The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  “My assignment,” Hilton says, “was to piece together the sequence and timing of events on the day of Ms. Himmel’s death, for both Ms. Himmel and Mr. Kolarich.”

  Oops, Katie forgot to tell her to call me the defendant.

  “Anything else?” asks O’Connor.

  “I also wanted to figure out where Ms. Himmel was staying at the time of her death, whether she was living at Mr. Kolarich’s house or her own.”

  “In the course of undertaking this assignment, Detective, did you review phone records?”

  “I did.”

  Katie O’Connor refers again to Alexa’s phone records on the day of her death, Tuesday, July 30, previously admitted into evidence:

  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

  “Detective Hilton, do you see the first line on this chart, a phone call made from Ms. Himmel’s cell phone at 6:14 P.M. on the day of her death?”

  “I do.”

  “Did you track down that phone number?”

  “I did.”

  “And whose phone number is that?”

  She says, “It’s the phone number for Mario’s Pizzeria in Overton Ridge.”

  “I see. And did you investigate this phone call any further?”

  “Yes, I did. We subpoenaed credit card records to review any transactions that might have taken place on that date,” she says.

  “And did you find anything?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Ms. Himmel used her Visa card that evening to buy a small pizza and chef’s salad from Mario’s. We obtained from Mario’s a copy of the delivery receipt.”

  “Is this the receipt?” Katie O’Connor shows the witness a yellow receipt from Mario’s Pizzeria, for a charge of $19.62, plus tip, with Alexa’s signature on it.

  “That’s the receipt,” says the detective. O’Connor admits the receipt into evidence without objection.

  “Does the receipt have a date and time indicated, Detective?”

  “Yes, it does,” says Hilton. “A small pizza and salad from Mario’s Pizzeria were delivered to Ms. Himmel at 7:02 that evening.”

  I have to stifle a smirk. I look down and control my expression.

  “What other information did you pursue, Detective?”

  “We looked at her cable television bill for the month of July,” says Hilton.

  “Is People’s Twenty-five a true and accurate copy of that bill?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  O’Connor admits that bill into evidence, too.

  “As you can see,” says the detective, “on the evening of her death, Tuesday, July thirtieth, Ms. Himmel ordered the movie Doctor Zhivago on pay-per-view television at 7:07 P.M.”

  Just after the pizza arrived. A pizza and a movie—a three-hour classic at that, a film that would run past ten o’clock that evening. Not the behavior of someone living at my house. But more important, much more to the point, not the behavior of someone who was planning on dropping by my house, either. It’s the behavior of someone who was kicking up her feet and settling in for a quiet night at home.

  Or someone who very much wanted it to appear that way.

  Oh, Alexa. How did I underestimate thee? Let me count the ways.

  FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL

  July

  75.

  Jason

  Tuesday, July 23

  I drop Alexa off downtown and then head to work. I have a nine-thirty in federal court, a status on a weapons case, which is bad news for my client because a federal gun charge will get you triple what it would on the state side. Trial is scheduled for six weeks from now, if it goes. The government wants my guy to flip on people up the chain, and so far my client has refused. I come from a neighborhood where you don’t narc on your buddies, so I understand my client’s reluctance, but my loyalty is to him, not his pals, and he could shave five years off his sentence if he starts talking.

  I get back to my office after ten and push around some paper, a few files I’ve kept, the ones I haven’t referred out to other lawyers. I realize that it’s not an optimal strategy for a lawyer, who makes his living representing people for a fee, to push away all his clients. It’s not exactly a recipe for long-term success. But long-term success is not on my agenda right now.

  The case files holding no interest for me, I return to the notes I’ve scribbled about my time interrogating suspects as a prosecutor, trying to relax my mind and come up with some breakthrough. It has to be somebody I put away, and it has to be someone who just got out of prison. This guy has way too much of a hard-on for me to have kept his powder dry for years. This is a guy who stewed in prison, every sit-up in his cell at night, every repetition of the bench press in the prison yard, every moldy piece of bologna he ate, every night staring at a cement ceiling, every morning in the shower, looking over his shoulder, blaming me for all of his troubles, plotting out what he’d do to me when he got released.

  He’d want to get started on that plan right away. This is not a guy who’s enjoyed years of freedom since. This is a guy who got out of prison and got right to work.

  I drop my head, feeling helpless. My stomach is revolting against me and my body temperature is fluctuating wildly from sweat to chills and back. I don’t want to take a pill. I didn’t take one for several hours on the night we tried to trap “James” at Linda Sparks’s house, the adrenaline rush distracting me, and my mind was sharper than it has been for months. In fact, it was the night I realized that “James” had been mimicking back to me one of my favorite lines during interrogations, the you’re nobody to me comment.

  So, no pills. No pills because they cloud my mind, and I need my brain to function right now, I have to think, I need to process information, I need to think out of the box, one of the things the corporate robots say, there has to be something, some way, but I’m so damn tired, my vision losing focus, maybe if I just sleep for a few minutes, a quick catnap . . .

