The Last Alibi

63

Jason

The judge mulls over an afternoon break, but Roger Ogren says he is close to finishing, and the judge clearly wants this witness to wrap up early tonight.

“Proceed, Mr. Ogren,” she says.

“Agent Jumer, let’s talk about Tuesday, July thirtieth. The day of Ms. Himmel’s murder.”

They do their thing, introducing another summary chart and displaying it on the screen for the jury, but this one isn’t much of a chart.

CALL DETAIL RECORDS FOR CELL PHONE OF ALEXA M. HIMMEL

Tuesday, July 30

Time

Destination

Length of Call (minutes)

Originating Cell Site

6:14 PM

555-0150

1

221529

8:16 PM

Kolarich Home

2

221529

“There are two phone calls on here, is that correct, Agent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For the moment, I’d ask you to focus only on calls made to the defendant.”

“Very good. Ms. Himmel only called Mr. Kolarich once that day,” says Agent Jumer. “As you can see, the phone call came at 8:16 P.M. to Mr. Kolarich’s home phone, his landline. And the same cell tower, covering Ms. Himmel’s house, provided service to that call.”

“This is the first time, on any of these summary charts you’ve shown us, that the length of call is different,” says Ogren. “Instead of one, it says two.”

“That’s correct. As I said, Ms. Himmel’s service provider counts the first second of a new minute as a full minute in its billing. So anything from sixty-one seconds to one hundred twenty seconds would go down as a two in this box.”

“So we know from this chart that the cell phone call could have lasted as long as two full minutes,” says Ogren. “But in no event less than one minute.”

“That’s right.”

Too long for a voice mail, in other words, or so Ogren will argue to the jury in summation. It’s hard to fill an entire minute of space on a voice mail; it’s unnatural to talk that long. Sure, it’s conceivable that Alexa would have droned on for more than a minute into a recording device; that’s what Shauna will say in closing argument. She was clearly distraught and obsessive, so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that this call made at 8:16 P.M. went into my home landline’s voice mail and she prattled on for over sixty seconds. But, Roger Ogren will counter, none of the other myriad calls Alexa made to me over the preceding days took that long-why, the charts prove it!

The punch line being: Jason was home at 8:16 on the night of Alexa’s murder. The call didn’t go into Jason’s landline voice mail. Jason was home, and he answered the phone, and he talked to Alexa for anywhere from sixty to a hundred twenty seconds. He didn’t come home after midnight and find Alexa dead, like he claimed. No, no, no. He received a call from Alexa at 8:16 P.M., talked her into coming over to his house-a notion the jury would easily believe, given how desperate she was for his attention at that point-and then killed her with a single gunshot from behind so she wouldn’t wreck his career by going to the Board of Attorney Discipline and ratting him out over his oxycodone addiction.

Then he cleaned up the place, wiped his prints off the gun with a Clorox wipe, probably took a shower and changed clothes to get the gunpowder residue off himself. And then he called 911 and tried to pass off a bullshit story to the cops about how his relationship with Alexa was terrific, peachy-keen, and she must have used a house key-a house key nobody can find-to get in, and some guy named Jim, no last name, yeah, he must have killed her. Yeah, go look for a guy named Jim, there’s only half a million people in this city with that name.

Shauna will cross the FBI agent now, but there’s not much she can do. About the only point she can score is that nobody knows if I received Alexa’s call to my house at 8:16 P.M. or if it went into voice mail; the call detail records just show the call was picked up, not whether it was picked up by a computer or a person. And then she’ll try to convince the jury in closing argument that I wasn’t home, that I didn’t come home until hours later, roughly midnight, like I told Detective Cromartie.

That 8:16 P.M. phone call will go under my list of regrets, my list of wish-I-could-do-it-overs.

I wish I hadn’t been home for that call. And I really wish I hadn’t answered it.