David Ellis: The Last Alibi

And every step Roger tried to take, he had a county prosecutor facing reelection who wasn’t happy about looking like the heavy in this melodrama. A not guilty was all but certain now, so wouldn’t the county attorney look a lot better if he dropped the charges in light of these new revelations? An elected prosecutor more concerned with Truth, Justice, and the American Way than with mounting another head on his wall?

My biggest fear was that Marshall had followed through on his threat to me, that he was planting evidence at the crime scenes to implicate me, and that the police would now go back and find those clues. I found the hypodermic needle in my office, so I did check Marshall on that one move, but I knew he’d swiped that Bic pen that had my bite marks and saliva on it, and probably other things like used tissues from my wastebasket, anything that might have my DNA. Did he plant those things? I don’t know. If he did, the cops didn’t attach any significance to them. Or they didn’t find them. Or maybe I just gave Marshall too much credit. Or maybe he was waiting until he was done with the killing spree and he was going to put it all at the final crime scene, one gigantic final present to me.

I’ll never know. Nor will I ever know when that final day was going to arrive, when Marshall was going to be finished killing women on the north side before lowering the boom on me. I’m not sure that day was ever going to come. He was just having too much fun doing it, with the added bonus of torturing me in the process.

“The People move for a dismissal of the charges with prejudice,” Roger tells the judge. He could have given a speech about the interests of justice. Presumably, his boss wanted him to. But Roger Ogren won’t do it. He thinks a very clever killer just walked free. So that high-minded speech will come from his boss, on the courtroom steps, a few minutes from now. And Shauna, if she says anything at all, will praise that boss for said high-mindedness.

My case is over. I have been, in a rather sensational way, restored. Not simply not guilty , but innocent , wrongly accused, a victim myself.

But all is not forgiven. The Board of Attorney Discipline opened an inquiry into me over my drug abuse, which they held in abeyance during my criminal trial, but which will proceed now in earnest. My attorney, a politically connected lawyer named Jon Soliday, is trying to negotiate a three-month suspension from the practice of law. My guess is it will be longer. It should be.

I got addicted to painkillers. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. But I should have stopped practicing law. I should have realized that my clients could be at risk. To this day, I don’t think I botched anything or failed a client, but I could have. I could have, and that’s what matters. My clients deserved better.

But that’s not the worst of my sins. I cheated and perverted and basically pissed all over the criminal justice system. I lied to the police and manufactured evidence and tampered with crime scenes and lied under oath and, in the process, framed another man for murder. Granted, he was a man trying to frame me for five murders, and yes, he was a sociopathic killer who, by the way, was already dead, so prison wasn’t an issue. And sure, I was doing all of this to keep Shauna out of prison. But the last time I checked our lawyers’ ethics code, there was no reciprocity exception, no self-defense or He started it or protecting-someone-you-love caveats.

I’m a guy who’s not fond of rules, in a profession that’s full of them. Something’s got to give there, yes? And I don’t see those rules changing anytime soon.

Three months away from the practice of law could become six months. It could become a year. It could become permanent.

But permanent is not a word I’m using just now. Not for anything.

I look over at Shauna, who takes a delicious breath of relief. Today wasn’t a surprise, but there is still something about hearing the gavel bang down. I’m out of harm’s way.

But here’s what’s really crazy: Winning this case and avoiding prison doesn’t hold a candle to getting clean, to reclaiming my soul. If I had to choose between spending my life in the state penitentiary but being clean, or being free to walk the streets but addicted to OxyContin, I’d take life in prison every time. Because when I was addicted, I was in prison anyway, but a bizarro-world kind of incarceration where I held the key, where I was free to leave anytime, where I closed the cell door on myself every day.

I’m six months removed from that tantalizing poison that hijacked my mind and body and I still can’t believe any of it happened. I can’t believe I let it seduce me and then own me, that I didn’t even protest, that I just let it happen. That’s the worst part, for me at least, that I didn’t even fight for my life.

Not until someone came along and made me fight.

“This is the part where you smile,” Shauna says to me, her breath tickling my ear.

Both of us will have to learn to do that again. We have a lot to figure out. Shooting someone changes you. Losing a child changes you. Spending four months in lockup changes you. Going through addiction and recovery changes you. It’s that simple: We aren’t the same people we were this summer. I wasn’t even sure we made sense together before. Now it’s anyone’s guess. She’s the most important thing to me, as I am to her. There will always be something between us. What, exactly, that will look like, I don’t know.

Shauna squeezes my hand under the table.

As if reading my thoughts, she says, “Now for the hard part.”