The Last Alibi

72

Jason

Monday, July 22

“Hey.” Joel Lightner sticks his head in my office, cautious.

I wave him in. “It’s okay, Lightner. You’re still doing a job for me, whatever else.”

“You’re pissed at me,” he says when he walks in and helps himself to a seat.

“You’re not at the top of my list right now,” I agree.

“I’d like to see that list. I’m pretty sure there’s only one name on it: Alexa Himmel.”

I put down the court opinion I was reading. “I take it you didn’t come to apologize.”

“Apologize? Why would I apologize? For the background check? Shauna asked me for a favor, and she was doing it out of genuine concern for you. And she’s right to be concerned.”

I raise my hands in surrender. “Let’s stick with business,” I say.

He holds his stare a moment, just to show his displeasure, before moving on. “We’re having a hard time digging up records, like you thought,” he says. “We’ve found some in a warehouse. So far, no recently released ex-cons-by recently, I mean in the last eighteen months-were interrogated by you. We aren’t done, but we’re starting to run out of places to check. There are big gaps. You got moved around all the time when you were on Felony Review. It’s not like you even stuck at one station house.”

None of this is a surprise, but it’s a big blow nonetheless. We’re running out of places to check. We’re running out of ways to catch “James.”

“Joel, this signature, the thing he does to all the victims. I need to know what it is.”

“We’ve already talked about this,” he says. “They won’t tell me. I won’t ask.”

“It’s the key to this, the more I think about it. Whatever it is he’s doing to them, he’d probably want to tie it to me, right? If he’s framing me, he’d want to make that signature tailored to me.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Joel agrees. “If he’s doing some strange, crazy thing to all the victims, he’s probably doing it because it implicates you. But what?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “That’s why you have to get it for me.”

Joel raises his hands. “I can’t help you. Even if I wanted to, they wouldn’t tell me.”

There’s got to be some way. I have to figure out that calling card he’s leaving at every crime scene.

“Okay.” Joel starts to look uncomfortable, rubbing his hands, stalling. “So. . so listen.”

I look up at him.

“I’m just going to say this as your friend. I’m not sure about that lady, Jason. I got a bad feeling about her.”

“You don’t know her.” I wave a hand. “Leave it alone.”

“Jason-”

“She has a very sweet side, Joel. She does. Does she come on strong? Okay, maybe. But she’d do anything for me.”

“Yeah? That so?”

“Yeah.” I nod at him. “The alibi, for example. She’s willing to say I was with her at the time of each of the five murders. She’s willing to be my alibi. Now, how many people would do that?”

Lightner doesn’t seem as impressed as I am. “I remember in my office, you guys said you were going to square up dates to confirm.”

“Yeah, we confirmed dates, and you know what? She wasn’t with me on any of those nights. Not one, Joel. And yet she’s willing to say she was. If the police walked in right now, she’d swear on a Bible that we spent those evenings together at my house.”

Joel thinks about that for a long time, seemingly unmoved, but thinking. “That’s a dangerous game, first of all. It could get you both in trouble.”

“I know. I told her that. I told her there were all kinds of ways you can attack an alibi. But she said she was home alone, just like me, on each of those nights, but she didn’t do anything that would establish that. Didn’t make any phone calls. Didn’t order food to the house or order a movie off of TV or have any visitors over or anything that would tie her to her house.”

I don’t even know how to order a movie off the television, she said.

And I never, ever have food delivered.

“It’s still a bad idea,” Lightner says again.

“I know, Joel. I’m not going to let her do it. But the point is that she’s willing to do it. Does that sound like someone who cares about me, or someone who doesn’t?”

Joel makes a face. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he says.

“Is there another way?”

Joel lets out a bitter laugh and shakes his head again. “Of course there’s another way,” he says. “And if you didn’t have your head so far up your ass, you’d see it, too, Counselor.”

I wave a hand. “Then enlighten me,” I say.

He leans forward and cups his hand over his mouth, like he’s shouting across a canyon. “She’s not just giving you an alibi,” he says. “She’s giving herself one, too.”