The Last Alibi

28

Jason

Wednesday, June 19

Back in my office, I push away a half-eaten cheeseburger I had picked up on the way back and go online to the Herald’s website. It isn’t hard to find, though by midday the story is no longer the headline. The victim is Nancy Minnows, age twenty-three, dead from multiple stab wounds. The police call it “premature” to speculate as to whether there is a connection between this stabbing and the others.

The promised rain begins to fall in sheets outside, turning everything gray. It will douse the temperature a bit and funk up the air. But I like the post-rain smell. It makes me think that even nature is fallible.

On the roller coaster that is my opinion of James Drinker’s culpability in these murders, I’m currently in a free fall, sure that he is the man who butchered four women. There is plenty of reason to believe otherwise, but this whole thing is starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. I grab my tin of Altoids for some midday happiness. As I chew up the tablet, it’s not lost on me that I may not be in a superior position to be judging the guilt or innocence of anybody.

Ten minutes later, I have my phone to my ear, pinching the bridge of my nose with my free hand as I listen to the heavy breath of James Drinker on the other end of the connection.

“Her name is Nancy Minnows,” he says. “And I don’t know her.”

“Are you sure you don’t know her?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you might know a Nancy but not know her last name, or something like that. Or you might recognize her face but never knew her name.”

“Well, they showed a picture of her on the news this morning and I didn’t recognize her.”

“It could be an old picture, something from a college yearbook or something that’s dated. How old is this girl?” I ask, even though I already know the answer from the Internet.

“I don’t know. She looked. . young, I guess. Like the. . like the others,” he adds with some hesitation.

“Well, if you’re right that someone’s trying to frame you, James, then they’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“Yeah. . yeah, I guess. But it’s weird, right?”

Yes, it’s weird. This whole thing is weird. Once again, this guy is giving me the creeps, but having a weird feeling about a guy isn’t a very strong basis for breaking your sworn oath as a lawyer and turning in your client.

“I was home last night, alone,” he says. “I didn’t talk to anybody that I can remember. I was online for a while. Should I document all that?”

“Definitely. But James, you were going to get me those phone records,” I remind him. “The ones that prove you were talking to your mother from your home phone on the night of the third woman’s murder? The night that grad student, Holly Frazier, was murdered?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I will. It’ll be on my phone bill. When I get my bill this month, I’ll send it to you.”

So he’s not going out of his way to expedite the process, to ask the phone company for an early peek at his phone records or to set up an online account and do it that way. But this could explain his innocence as much as his guilt. If he really was on the phone with his mother that night, and he really didn’t kill anybody, then he’d have no particular urgency to get me the data.

“Let’s go to the police,” I suggest. “I know you’re concerned about handing yourself over to them, but you didn’t kill those women, James, and the cops are going to come to you anyway, eventually. Between dating Alicia Corey and being friends with Lauren Gibbs, it’s bound to happen sooner or later, so you look better getting out in front of it. And now you look far less suspicious, because there have been two more stabbings, and you’re telling me you have no connection to these last two women.”

Silence, but he hasn’t hung up.

“I said I don’t know of any connection,” he says. “It doesn’t mean there isn’t one. For all I know, one of them sold me clothes or served me coffee or cleaned my teeth or deposited my check at the bank.”

“That’s not motive for murder,” I say.

“Maybe I liked them,” he says. “Maybe I coveted them. Maybe I watched them, everywhere they went, obsessed over them, learned their habits, and then followed them home one night and killed them.”

I don’t say anything. I feel a decided change in temperature.

“Maybe that’s exactly why I chose them,” he goes on. “Because my encounter with them was so casual and short that nobody would even remember it.”

I push myself out of my chair, my head dizzy, my heartbeat drumming. I breathe out. The warm rain still attacks my window. The remnants of my burger, the pink chewy flesh, bring a surge to my throat.

“I’m not going to the police, Jason,” he says.

I start to form words but can’t find them. The call disconnects a moment later.

I call Joel Lightner right away. “The mother,” I say. “James Drinker’s mother. He said she lives in a nursing home. I want you to find her.”

“What are you going to do with his mother?” Joel asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Find out where she is and then I’ll decide.”

A pause. He’s scribbling something down, presumably. “Okay, princess, anything else?”

“One other thing,” I say. “And this one isn’t free of charge. Put this on my tab. Because it’s going to be expensive.”

“Okay.”

“I want twenty-four-hour surveillance on James Drinker,” I say.