“Yes, it does. Sixty seconds or less.”

“Does the service provider differentiate, to your knowledge, between calls that are received by a live person and calls that are received by that person’s voice mail?”

“No, there’s no difference. All this computer knows is that the other line picked up.”

“So it’s possible that some or all of these calls made by Ms. Himmel went to voice mail.”

“It’s possible, sure. Common sense says it’s likely. But it’s impossible to know.”

“Fine, that’s fine.” Ogren clears his throat. He’s sounding a little nasal today, the onset of a cold. Trials can be murder on your health, though I usually didn’t get sick until after it was over, like my immune system knew when it was okay to surrender.

“Agent, the farthest-right column refers to the ‘originating cell site.’”

“Yes. That’s the tower that provided service to her call.”

“And did you estimate the range of coverage of that cell tower?” Ogren puts up a chart of a map of the city and the near-south suburbs, including Overton Ridge, where Alexa lived.

“Yes. This map shows the estimated range of coverage of cell tower number 221529,” he says.

The map has a large red triangle at the location of that cell tower. From that red triangle, a large yellow-shaded area fans out to the east, about a third of a circle, showing the estimate of the range covered by that cell tower.

“This cell tower, like many in urban areas, is directional,” says Jumer.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, in some places, cell towers are omnidirectional, meaning they send radio frequencies in all directions. Imagine dropping a pebble in the water and watching the ripple. The ripple goes in all directions. That’s omnidirectional. But many cell towers in high-population areas, like this one, are sectored. This tower has three sectors. So this area of coverage you see here in the highlighted area? That’s about a hundred twenty degrees, or a third of the circle.”

Ogren uses his pen to point to a small X within the highlighted area of coverage. Popping off that X on the exhibit is a bubble containing the words Alexa Himmel Residence. “Explain this X and this bubble next to it, Agent.”

“As you can see, Ms. Himmel’s home residence is located within the highlighted area of coverage that this cell tower provides,” says Jumer.

“So these phone calls—how many phone calls were there?”

“Twenty-four phone calls,” says Jumer.

“Each of these twenty-four phone calls was made using the same cell tower’s service.”

“Correct.”

“A cell tower that covers Ms. Himmel’s home.”

“Correct. We can’t say for certain that she made those calls from home. We can say for certain that the cell tower feeding her RF on each of those calls covered her home.”

Shauna catches my eye. I give a Who cares? shrug. We could argue with the agent on this point, but twenty-four calls pinging the same cell tower? Of course Alexa made those calls from home.

And that, of course, is one of the nice things about this evidence for the prosecution. They are using this evidence primarily to show Alexa’s desperation, leading her to blackmail me with that letter to the Board of Attorney Discipline, leading me to kill her to cover up my addiction to painkillers. But this evidence also helps them show that, over the days that preceded her death, she was living at home, not with me—a nice reminder to the jury of one of the many things I lied about in the interrogation.

“Let’s move to the next day, Saturday, July twenty-seventh,” says Ogren. “Did you obtain a list of phone calls made from Ms. Himmel’s cell to one of the defendant’s numbers on that day?”

He did, and another summary chart is admitted into evidence. There were more calls for Saturday than for Friday, because it was a full day of calls, beginning at the dawn of the day—twenty minutes after midnight—and continuing all the way until the day’s end, at 11:51 P.M.

“She made forty-seven phone calls to Mr. Kolarich on that day,” Jumer summarizes. “All of them for one minute or less.”

“And then, Sunday, July twenty-eighth, Agent.” They go through the same routine, producing a summary chart, admitting it into evidence.

“Sixty-three calls on that date,” says the agent.

“And Monday, July twenty-ninth, Agent Jumer. The day before Ms. Himmel’s death,” he reminds the jury. Another chart, same basic result.

“Fifty-nine phone calls on that date to Mr. Kolarich’s cell phone,” Jumer says.

One of the jurors in the front row, a schoolteacher, is doing the math on his notepad: 24 calls on Friday + 47 on Saturday + 63 on Sunday + 59 on Monday = 193 phone calls she made to me in four days.

We’ve known this evidence was coming, of course, and I’ve always wondered how it would cut. On the one hand, it makes Alexa look wildly unstable, and I had a glimmer of hope that maybe the jury would start to turn on her—kind of a Jesus, lady, get the hint and move on sentiment—and feel some sympathy for me. Maybe some of the men on the jury, who’ve had messy breakups, might feel a kinship with me. Maybe some of the women, who usually are more critical of other women than are men, would lose patience with her.

That was a possibility, a hope. But it’s one of those things that you can’t predict, dependent on the circumstances, any number of factors; I knew I’d have to wait until the evidence was laid out and the jury reacted to know its impact.

Now it’s been laid out. Now the jury has reacted. And I don’t see anyone experiencing any pangs of sympathy for Jason Kolarich. Quite the opposite. They are seeing a desperately sad woman who, unbeknownst to her, is about to be murdered, and a cold, unfeeling man who broke her heart. And probably took her life, too.

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.”