The Last Alibi

113

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.

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.”