“I understand, Mr. Ogren. It’s not my first trial.” The judge holds him up. Ogren has the tendency to talk down to people, and judges are not fans of condescension.

“Okay, everyone. Let’s put on your final witness, Mr. Ogren. Then, Ms. Tasker, I’ll give you fifteen minutes to argue for a directed verdict. I will tell you right now that you will face a tall climb, but of course I’ll hear you. Assuming we go forward from there, Ms. Tasker, do you think Mr. Kolarich’s direct testimony can be completed today?”

“I would think so, Judge.”

“So that would give Mr. Ogren tomorrow for cross-examination and then redirect and recross, and maybe we could get that done by then. Okay. Okay.” She nods. “Ms. Tasker, tomorrow, you will give me a smaller list of witnesses you’re going to call. It’s not going to be the entire Area Three squad room. You understand that?”

“Yes, Judge. It won’t be that long.”

“Very well. Let’s get out there,” says the judge.

74.

Jason

“We call Detective Molly Hilton,” says Katie O’Connor.

Molly Hilton is a short woman with frizzy blond hair and a hard look about her. I’ve never met her, but Lightner apparently knows her ex-husband from when he was a cop in Marion Park. These cops are a whole community unto themselves.

“My assignment,” Hilton says, “was to piece together the sequence and timing of events on the day of Ms. Himmel’s death, for both Ms. Himmel and Mr. Kolarich.”

Oops, Katie forgot to tell her to call me the defendant.

“Anything else?” asks O’Connor.

“I also wanted to figure out where Ms. Himmel was staying at the time of her death, whether she was living at Mr. Kolarich’s house or her own.”

“In the course of undertaking this assignment, Detective, did you review phone records?”

“I did.”

Katie O’Connor refers again to Alexa’s phone records on the day of her death, Tuesday, July 30, previously admitted into evidence:

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

“Detective Hilton, do you see the first line on this chart, a phone call made from Ms. Himmel’s cell phone at 6:14 P.M. on the day of her death?”

“I do.”

“Did you track down that phone number?”

“I did.”

“And whose phone number is that?”

She says, “It’s the phone number for Mario’s Pizzeria in Overton Ridge.”

“I see. And did you investigate this phone call any further?”

“Yes, I did. We subpoenaed credit card records to review any transactions that might have taken place on that date,” she says.

“And did you find anything?”

“Yes,” she says. “Ms. Himmel used her Visa card that evening to buy a small pizza and chef’s salad from Mario’s. We obtained from Mario’s a copy of the delivery receipt.”

“Is this the receipt?” Katie O’Connor shows the witness a yellow receipt from Mario’s Pizzeria, for a charge of $19.62, plus tip, with Alexa’s signature on it.

“That’s the receipt,” says the detective. O’Connor admits the receipt into evidence without objection.

“Does the receipt have a date and time indicated, Detective?”

“Yes, it does,” says Hilton. “A small pizza and salad from Mario’s Pizzeria were delivered to Ms. Himmel at 7:02 that evening.”

I have to stifle a smirk. I look down and control my expression.

“What other information did you pursue, Detective?”

“We looked at her cable television bill for the month of July,” says Hilton.

“Is People’s Twenty-five a true and accurate copy of that bill?”

“Yes, it is.”

O’Connor admits that bill into evidence, too.

“As you can see,” says the detective, “on the evening of her death, Tuesday, July thirtieth, Ms. Himmel ordered the movie Doctor Zhivago on pay-per-view television at 7:07 P.M.”

Just after the pizza arrived. A pizza and a movie—a three-hour classic at that, a film that would run past ten o’clock that evening. Not the behavior of someone living at my house. But more important, much more to the point, not the behavior of someone who was planning on dropping by my house, either. It’s the behavior of someone who was kicking up her feet and settling in for a quiet night at home.

Or someone who very much wanted it to appear that way.

Oh, Alexa. How did I underestimate thee? Let me count the ways.

FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL

July

75.

Jason

Tuesday, July 23

I drop Alexa off downtown and then head to work. I have a nine-thirty in federal court, a status on a weapons case, which is bad news for my client because a federal gun charge will get you triple what it would on the state side. Trial is scheduled for six weeks from now, if it goes. The government wants my guy to flip on people up the chain, and so far my client has refused. I come from a neighborhood where you don’t narc on your buddies, so I understand my client’s reluctance, but my loyalty is to him, not his pals, and he could shave five years off his sentence if he starts talking.

I get back to my office after ten and push around some paper, a few files I’ve kept, the ones I haven’t referred out to other lawyers. I realize that it’s not an optimal strategy for a lawyer, who makes his living representing people for a fee, to push away all his clients. It’s not exactly a recipe for long-term success. But long-term success is not on my agenda right now.

The case files holding no interest for me, I return to the notes I’ve scribbled about my time interrogating suspects as a prosecutor, trying to relax my mind and come up with some breakthrough. It has to be somebody I put away, and it has to be someone who just got out of prison. This guy has way too much of a hard-on for me to have kept his powder dry for years. This is a guy who stewed in prison, every sit-up in his cell at night, every repetition of the bench press in the prison yard, every moldy piece of bologna he ate, every night staring at a cement ceiling, every morning in the shower, looking over his shoulder, blaming me for all of his troubles, plotting out what he’d do to me when he got released.

He’d want to get started on that plan right away. This is not a guy who’s enjoyed years of freedom since. This is a guy who got out of prison and got right to work.

I drop my head, feeling helpless. My stomach is revolting against me and my body temperature is fluctuating wildly from sweat to chills and back. I don’t want to take a pill. I didn’t take one for several hours on the night we tried to trap “James” at Linda Sparks’s house, the adrenaline rush distracting me, and my mind was sharper than it has been for months. In fact, it was the night I realized that “James” had been mimicking back to me one of my favorite lines during interrogations, the you’re nobody to me comment.

So, no pills. No pills because they cloud my mind, and I need my brain to function right now, I have to think, I need to process information, I need to think out of the box, one of the things the corporate robots say, there has to be something, some way, but I’m so damn tired, my vision losing focus, maybe if I just sleep for a few minutes, a quick catnap . . .