David Ellis - The Last Alibi

“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.

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.

July

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.