The Last Alibi

111

Jason

11:00 P.M.

My ex-girlfriend, my house, my gun.

A good start. Hard not to look at me as the prime suspect.

No house key on Alexa. So no explanation for how she got into my house if, as I will tell them, I wasn’t home.

Better. It will be the first lie they catch me in. If I came home and found her dead, how did she get inside in the first place?

Lie about the relationship. Tell them you and Alexa were still a couple.

Even better. It will take them, what, twenty-four hours to get their warrants and see the phone records-her obsessive phone calls to me-and the e-mails, including that horrible one with the letter to the disciplinary board. Line those up with me saying, Oh, sure, we were doing just swell, Alexa and me, and you have a liar and a murderer.

Because that is precisely what has to happen. I can’t have the cops starting to get all curious. I can’t have them saying things like, Hey, let’s take a look at other people close to Jason-like, for example, Shauna Tasker! Shauna wouldn’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny. She’ll spill everything if they so much as look in her direction in the next few days.

No, I have to be an obvious suspect right here, tonight. So obvious, so glaringly guilty in their eyes that they stop looking anywhere else. My girlfriend, my gun, my house, the lack of any house key or means of entry for Alexa, and my lies. It will be enough.

No doubt, they will say. Kolarich is our guy.

I’ll worry later about how to clean this thing up, how to keep myself from spending life in prison. Maybe the cops will end up putting Marshall Rivers together with Alexa’s murder on their own. Maybe I’ll give them a few hints. Or maybe I’ll wait until trial and spring it on them. It will depend on a lot of things. Things I won’t worry about tonight.

I pull the SUV up to the street on which Shauna’s condo building is located. It wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to see my car dropping her off. She can walk the half-block.

“You can sit up now,” I say.

In the backseat, Shauna sits up, rights herself. If anyone, God forbid, saw me drive out of my garage, it had to be only me they saw.

“You okay?” I say.

She gives a flat, exhausted snicker.

“You remember what we talked about?”

“I remember,” she says. “Walk into my building, act tired, don’t talk to anyone.”

“Right.”

“Get in bed and don’t move. Try to get some rest.”

“Yes.”

“Call Joel and tell him to stand down.”

“Say it exactly, Shauna. It’s important.”

She is quiet a moment. I need her for this. I can’t call Lightner tonight. The police are about to become very interested in my phone records.

“I will tell Joel that you and I talked, and I’m calling at your request, and he shouldn’t do anything about that voice mail this afternoon. And he shouldn’t believe what he sees on the news tomorrow.”

Close enough.

“What was on the voice mail he left you?” she asks.

“Later,” I tell her. “Nothing for you to know tonight. Now, listen,” I say. “I’m going to be calling you later on tonight. Right?”

“Right.”

“It will be hours from now. Maybe the middle of the night.”

“Yes.”

“And what am I going to tell you?”

She takes a breath. “You’re going to tell me that the police are placing you under arrest.”

“Correct. And what are you going to do then?”

“I’m going to call Bradley and have him go down to Area Three headquarters.”

“Correct. It has to be Bradley, not you,” I say. Shauna is in no position to sit in on an interrogation over the next few hours. The police would get a confession, but it wouldn’t come from me.

“Okay.”

“So if anyone tries to talk to you in the next few days, you and Bradley are counsel of record. You’re my lawyer.”

“I understand.”

“And you’re not going to worry about me, because I have this under control. I’m going to let them think I killed her, but it’s not going to stick. I’m going to make sure of that.”

She doesn’t speak. I’m not sure she can. I want to reach back there, touch her, but she doesn’t need more emotional avalanches right now.

“Shauna,” I say. “This is all my fault. I’m the one who let Alexa into our lives, and I badly underestimated her. Make no mistake, she planned this tonight. She tricked me into being away from home so she could go to my house and kill you. If I’d gotten home fifteen minutes earlier, I’d have shot her myself. So remember that tonight. I don’t care if her back was turned. I don’t care if it was tonight or tomorrow or a week from now-”

“She wasn’t going to stop.”

“That’s right, she wasn’t going to stop, Shauna.”

“I get it,” she says quietly. “I know.”

A police car passes by us, slow and steady. I watch it until it disappears, two blocks down, with a left turn.

“You. . need to get going,” says Shauna.

“Okay, kiddo.”

She pushes the door open, lifting her bag and shuffling out of the car. She stops before she exits. “Tell me you know what you’re doing.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I promise her. I watch her make the half-block walk to her condo building. It must be the longest and loneliest walk of her life. Finally, she turns in to her building and disappears into the lobby.

Then I pop the car back into gear and drive to Marshall Rivers’s apartment.