“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.

FIVE MONTHS BEFORE TRIAL

July

64.

Jason

Tuesday, July 16

Ten minutes to midnight. I’m in my living room, looking out the picture window, a bottle of water and the tin of Altoids beside me. Alexa—my girlfriend, my alibi—is asleep upstairs, but sleep isn’t for me right now. I’m waiting for a call. I’m always waiting for a call.

Nine days. Nine days since we set the Linda trap, when I flirted with Joel’s investigator, posing as a hostess at the Greek restaurant, hoping to gain the attention of the man previously known as James Drinker. Nine days and nothing yet. Joel Lightner’s team has followed Linda, who is continuing her undercover work at the restaurant, dutifully playing the part, showing up at the restaurant every night as hostess, coming home every night to the single-family house where she lives alone. She is everything “James” would want—young, pretty, and with a clear connection to me now. And yet Joel’s team has not had a sniff of him, no suspicious people following her, no cars driving slowly, no casual observer tracking her movements—nothing. Sometimes the North Side Slasher has moved quickly, sometimes he’s taken weeks to make his move. We don’t know when he’ll strike. Or if. Maybe this is all a waste of time; maybe he never even followed me to the Greek restaurant.

It’s been eight days since the night I spent with Shauna, fifteen of the strangest minutes of a strange period for me. She’s out of sight now, having started her trial the day after our interlude, and taking Bradley John with her, leaving our office empty. They probably come back to the firm at night, but I’m not there to see them. I’m not working late these days. I’m not working at all. And I wouldn’t know what to say to Shauna if I saw her, anyway. The last two times we talked didn’t go so well—one where she accused me of being addicted to pills, the other where we ripped each other’s clothes off and then departed about as awkwardly as could be.

And I’m drifting forward, deprived of a decent night’s sleep going on four months now, popping awake more and more frequently, needing those Altoids more and more frequently. I am drugged and edgy, like someone given a sedative but then jolted periodically with electroshock, trying to focus on the real identity of “James Drinker,” searching for anything he did or said that would narrow the field of candidates, always coming back to the same problem: When I’m chewing up these Altoids, I’m not thinking straight. I’m either foggy from the pills or I’m craving them, neither of which lends itself to good focus.

Name a client, I’ve told myself over these last months. Name a client who didn’t get my best effort. And I want to believe that there is no such client. Kerry Alexander got a lesser-included battery conviction, nine months in the pen, when he could have gotten a decade behind bars. I got a not-guilty on the domestic battery case for that woman whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve already forgotten. Billy Braden waltzed out of court altogether after I walked him on a Fourth Amendment argument. Name a client. I can’t. I can’t point to a client and say, If my head had been more in the game, he would’ve gotten this result instead of that one.

But then it comes full circle: I can only remember my conversations with the man who called himself James Drinker as well as I could see through fog: whispers of comments, stray words and phrases, but not the entirety of the conversations, or even full chunks of it. And here’s what gets me: I didn’t realize it at the time; I thought I was doing perfectly fine. So if I’m looking through a cloudy lens, who am I to judge how well I’ve handled any case?

That’s why I’ve begun reassigning cases, referring all my cases out to other lawyers in the private sector, part of the cadre of defense lawyers who kick things to one another. I’ve become a lawyer with no clients. For now. For now, I say to myself. Until I clear things up. Until I get this thing with “James Drinker” resolved, at which point I’ll start cutting back on those happy pills and figure something out. No use trying to take on too much all at once, right? Right. Right, right, right.

My knees bounce up as my cell phone rings. Joel Lightner. I say a quiet prayer.

“Yeah, Joel?”

“I think we spotted him tonight,” he says, breathless. “We were perched at Linda’s house and we think we saw him across the street, between two houses. We saw somebody, at least. I tried with the camera, but I didn’t get anything of value. Pretty much missed him. We tried to double back and catch him, Jason, or follow him, like we said—”

Right. Our best result was to spot him and tail him, follow him back to his home, get his address, then take our time with what we wanted to do. That was Plan A. Plan B, however, was just to snatch him.