The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  I step in. “Alexa? Alexa.”

  She is sitting in her living room, the lights off, the curtains pulled, the room dark, save for the illumination from the television, an old movie, Doctor Zhivago, I think, with the sound on mute.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Am I . . . okay. Huh,” she hiccups without humor. She is motionless, the dancing light from the TV playing shadows across her body, her face.

  Something makes me stay where I am, halfway between the front door and the living room where Alexa is sitting, her back to the wall, facing me. The flickering light is messing with my vision, playing with her facial features, masking them, exaggerating them.

  “Did you hurt yourself, Alexa?”

  She doesn’t answer at first. The smell of food—pizza? pizza—wafts past me. She doesn’t even like piz—

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” she says. “You never did.”

  “Tell me.” I raise my hands. “Tell me what’s going on. I couldn’t even understand you on the phone. I thought you said that you were going to kill yourself.”

  She makes a noise in her mouth, like a giggle, something fleeting.

  “No, Jason, that’s not what I said.”

  She raises her hand, holding something, showing it to me in the dark.

  “You left your iPhone here,” she says slowly, as if she’s saying something of paramount significance. “There’s a voice mail you should hear from this afternoon.”

  She lowers her hand and plays with my phone. A moment later, blaring out from the speakerphone is Joel Lightner’s voice:

  “Get ready to be happy, sport. I found him. I found our fucking guy! We were looking for cons recently released from a state penitentiary. This guy came out of a federal facility in January. You got him to confess to a gun charge, like, eight years ago, but you handed him over to the feds and they prosecuted him. We were looking in the wrong damn place! His name is Marshall Rivers. He’s got a history of violence against women and, since he got out, he’s been working at a dry cleaner’s two doors down from Higgins Auto Body! He probably saw James Drinker every day! Anyway, Marshall Rivers, does that ring—”

  The recording stops abruptly, mid-sentence. I steady myself with a hand to the wall, squeeze my eyes shut, lower my head, then slowly raise it. Marshall Rivers. Marshall—

  Okay.

  I remember him. I remember Marshall Rivers.

  I remember a bad guy. Pure evil.

  I remember a scared witness, a young woman.

  I remember what I did to him.

  And when he got out, he came back to pay me his respects. He came to my office in disguise, assumed a different name, and watched me sit helplessly while he carved up five women on the north side of the city.

  Marshall Rivers is “James Drinker.” Marshall Rivers is the North Side Slasher.

  “Finally,” I mumble. Then I look at Alexa, remembering the truncated nature of the voice mail. “Did you pause the message or did it just stop there?” I ask. “Is there more?”

  From her dark corner, Alexa stands slowly and inches toward me, crossing the line of the television light, blocking it out, leaving us in darkness, her features changing with each step—

  —the face of a ghost, a haunted figure, piercing eyes, a wry grin, a scowl, terror and rage and panic and fear—

  “There’s more,” she says to me. “There’s a lot more.”

  EIGHT YEARS AGO

  90.

  Jason Kolarich

  Assistant County Attorney

  The shower water scalded his skin, the way he liked it. The heat would stay on him for hours, keep him refreshed. It was little things like that—small meals, lots of coffee, catnaps when you could get them, and hot showers—that kept him on his game.

  Whoever it was who decided to put Felony Review prosecutors on seventy-two-hour shifts had a sadistic streak. He had until tomorrow morning at ten before his shift ended and he could really sleep—unless, of course, he caught a case and had to see that one through post-shift.

  He dried off, dressed in the same underwear and the same clothes, knotted his tie and finger-combed his hair. The door in the police locker room popped open, and cool air hit his skin.

  “Counselor, we need you.”

  “Coming, dear,” said Assistant County Attorney Jason Kolarich.

  He was upstairs five minutes later, his shirt still wet from beads of water, his brain foggy. He walked into the detective squad room’s small kitchen, which served as Kolarich’s makeshift office. He put his hand out, and Officer Richard Nova dropped the report in it. Kolarich read it over quickly and then looked up at Nova, looking for any facial expression, finding none.

