David Ellis - The Last Alibi

That seems to do it for her. She probably doesn’t believe me, and her heart is telling her to come clean, but her brain is telling her that I’m right, that the smartest plan at this stage is to give me my day in court.

I have a good chance, I think. But there’s always risk. I’ve set the table for some Perry Mason revelations at my trial, but you never really know how things are going to work out. Because what I said to Alexa when she told me she killed Marshall Rivers was true: She could have made a hundred different mistakes. I could have, as well, in what I did.

So I will focus on what is most important right now-my recovery-and hold my breath until trial. It’s Shauna who has all the worries. She lost the baby and doesn’t have me around to help her grieve. She has to live with the fact that, whatever the circumstances may have been, she pulled a trigger and ended a woman’s life. And she has the stress of knowing that my fate rests in her hands. A stress that, no matter how much she denies it, was probably responsible for the loss of the baby.

But she has to be my lawyer, because it makes it so much harder for the prosecution to try to talk to her. They’d have to disqualify her as counsel, and the judge would push back because I have a constitutional right to a lawyer of my choice. If Roger Ogren really wanted to push it, he could, but he doesn’t have any basis for doing so. As long as Shauna is my lawyer, there’s almost no chance that Roger Ogren or Detective Cromartie would put her under the lights. If they ever did so, dollars to donuts that Shauna and I would trade places in this detention center.

I touch Shauna’s face now. I want to say so many things to her. We’ll have another baby. There’s still time for us.

But I don’t. Because I don’t know if either of those statements is true. The state of our relationship is not something we’ve discussed. Everything was so bizarre, after all. Things between us were strained, then she told me she was pregnant and I confessed my drug addiction, and we were together, joined at the hip, maybe forever. And then a few days later, she shoots Alexa and I’m locked up. Quite the bumpy hill.

Can we come back from that? It’s not something either of us is ready to explore at the moment. There are too many other things occupying our attention.

So instead, I just say, “We’ll get through this, Shauna. One way or the other, we’ll get through this,” and we both pretend to believe it.

TRIAL, DAY 7

Monday, December 23

Jason

The court clerk gavels the mobbed courtroom to order as Judge Judith Bialek assumes the bench. My case is called, and the room goes silent.

It’s been six days since Shauna cross-examined Detective Vance Austin. Roger Ogren asked for a continuance of a week, minimum, to consider any rebuttal evidence he might have. Noting that a week would be Christmas Eve, the judge truncated the request by one day, to December 23. That was more than enough time, she said.

During that time, the prosecutors mobilized their extensive resources to try to salvage their case-I mean, seek out the truth. The word is that Roger Ogren tried to reopen the inquiry into Marshall Rivers’s suicide, to consider the possibility that he’d been murdered. His argument was simple enough: By the coroner’s estimate, Alexa could have died as early as nine P.M., giving me three hours of free time, so to speak, before I dialed 911. Plenty of time for me to have driven to the home of Marshall Rivers and killed him, typed the fake suicide note, planted evidence, whatever, after killing Alexa, or even before killing her. The word I heard back, via Joel Lightner, is that the police detectives told Ogren that his theory was far-fetched, which I find somewhat amusing given that it’s exactly what Alexa Himmel planned to do-fake Marshall’s suicide, kill Shauna, and pin it on Marshall.

Roger Ogren, in fact, found resistance everywhere he turned. First, the press, more enamored with Marshall Rivers than with me, far preferred the idea that the North Side Slasher had claimed a sixth victim-which meant that I was a man wrongly accused , another cause a hungry media eagerly embraced. I was embarrassed to learn that an entire following built up around this idea of me as the victim, including a “Free Jason Kolarich” website and Facebook page. My role in taking down a corrupt governor, Carlton Snow, which has never been confirmed by me or anyone else, became accepted as fact and Exhibit A in my cause. That’s what I’ve become, a crusade.

James Drinker-the real James Drinker, the one whose apartment door I crashed through, complete with the mop of red hair and the protruding stomach-came forward and told his story of how I accosted him before realizing that I had the wrong guy. That corroborated my story that Marshall had used that fake name. It also showed me as the conscientious defense lawyer who was trying to stop his client, the serial killer, only to realize that he didn’t know his real identity. Drinker also said that he’d seen Marshall several times at a burger joint that was located between Higgins Auto Body and the dry cleaner’s where Marshall worked. Not hard to imagine Marshall sizing up Drinker, thinking he was roughly the same size, that with a red wig and a belly suit, he could pull off a decent impersonation. Good enough for his purposes, at least.

The police also got around to remembering that, among the thousands of anonymous tips they received, someone had sent a letter to Detective Vance Austin identifying James Drinker as the north side killer. The letter leaked out and became public fare, the words cut out of a magazine like some ransom note in a 1950s mystery movie. There might have been some suspicion that I was the one who sent that letter. But that’s not how it all came out. Why?

Because there was one more thing I left in Marshall Rivers’s apartment that night, when I fitted Alexa’s key on his key ring and placed that hypodermic needle alongside the others he had used. I remembered it just before I drove Shauna home on my way to Marshall’s apartment.

It was the Sports Illustrated magazine I used to cut out the words for the anonymous note. When the cops first found it, after responding to Marshall’s suicide, they thought nothing of it. Marshall just had a copy of an SI magazine, no big deal. Compared to the bloody knife and the hypodermic needles and the packets of fentanyl, who cared about a sports magazine? But after they remembered the “James Drinker” anonymous note over this last week, they searched through the inventory of his apartment and found it, with words cut out of several pages.

This proves it, wrote one columnist in the Herald who had taken up my cause. Marshall Rivers used the same name in the anonymous note that he gave to Jason Kolarich-James Drinker-to throw the police off the scent.

Roger’s other problem was simply the lack of proof to corroborate his theory. He couldn’t prove that I knew the identity of Marshall Rivers before his death. He couldn’t even prove that Marshall died before I was taken into custody, given the vagueness of the time-of-death window for Marshall, whose body wasn’t discovered until August 2. It was possible that he was still alive when the police responded to my 911 call, which would obviously rule me out as his killer. And even if he could show that I knew Marshall’s identity by then, and that Marshall was dead by the time the cops hauled me in, they had no proof that I had, in fact, killed him. The medical examiner wasn’t willing to come off her finding that the manner of death was suicide, and I don’t think the police department wanted her to. Even if Roger got the coroner to flip, they would be stuck with her first report, her initial conclusions, which would make her revised opinion open to considerable criticism.