The Last Alibi

99

Shauna

“Let’s take ten minutes,” says the judge after Roger Ogren completes his cross-examination of Jason.

I nod to Jason’s brother, Pete, give him one of those grim half smiles, and then walk straight to the anteroom. Jason goes to talk to Pete for a minute, so it’s just Bradley and me inside the room.

“Redirect,” Bradley says. “I was thinking-”

“I wouldn’t do redirect, personally,” I say. “We got our points out, he got his out. He did a nice job.”

“It was okay.”

“No, it was better than okay. It was very good. He shaved down our entire case to resting on the credibility of Jason’s testimony. That’s not a good place for us.”

“Then let me do some redirect.”

I shake my head. “Bradley, nothing that Jason can say will change the fact that it’s Jason saying it. The guy standing trial for his life. The guy they’ve already seen lie repeatedly to a police detective in that interview. They have to take his word for everything he says, because there’s no corroboration. No one saw him on the beach or driving around the night of the murder. No one heard his conversation with Alexa where she assured him she wouldn’t send that letter.”

I shake my head again, for no apparent reason other than it seems appropriate.

“So. . what? What now?” Bradley asks. “We call Detective Austin, the lead on the north side murders, and pump him for information?”

I shrug. “Not much else we can do.”

“We’re fishing, in other words,” he says.

“Totally.”

“Because what Roger Ogren said in there was right, Shauna,” Bradley goes on. “Marshall Rivers was the North Side Slasher, not the North Side Shooter. If Rivers killed Alexa, then he switched MOs from butchering women to shooting them in the head.”

And here I didn’t think I could feel any worse. I know all of this, of course, but hearing it in such a tidy, withering summary, from my own cocounsel no less, lights a tiny bomb in my stomach.

“That’s going to be a pretty hard thing to sell to the jury,” says Bradley. “Don’t you think?”

“Maybe so,” I say.

Or maybe not. I know more than Bradley about what happened that night, but far, far less than Jason. To varying degrees, our client has kept us both in the dark.

We’re all going to find out together.