  Kolarich read the report again. “We have the gun.”

  “Right.”

  “And eyes.”

  “Right.”

  “Whose eyes? Yours?” Kolarich looked up at Nova. Richie Nova was stocky and fit, young and sometimes too eager, but one of the by-the-book guys, one of the good ones. Most cops were good ones. Some of them were not. It made a difference to Kolarich.

  “Mine and Gina’s. Happened right in front of us, the gun toss.”

  Kolarich flipped past the officer’s report to the suspect’s priors. Something similar in the past, five years ago—an aggravated assault pleaded down to simple; he’d accosted a woman with a firearm. With the plea, he avoided prison. Six months later, he was arrested for the rape of a teenage girl in an alley off Marquette; the witness had a change of heart and he was released when she refused to testify. In another six months, a gun charge and possession of cocaine that got him three years, give or take. He’d been out just about a year, and now he was back to his first crime, abducting women at gunpoint.

  That made three women, including this one tonight, that he’d attacked.

  “Marshall Rivers,” said Kolarich. “He sounds like an aristocrat.”

  “He’s no aristocrat, this one.”

  “Okay. Where’s the witness?”

  “She’s in Two,” said Nova.

  Kolarich grabbed a notepad, stuck a Bic pen in his front shirt pocket. In Interview Room Two, a young woman was standing over a small wooden crib, where an infant slept with blankets wrapped tightly over her. Kolarich didn’t know where the crib had come from, but they must have kept it around for situations just like this.

  It was almost ten o’clock at night. The attack had happened around six, as dusk had settled over the city in early spring.

  The woman, the mother, was really just a girl, all of eighteen years, with dark, kinky hair pulled back with a rubber band, a thin face, and large brown eyes. She was wearing a pink cotton long-sleeved shirt and jean shorts, denim cut off a respectable length down her thigh.

  Kolarich trod lightly, lifting the wooden chair off the hardwood floor to avoid scraping. “Miss Flores?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said with some effort, a hint of j on top of the y. English was not her first language. It might not be her language at all. She sat in the chair opposite Kolarich and laced her hands together, as if in prayer.

  “Hablas inglés?”

  “Un poquito,” she answered with apology. “Lee-tle.”

  “Bueno.” Where the hell was Witness Services? Why didn’t Nova bring up a translator? Gina Alvarez, Nova’s partner, spoke Spanish, but he needed the official translator. It was a union thing. Pass over the certified translator and someone would file a grievance. It took another half hour before Lisa from WitServ showed up.

  “Tell her I’m a prosecutor, and would she please tell me what happened?” said Kolarich, which Lisa translated to Caridad Flores.

  She felt more at ease with the translator in the room. The story came out in short bites, because each sentence had to be translated, even when Kolarich thought he understood it, so it had an odd quality to it, not simply a freewheeling, natural conversation. Caridad Flores spoke in a soft, restrained voice, fear shaking her words. Fear from what happened, Kolarich thoug
ht, or maybe fear of him, of law enforcement.

  She was walking on the sidewalk on the 7100 block of South Briar Way with her baby in one of those travel pouches you wear over your shoulders and drop your baby in, so the baby’s back is against your chest, facing forward, that kind of thing. A nice walk in the fresh air before she put her baby daughter, Gracelia, down for a nap.

  But then a car pulled up to the curb. A man got out. He had a gun. He blocked her forward progress and motioned toward the car. She may not have spoken English, but a gun to your infant’s head requires no translation.

  Then she did something that the offender probably didn’t expect. She did something smart. She realized that if she got into that car, she and her baby would never get out.

  So she ran. And she flagged down a patrol car, around the corner and a block away.

  Kolarich knew the rest from the police report. Patrol Officers Nova and Alvarez did a drive-around, found the vehicle that fit the description and the partial plate, and lit their overheads. The offender sped forward. Two blocks into the chase, a gun flew out the driver’s side window and bounced against the curb. Nova jumped out of the car and retrieved it while the driver, Officer Alvarez, continued the chase and cut off the offender with the help of a second patrol unit two blocks farther down. Marshall Rivers was taken into custody without incident. A search of his person and vehicle revealed a crowbar, switchblade, and rope.

