker” resolved, at which point I’ll start cutting back on those happy pills and figure something out. No use trying to take on too much all at once, right? Right. Right, right, right.
My knees bounce up as my cell phone rings. Joel Lightner. I say a quiet prayer.
“Yeah, Joel?”
“I think we spotted him tonight,” he says, breathless. “We were perched at Linda’s house and we think we saw him across the street, between two houses. We saw somebody, at least. I tried with the camera, but I didn’t get anything of value. Pretty much missed him. We tried to double back and catch him, Jason, or follow him, like we said—”
Right. Our best result was to spot him and tail him, follow him back to his home, get his address, then take our time with what we wanted to do. That was Plan A. Plan B, however, was just to snatch him.
“—but there’s only so many of us. By the time we got there, he’d vanished.”
“Do you think he spotted you?” I ask, my pulse slowing, post-adrenaline. I was hoping for an A-plus. This isn’t nothing, but it’s more like a C.
“I don’t . . . I don’t know. By the time we doubled back over there, he was gone. Did he see us coming? God, man, we’re pretty good at what we do. I really wouldn’t think he’d see us. But all I can really say is, I don’t know, and I sure as shit hope not. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”