by David Ellis
He rips off a paper towel from a roll on the counter and walks over to the breakfast bar. He picks up the knife with the paper towel and walks over to Alexa.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He turns and looks at me like I’m the one being unreasonable. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“You’re putting the knife in her hand?”
“Yes, I am.”
“No,” I say. “I’ll tell them what happened and . . . that will be that.”
“What does that even mean?” Jason says. “‘That will be that’?”
Jason looks over my head, considering everything. “No, this doesn’t work. This—how far away were you when you shot her? Shauna.” He snaps his fingers. “How far away?”
I point to the staircase.
“Okay, so that’s, like, ten or twelve feet,” he says to himself, thinking this through. “You shot her from pretty far away, with her back turned, while she was unarmed. That’s the current state of this crime scene. And it’s a very long bridge from that set of facts to self-defense. Even if I put the knife in her hand, her back was turned.”
I try to analyze it myself, still in a trance but trusting Jason’s analysis as my friend and as a whip-smart defense attorney, unsure of which matters more at the moment. I raise a hand to my face and find it trembling, and then my vision blurs, everything is moving, slow-motion animation.
“It’s over,” I hear myself say. “I’m not going to lie.”
And then I’ve fallen to the floor in the kitchen. And then my head is in my hands, and tears are flowing, my shoulders are bobbing, a full-scale cry.
“You won’t have to lie,” Jason says, a firmness to his voice that gives me comfort, a lifeboat in turbulent waves. He grips my arm. “Because you were never here, Shauna.”
He lifts me up effortlessly, my legs unfolding and finding the floor, Jason’s bear-arms wrapped around me. “Think of the baby,” he whispers. “Think only of the baby. And you’ll see I’m right. Let me handle this. I can handle this.”
“No, it’s . . . it’s too much, Jase.”
“This is too risky for you, Shauna. It doesn’t matter what you and I know. This doesn’t look like self-defense. I do this for a living, okay? This is what I do. This isn’t first-degree murder by a long shot, but it ain’t self-defense, either. This is prison time or, at the very best, probably a trial and the county lockup for you in the meantime. County lockup, Shauna, while our baby grows inside you. You give birth in a detention facility.” He cups a hand under my chin and makes me look at him. “That can’t happen. It won’t happen. This isn’t about me. This isn’t even about you. It’s about the baby. You know I’m right.”
I put my head against his shoulder, squeeze my eyes shut, try to mentally will away the last hour of my life. Rewind the clock, let Alexa leave, then call the police, get a restraining order, something, anything other than squeezing that trigger, anything, God, ANYTHING—
“Let me do this, Shauna. I can do this and make it turn out okay. I can.”
“How?” My voice trembling so hard, the word has three syllables.
“Never mind how. It’s better you not know. But I promise you, I can do this.”
No, I think to myself, but I don’t say it. I don’t say it because a part of me is saying yes, yes, it’s about the baby, he’s right, but no, it’s too much for anyone to do for anyone else—
“Hey.” Jason gives me one good shake. “It’s decided. I’ve got this covered. So here’s what’s going to happen. Are you listening?”
I take a deep breath, blinking away tears.
“I need you to clear everything of yours out of here. Your purse, work bag, anything of yours needs to be gone. Can you help me do that?” he asks, pulling my arm.
“I can . . . do that.”
“Good. And then we’re going to get you out of here. You were never here tonight, Shauna, do you understand? As of this moment, you were never here.”
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 ou
r 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.
THREE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL
Thursday, September 5
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?”