  Caridad had described the man who confronted her as muscular, bald with a goatee, a white T-shirt, and a tattoo on his right forearm of a knife and snake.

  “Okay,” he said. He nodded to Lisa. “Explain the lineup to her.”

  Officer Nova and the detective assigned to the case, Lou Carnellis, had been putting together a lineup for identification. They used Interview Room One to do it, because it was the only room with the one-way mirror and observation booth.

  Kolarich stood with Nova and Carnellis on the opposite side of the plate glass. “He hasn’t requested counsel?” he asked Carnellis.

  “Nope.” Carnellis had lost most of his hair and sucked on lollipops ever since he quit smoking, so most people called him Kojak or Telly, the name of the actor who played the TV cop. Kolarich called him Carnellis. Kolarich was friendly with the police officers, but didn’t want to get too friendly. He wasn’t their pal. Sometimes he had to be the heavy. Easier to do that if you aren’t drinking buddies.

  Five men entered the room, each of them holding a card with a number. Kolarich knew that two of them had come from county lockup, and two worked here in the station but had dressed down to civilian clothes. And the man holding the placard that said 2 was Marshall Rivers. Rivers was muscular and bald, with a thick goatee that emphasized his scowl. Kolarich would have identified him even if he hadn’t known already. The guy was bad. Those eyes, something menacing just radiating off him, like he’d never known good, he only had one direction and it was through you. A shudder crossed Kolarich’s shoulders.

  The lineup wasn’t bad. Two others were completely bald and two had receding hairlines. All of them were stocky enough. One of them, a weight-lifting rookie officer, was bigger than Rivers, the rest of them comparable but probably not as big as the suspect. Three of them had facial hair, and two did not. The key was to make sure that Rivers wasn’t the only anything—not the only big guy, not the only bald guy, not the only goatee. He had to fall somewhere in the middle, or the lineup wouldn’t hold. It was like a game of Goldilocks.

  Rivers, he noticed, had his arms behind his back. He was covering up the tattoo on his right forearm, which Caridad Flores had described.

  “Tell everyone to put their hands behind their backs,” said Kolarich.

  Carnellis did so, operating a microphone on the console.

  “We’re good to go,” he said.

  Caridad Flores came in with Officer Alvarez, Nova’s partner, and Lisa the translator. Kolarich explained the drill to the witness, though she probably already knew it. When she turned toward the plate glass, her face tight with fear, a small gasp escaped her and she choked up. Kolarich smelled something, then heard the sound of tiny droplets, then saw it for himself: a small pool at the feet of Caridad Flores. She had wet herself.

  “Número dos,” she whispered through her hand. She turned away, and Gina Alvarez put an arm around her.

  “Now, arms at their sides,” Kolarich instructed. Carnellis gave the command, and Marshall’s tattoo came into view. Caridad looked again and let out a large cry.

  “Número dos!” she repeated.

  Kolarich nodded. Officer Alvarez hustled her out of the room.

  Caridad Flores was hovering over her baby when Kolarich returned to Interview Room Two with Lisa the translator. They all sat down.

  “I’d like you to sign a written statement,” said Kolarich.

  The witness listened to the translation, then said something back so quickly that it failed Kolarich’s four years of Spanish at Bonaventure. She was upset, that was clear enough. Her eyes filled, and she pressed her hands against her chest.

  “She wants to know if that’s necessary,” said Lisa.

  “Tell her yes.” Kolarich looked at Caridad Flores. “Sí, por favor.”

  The witness and Lisa talked back and forth a moment in animated terms. Kolarich gave up trying to follow them.

  “She says,” Lisa started, then let out a sigh. “She said she may not be positive about everything that happened.”

  Jason gave a grim smile. It was how he expressed frustration when it was inappropriate to throw something or shout an obscenity.