  “Who are you, James?” I mumble, and he’s in my office, James in my office, James telling me he didn’t kill anybody, James asking me how to frame somebody, James in my office when I leave to take a pill in the bathroom, James taking my Bic pen, James dumping out my trash for Kleenex or an empty bottle of water, anything with saliva or mucus for DNA, maybe fingerprints, What evidence do I have against you? he asks me, taunting me over the phone, Just some souvenirs I collected from you, just some souvenirs like a chewed-up pen, maybe some Kleenex from the trash, a water bottle, just some souvenirs, because That’s How You Frame Somebody by Jason Kolarich, Chapter One, first you pick a time when I have no alibi, Chapter Two, next you pick victims connected to me, Chapter Three, then you take things from my office that implicate me, souvenirs, and you leave them at the crime scene, James in my office, taking souvenirs—

  My head pops up off the desk, my eyes taking a moment to return to focus, my brain reorienting.

  Chapter Four, you plant incriminating evidence at the patsy’s house.

  Or, failing that, the patsy’s office.

  I jump out of my chair. Did I say that to him? Did I give him that advice? I don’t know. The fog is too thick. But it’s what I’d do if I really wanted to lock somebody down; I’d leave some morsels at the crime scene, nothing obvious but enough for an inquiry, and then, for the cherry on top, I’d put something really incriminating at the patsy’s house or office.

  As far as I know, he’s never been inside my house. But he’s been here in my office.

  There’s something here, I realize. Right here, in this office. He planted something here, something subtle, something hidden, something the police will specifically search for. It would need to look hidden. It can
’t be dangling from the ceiling or plastered on the wall like a trophy. It has to look like I didn’t want anyone to find it. But it’s here.

  Why didn’t you think of this before? You know why. It’s those little white round bundles of joy that turn your brain to mush. How much more proof do you need?

  I go to the corner of my office and dig my fingers against the cheap carpeting, feeling for a hole, a place where he could have stuck something. I cover the entire perimeter of the room, pulling back case files, the refrigerator, the couch. Nothing. Nothing I can find, anyway. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

  The couch. I search under it and run my hands under cushions, feel under the bottom. Nothing.

  The fridge. That would be fiendishly clever of him, brilliant in its simplicity. But nothing there. No lock of hair tucked into the small freezer section, no bloody knife taped to the bottom.

  I go through my desk drawers, removing everything, searching through my coffee cup full of pencils and pens, everything I can think of. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Bigger than a bread basket? Probably not. A woman’s fingernail? Her blood?

  I turn my attention to the case files strewn around my office. Sure, maybe. He could have dropped something inside them, into one of the accordion files or one of the manila folders shoved within them. It could be anything. It could be anywhere.

  This is what he wants, I think to myself. He wants to make me crazy, he wants me chasing my own shadow, my imagination scattering in all directions.

  I drop down on the carpet, woozy and nauseated. Over three hours now, and no pills. Hold out. Hold out. You think better when you’re not on those ridiculous things, those beautiful tablets, that horrible, soul-stealing medicine, those delicious, wonderful pills.

  I force myself up, my muscles seizing, my stomach twisting, my skin burning. I stand in the center of my office, only a few feet from my desk, five feet from each wall. The radiator, I should check the radiator, complete with peeling paint, below my long horizontal window.

  Nope. Nothing underneath, nothing shoved inside. I remove the cover and can’t put it back on.

  I finally succumb to the itching and start on the backs of my hands, my knuckles, my forearms, scratching furiously, knowing that I’m only spreading it like wildfire across my skin.

  “Where the hell is it?” I hiss.

  Leave. Walk out of the room, get some fresh air, empty your mind and start fresh.

  I try my desk again, pulling out the drawers, patting underneath. The chair. I check the chair for the first time, a burst of adrenaline for an original thought, some place I haven’t already checked, but no, no murder weapon or DNA evidence that I can find, assuming I can find it at all because I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS I’M LOOKING FOR.

  Then back to the knuckles, bloody now, and my beet-red forearms. And then my calves and thighs.

  “Dammit,” I say to nobody, standing straight again.

  I let out a long breath. I know it’s here. I know it.

  But I can’t find it.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  I spin around. It’s Alexa, standing in the doorway.

  76.

  Jason

  Tuesday, July 23

  “What’s going on?” Alexa asks.

  “Nothing,” I say instinctively, as ridiculous a claim as that is. Nothing, just thought I would empty out every file in the room, pull out every drawer, rip the front off my radiator, create an absolute tornado in my office, all in the name of a casual good time.

  Joel’s words from yesterday echo between my ears, like something in a movie: She’s not just giving you an alibi. She’s giving herself one, too.

  I got a bad feeling about her.

  I don’t like it when you talk to pretty girls.

