David Ellis - The Last Alibi

“Wow,” I agree.

He rises up and sits on the carpet, facing me, his hair all in his face, stuck with sweat. And there I am, up on my elbows on the office carpet, my skirt hiked up, panties curled around one ankle, semen dripping down my leg.

“Where did that. .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. But he could smile. He could look pleased. He could look moderately happy .

“I’m not sure,” I say. Then I say, “Maybe I just needed to release some stress.” Playing defense, giving him an out, giving myself an out. Hating myself. Lobbing the ball gently onto his side of the court.

“Yeah, right.” He isn’t smiling. He isn’t saying, I’ve always loved you, Shauna . He isn’t saying, This feels right .

Maybe Alexa was right. He never picked you. You went a couple of rounds with him over the years, but somehow, he never picked you, did he?

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. Despising myself. When did I become such a coward?

“Yeah, no, I. . I mean, it was great,” he says.

I scrunch up my face. That was great, the high school senior said to the other high school senior. See how far we’ve come! Maybe we can talk about R.E.M. music next.

“I should probably get back to my opening,” I say. “And you should go home to Alexa.”

We put our clothes back on in silence, no eye contact. He gets himself together and isn’t sure what to do. At this point, if he tries to give me the obligatory kiss, I’m going to vomit, so I walk back around my desk like I’m about to start reciting my opening again right away.

“Shauna,” he says.

I make a point of shuffling some papers before I look up, my eyebrows raised, holding back emotional responses that are aching to come out.

“Yes, Jason, what?”

“I just. .” He thinks it over a moment, his jaw working but no words.

“Yes, Jason?”

His expression softens. He lifts his shoulders. “Just wanted to say, good luck tomorrow. Which courtroom?”

“It’s 2106.” As if either of us believes he’s going to stop by to watch.

“Good, great. You want me to walk you to your car?”

“Security will. I’m fine. I’m going to stay a while longer.” I finger-comb my hair, try to compose myself.

He nods. “Don’t stay too late,” he says. “You know when you’re on trial, you always stay up too-”

“Jason, you should go,” I say, not interested in his attempt to recapture some intimacy. Even our associate, Bradley, knows I deprive myself of sleep while on trial. If that’s the best he can do, he should hit the road. And that’s clearly the best he’s going to do tonight. Ever.

He didn’t pick you.

“Okay. Good luck.” He taps the door and exits.

And just like that, our conversation went from I love you, girl to a Grand Canyon between us. I clean myself up with some tissues, feeling like a two-dollar whore. Well, I wanted him to fuck me, and he sure did fuck me.

I take a deep breath and steel myself. “This is a case about incompetency and inefficiency in our city government,” I say, before my throat chokes closed.

TRIAL, DAY 3

Wednesday, December 11

Jason

Katie O’Connor, the prosecutor playing second chair to Roger Ogren, rises from her seat. “The People call Lieutenant Oswald Krueger,” she says.

She takes her position at the podium and adjusts her notes, tucks a strand of her orange hair behind her ear. She has the complete Irish look with the hair and the freckles. She is tall and thin and earnest, but somehow manages to give off the impression that she’s a nice person at the same time. That’s a hard thing to pull off, especially for a female lawyer-as Shauna has often reminded me over the years-being strong and firm but likable all at once. I have to stifle my instinct to root for her. I’ll bet Shauna does, too.

Ozzie Krueger is also tall and thin, a balding man in his late fifties who wears a goatee and wire-rimmed glasses. He looks like my biology teacher at Bonaventure, except that Krueger doesn’t reek of tobacco as he passes me and takes the witness stand.

“I’m a senior supervisor in the County Attorney Technical Unit,” says Krueger.

“Is that sometimes called the CAT Unit, Lieutenant?”

“CAT Unit, CAT squad, sure.”

“Lieutenant, can you describe in general terms what role you played in the investigation of Alexa Himmel’s murder?”

Shauna could object to the use of the word murder as a legal conclusion, but she doesn’t. I wouldn’t, either. It’s not like we’re arguing suicide here. There had been some talk of arguing self-defense at trial-Bradley John and my brother, Pete, in particular, pushed for it-but I rejected it out of hand.

“Part of the CAT Unit’s responsibility is to check computers and e-mails and the like,” says Krueger. “I obtained Ms. Himmel’s laptop computer and inspected it.” O’Connor spends a good amount of time establishing how Krueger went about obtaining the computer, how he preserved it, how he discovered she had an e-mail account with Intercast.

Now that she has set the table, the prosecutor is going to return to my interview with Detective Cromartie on the night of Alexa’s death. The prosecution has already shown the jury snippets-my bravura performance in explaining the house key and my vague, shifty discussion about a guy named Jim who I suggested had killed Alexa-but now they want to go back to the beginning of the interview.

Cromartie, I thought, did a nice job during the interrogation. What I liked most-from a clinical perspective, certainly not a personal one-was how the interview began. Most cops, in my experience, lack imagination when they interview suspects. Most would start at the start, would get my name, rank, and serial number, all the essentials, and then the same for Alexa, and then work their way forward to the point where she ended up dead in my living room. When I used to interrogate suspects in Felony Review, I never followed that routine. Because every situation was different, every interviewee different. Sometimes I would start nice and easy, trying to establish a rapport. But I usually started at the pressure point, whatever that would be in the given situation. For a domestic, a situation like mine with a dead girlfriend in the boyfriend’s house, I’d always start right there with the relationship. Look, I can imagine what you’re going through. You loved her, didn’t you? Did she love you? Relationships can be tough, can’t they? I would even share some of my personal life, although it was made up. I love my wife, but Jesus, sometimes-sometimes the ones you love are the ones that make you the craziest, right? That sort of thing.

Cromartie did essentially the same thing with me. He went straight for my relationship with Alexa, seeing what it would do to me. He couldn’t really lose. If I was cold as ice about her, he would capture me on camera looking like a murderer. If I got weepy, my defenses might break down and the interrogation would be as easy as holding a bucket under a busted glass of water and catching the drips.

Katie O’Connor tells the courtroom that she’s going to reference the video interrogation again. The jury, having already found some very interesting moments during this interview, is wide-eyed with anticipation.

On the basis of the time frozen in the corner of the video monitor, O’Connor wants to start the video at nearly the beginning of the interrogation, just after Cromartie had taken me through the preliminaries-date, time, the presence of counsel, et cetera. The screen comes to life and the jury and spectators are watching the interrogation. Me, I’d prefer not to watch, but that might send some kind of signal to the jurors, so I watch along with them.