“How’s my opening coming along . . . how’s my opening coming along.” I drop my head and make a noise. “Is that what you came here to ask me?”

“No.” He looks down the hallway toward his office, like he’s about to walk away. Since when have we been unable to communicate? When did that happen?

“Sometimes,” he says, still facing the hallway. “Sometimes I wonder if I still want to do this. Be a lawyer. I’m not totally sure I do anymore.”

“Okay,” I say gently, soothingly, but inside it’s like a dagger to my heart.

“But . . . I do know one thing.” He turns to me. “As long as I practice law, I want to do it with you. I love you, girl.”

My eyes instantly well up. I come around the desk but stop short of him. “Okay,” I say, choking out the word. I’m not going to cry. I’m not. Maybe I am.

His expression softens. “Okay.”

“Okay,” I say.

His eyebrows curl in, serious-face. “About this other thing—”

“Shut up. I don’t want to talk about that now.”

He takes a deep breath and nods. “Okay. Well, so . . .” He gestures to the hallway. “I should probably—”

“Stay,” I say.

“Oh. You want some company?”

“I want you.”

To stay. Finish the sentence. I want you to stay. Not just, I want you.

“You . . . want me?”

“I want you,” I say again, and then my mouth is on his, my hand in his hair, and for an instant, for an insane, horrifying instant, I think that he’s going to draw back, reject me, and if he does we’ll never be the same, nothing will ever be the same, and then he kisses me hard and he lets out that moan, Jason’s moan, and then he yanks my blouse out of my skirt and runs his hands underneath, and then we’re tearing at our clothes and his rib cage is so prominent, skeletal, but he’s still Jason, big and strong Jason, with Jason’s soapy smell, Jason’s big hands, and we fall to the ground, right there in the threshold between my office and the hallway, and he rolls me over and my head bangs against the door and we both laugh and then he’s on top of me, running his hands everywhere, his tongue on my neck, then lower, then he’s pumping hard and moaning, and I close my eyes and grip the back of his hair and cry out into his ear—

“Wow,” he says, falling over me when it’s over, panting, his heart beating against my shoulder.

“Wow,” I agree.

He rises up and sits on the carpet, facing me, his hair all in his face, stuck with sweat. And there I am, up on my elbows on the office carpet, my skirt hiked up, panties curled around one ankle, semen dripping down my leg.

“Where did that . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to. But he could smile. He could look pleased. He could look moderately happy.

“I’m not sure,” I say. Then I say, “Maybe I just needed to release some stress.” Playing defense, giving him an out, giving myself an out. Hating myself. Lobbing the ball gently onto his side of the court.

“Yeah, right.” He isn’t smiling. He isn’t saying, I’ve always loved you, Shauna. He isn’t saying, This feels right.

Maybe Alexa was right. He never picked you. You went a couple of rounds with him over the years, but somehow, he never picked you, did he?

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I say. Despising myself. When did I become such a coward?

“Yeah, no, I . . . I mean, it was great,” he says.

I scrunch up my face. That was great, the high school senior said to the other high school senior. See how far we’ve come! Maybe we can talk about R.E.M. music next.

“I should probably get back to my opening,” I say. “And you should go home to Alexa.”

We put our clothes back on in silence, no eye contact. He gets himself together and isn’t sure what to do. At this point, if he tries to give me the obligatory kiss, I’m going to vomit, so I walk back around my desk like I’m about to start reciting my opening again right away.

“Shauna,” he says.

I make a point of shuffling some papers before I look up, my eyebrows raised, holding back emotional responses that are aching to come out.

“Yes, Jason, what?”

“I just . . .” He thinks it over a moment, his jaw working but no words.

“Yes, Jason?”

His expression softens. He lifts his shoulders. “Just wanted to say, good luck tomorrow. Which courtroom?”

“It’s 2106.” As if either of us believes he’s going to stop by to watch.

“Good, great. You want me to walk you to your car?”

“Security will. I’m fine. I’m going to stay a while longer.” I finger-comb my hair, try to compose myself.

He nods. “Don’t stay too late,” he says. “You know when you’re on trial, you always stay up too—”

“Jason, you should go,” I say, not interested in his attempt to recapture some intimacy. Even our associate, Bradley, knows I deprive myself of sleep while on trial. If that’s the best he can do, he should hit the road. And that’s clearly the best he’s going to do tonight. Ever.

He didn’t pick you.

“Okay. Good luck.” He taps the door and exits.

And just like that, our conversation went from I love you, girl to a Grand Canyon between us. I clean myself up with some tissues, feeling like a two-dollar whore. Well, I wanted him to fuck me, and he sure did fuck me.

I take a deep breath and steel myself. “This is a case about incompetency and inefficiency in our city government,” I say, before my throat chokes closed.

PEOPLE VS. JASON KOLARICH

TRIAL, DAY 3

Wednesday, December 11

57.

Jason

Katie O’Connor, the prosecutor playing second chair to Roger Ogren, rises from her seat. “The People call Lieutenant Oswald Krueger,” she says.

She takes her position at the podium and adjusts her notes, tucks a strand of her orange hair behind her ear. She has the complete Irish look with the hair and the freckles. She is tall and thin and earnest, but somehow manages to give off the impression that she’s a nice person at the same time. That’s a hard thing to pull off, especially for a female lawyer—as Shauna has often reminded me over the years—being strong and firm but likable all at once. I have to stifle my instinct to root for her. I’ll bet Shauna does, too.

Ozzie Krueger is also tall and thin, a balding man in his late fifties who wears a goatee and wire-rimmed glasses. He looks like my biology teacher at Bonaventure, except that Krueger doesn’t reek of tobacco as he passes me and takes the witness stand.

“I’m a senior supervisor in the County Attorney Technical Unit,” says Krueger.

“Is that sometimes called the CAT Unit, Lieutenant?”

“CAT Unit, CAT squad, sure.”

“Lieutenant, can you describe in general terms what role you played in the investigation of Alexa Himmel’s murder?”

Shauna could object to the use of the word murder as a legal conclusion, but she doesn’t. I wouldn’t, either. It’s not like we’re arguing suicide here. There had been some talk of arguing self-defense at trial—Bradley John and my brother, Pete, in particular, pushed for it—but I rejected it out of hand.

“Part of the CAT Unit’s responsibility is to check computers and e-mails and the like,” says Krueger. “I obtained Ms. Himmel’s laptop computer and inspected it.” O’Connor spends a good amount of time establishing how Krueger went about obtaining the computer, how he preserved it, how he discovered she had an e-mail account with Intercast.

Now that she has set the table, the prosecutor is going to return to my interview with Detective Cromartie on the night of Alexa’s death. The prosecution has already shown the jury snippets—my bravura performance in explaining the house key and my vague, shifty discussion about a guy named Jim who I suggested had killed Alexa—but now they want to go back to the beginning of the interview.