  My one-word answer to Alexa—nothing—crashes to the floor faster than Newton’s apple. Things have been odd since I confronted her two days ago about the restraining order and her lie about being an only child, her brother living here in the suburbs. I accepted her explanation. I believed her explanation. But you don’t just brush that whole thing off and pretend like it didn’t happen. There was something accusatory in my bringing it up, there’s no way around it, and it’s hard to walk that back to normal. She’s now been the object of suspicion, like a murder suspect who beats the rap, who is found not guilty, which is different from innocent, and you always wonder what really happened; the taint never fully diminishes.

  It’s so obvious that the chaos Alexa sees in my office is something—not nothing—that she can’t bring herself to quarrel with me.

  “Deposition got done early?” I ask.

  She nods. “I thought you might want to leave early. Looks like you don’t.”

  “Right.” I look around the room and shrug.

  “You think he planted something in here for the police to find?” she asks.

  I nod. I don’t know why I didn’t just admit that up front; it’s pretty obvious what I’m doing. “I could see him doing something like that,” I say.

  “That would make sense.” She looks about the room. “Do you want some help?”

  A gut-check moment. Either I trust her or I don’t. Do I really think she’s capable of doing these things?

  A better question: Am I capable of making that judgment?

  “What happened to your hand?” she asks. “Oh my God, your arms.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, I’m fine.” Just a little scratching. Or a lot of scratching.

  “Oh, Jason.” She takes my arm, then looks up at me. “You’re doing okay?”

  “Sure, sure,” I say.

  She pauses, chews on her lip. “I’ll leave if you want. If you want to do this by yourself. It’s not a problem, really.”

  “No, not at all,” I hear myself say. “I could use the help. But I think I’ve looked pretty much everywhere.”

  She surveys the room, nodding her head and humming to herself. “You don’t know what you’re looking for, that’s part of the problem.”

  “That’s the main problem, yeah.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She spins around the room. “Did you pull up the carpet?”

  “First thing I did.”

  “The refrigerator,” she says.

  “Check.” But I’m sure I’ll recheck it.

  She keeps looking around. “Looks like you checked the heater.”

  Check. But will recheck.

  “The couch,” she says.

  “Check.” But will recheck.

  “We should go through your files again, probably.”

  “Probably. I looked through them all.”

  “Did you check every piece of paper?” she asks.

  “Every piece—no. I was looking for things that didn’t belong.”

  “It could be a piece of paper,” she says. “We don’t know what it is.”

  That’s true. She’s right.

  “What about the diplomas and pictures on the walls?” she asks.

  “The walls? No.” I shake my head, feeling a surge. Her words trigger a memory.

  You played football at State, didn’t you? “James Drinker” asked me.

  Yes. Yes. He was standing, admiring my ego wall when I returned from the bathroom after taking the Altoids. I remember now. What is wrong with my brain?

  “Haven’t gotten that far yet,” I say. Making it sound like I was just about to head there. I probably would’ve thought of that, eventually. I’d prefer to think so.

  “Let’s check those first,” she sings.

  There are . . . ten frames on the walls. My college and law school diplomas. Certifications from various courts to practice before those tribunals. Certificates from the public defender and county attorney offices for my work there. A picture of me cross-examining a witness, drawn by a courtroom sketch artist when I was defending Senator Almundo from federal corruption charges. And my favorite, the photograph of me, taken by one of the university photographers, my body angled while airborne, my arms outstretched, my h
ands closing over the football. I don’t remember if I caught the ball.

  I start with that one, because that’s the one “James” specifically referenced. I lift it off its hook and look behind it. Nothing but a flat, smooth wooden frame. I balance it on my knee and twist off the levers that hold the backing in place, removing each piece of the frame, the matting, and the photo itself. He could have stuck something deep within it, after all.

  Nothing. Alexa does the same thing with my college diploma.

  I go next to the certificate from the county attorney’s office, my name in a thick gothic font on gold paper. If I’m right about this guy, it was my time as an assistant county attorney that brought us together. If “James” has any sense of irony, this is where it will be.

  I gently lift the frame off its perch, a horizontal piece of wire resting on a nail, and turn it over.

  “Well, lookee here,” I murmur.

  Fastened to the back of this frame, with Scotch tape, is a hypodermic needle, the hollow tube with the syringe attached. And from what I can tell, some fluid still inside.

  “He’s injecting them with something,” I say to Alexa. “That’s his signature.” And I’d bet any money that this particular needle was used to inject the first two victims, the ones already dead when the man who called himself James Drinker paid a visit to this office.

  77.

  Jason

  Tuesday, July 23

  “A needle,” Joel says. “With fluid still inside?”

  “Some, not a lot,” I say, perching my cell phone on my shoulder. I’m at my town house now with Alexa. The needle is inside a sandwich bag, resting on my bed. “Maybe a quarter of the vial?”

  “Well, that would be a signature, all right. Maybe it’s some kind of incapacitating agent. Or, well, it could be anything. He could’ve injected it when they’re half dead, or all dead, or he could have used it to subdue them in the first place.”