  “Tell her that with his criminal record, he’ll go away for a very long time,” he said, hoping it was true.

  After another lengthy exchange, Lisa shook her head, while Caridad Flores stared at a wall, refusing to look at him.

  “Ask her where she’s from,” he said to Lisa.

  She did. Kolarich heard the answer: Sixty-fifth and Roseland.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

  Lisa knew that. So did the witness.

  “Ask her,” said Kolarich.

  “Ask her what? I already did.”

  “Lisa,” said Kolarich, scolding her. “Ask her if she’s here legally.”

  He could have added a few things, like I can keep her here all night and find out, but he wanted to start with a light touch.

  When the question was translated, Caridad Flores broke into a sob, then a number of por favors spilled out of her mouth.

  Shit. She was undocumented. She wanted nothing to do with law enforcement. She wasn’t going to sign a statement. It probably had something to do with a fear of Marshall Rivers, but her bigger fear was being deported.

  “Okay,” said Kolarich. “It’s okay.” He patted the air. Caridad Flores looked at him, unsure of what was happening, what was going to happen.

  Kolarich said, “Give me a few minutes,” and left the room.

  Kolarich quickly found Detective Carnellis. “Put him in Three,” he said.

  “Three? Why Three?”

  Kolarich gave him a look. The question between them was obvious, as was the answer. Interview Room Three didn’t have one-way glass. Nobody would be able to observe the interrogation.

  “Put him in Three,” Kolarich repeated.

  Kolarich found a phone at one of the detectives’ desks. He balanced it between his ear and shoulder and fished the card out of his wallet.

  Lisa the translator came up behind him. “You’re going to call Immigration on her?”

  Kolarich dialed the phone.

  “Jason,” she said. “You’re going to get this poor girl deported? Or locked up until trial? She has a baby.”

  Kolarich looked at her. “Tell me honestly, Lisa. You think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that this woman will show up and testify against the offender?”

  Lisa blinked twice. “No,” she conceded.

  “So without her, I have no case on the attack. She’s all I’ve got, Lisa. She’s it. So
if she’s unwilling to testify, I need another avenue. Just . . .” He waved at her. “Tell Caridad it will all be fine.”

  He finished dialing and the phone rang.

  “You tell her,” Lisa spat. “I’m not going to lie to her.” She stormed off.

  “Patrick Romer,” the voice answered, in that crisp, federal-law-enforcement tone.

  “Romie, it’s Jason Kolarich.”

  When his call was over, Kolarich went to Interview Room Three, where the suspect was sitting with his left hand cuffed to the metal table. Kolarich tended to trust his first vibe, which had been negative, but now he was seeing him up close, and he let it wash over him as he walked in and introduced himself to Marshall Rivers. Rivers was wearing a plain white T-shirt, torn and straining against his muscular upper body. His head was freshly shaved, and he wore a goatee. He had a bad complexion and eyes that screamed out at Kolarich. Menacing—that word stayed with him. This man was bad. Trouble. He wore a dull expression, but those predatory eyes gave him away. The kind of guy who could part a sidewalk of pedestrians just by walking in a straight line.

  Three women, Kolarich thought to himself. The first one, the case was pleaded out; the second time, the woman was scared off.

  He didn’t want to miss the third time.

  “You need anything, Marshall?” he asked. “Take a piss, cup of water, cigarette?”

  He hoped that Marshall smoked, or chewed tobacco, something that Kolarich would do, too, if so. It formed a bond, a small thing, but meaningful.

  Rivers shook his head but didn’t speak. A smirk played on his face. A tough guy. Not afraid of nothin’.

  Kolarich eyed the tattoo on Marshall’s forearm. It ran all the way from elbow to wrist, a bloodred dagger with a black snake curled around it, a multipronged tongue hissing out of the viper’s mouth. His mother must be so proud.

  “I was disappointed to learn you went to Annunzio for school,” said Kolarich. He pointed to himself. “Bonaventure.”

  Rivers watched him a moment, then showed his teeth. “Bon-Bons, huh? Too bad for you.”