They also asked Joel about conversations we had, documented from phone records, but Joel was working for me in my capacity as a criminal defense attorney, so the privilege umbrella extended to our conversations. He kept his mouth shut. And I’m pretty sure that, if a judge forced him to talk, he’d either take a contempt citation or, more likely, make up a story.

But it hasn’t come to that. Roger Ogren doesn’t consider this a complicated case. His theory is simple: a bad breakup, a grief-stricken woman obsessively tries to reconcile, finally threatening to spill the beans on my drug use, and so I kill her. Marshall Rivers? Or some case I was working on with Joel? They haven’t entered Roger’s mind. He likes his case, and he hasn’t seen any evidence from the defense that would make him think he’s wrong.

Not yet, at least.

All the same, I told Shauna that I didn’t want Joel visiting me. I don’t want to create any ideas in the prosecutors’ minds if they look at my visitor sheet. As of now, they will only see on that sheet three people: my two lawyers and my brother, Pete, who has come into town a couple of times already to check in on me.

“Promise me, Jason,” Shauna says. “Promise me, if you’re convicted, you’ll let me tell the truth.”

“I promise.”

“Promise me. Because if you don’t, I’ll call Roger right now.”

I detect a tinge of disappointment in her voice. Shauna, I think, wants to confess. Or stated more accurately, she feels wrong not confessing. I think she believes the shooting was justifiable—I hope she does—but hiding it does not sit right with her, regardless of the consequences.

“Shauna,” I say, “if the jury comes back guilty, I’m going to pop out of my chair and point at you and say, ‘She did it! She did it!’ I swear I will.”

That seems to do it for her. She probably doesn’t believe me, and her heart is telling her to come clean, but her brain is telling her that I’m right, that the smartest plan at this stage is to give me my day in court.

I have a good chance, I think. But there’s always risk. I’ve set the table for some Perry Mason revelations at my trial, but you never really know how things are going to work out. Because what I said to Alexa when she told me she killed Marshall Rivers was true: She could have made a hundred different mistakes. I could have, as well, in what I did.

So I will focus on what is most important right now—my recovery—and hold my breath until trial. It’s Shauna who has all the worries. She lost the baby and doesn’t have me around to help her grieve. She has to live with the fact that, whatever the circumstances may have been, she pulled a trigger and ended a woman’s life. And she has the stress of knowing that my fate rests in her hands. A stress that, no matter how much she denies it, was probably responsible for the loss of the baby.

But she has to be my lawyer, because it makes it so much harder for the prosecution to try to talk to her. They’d have to disqualify her as counsel, and the judge would push back because I have a constitutional right to a lawyer of my choice. If Roger Ogren really wanted to push it, he could, but he doesn’t have any basis for doing so. As long as Shauna is my lawyer, there’s almost no chance that Roger Ogren or Detective Cromartie would put her under the lights. If they ever did so, dollars to donuts that Shauna and I would trade places in this detention center.

I touch Shauna’s face now. I want to say so many things to her. We’ll have another baby. There’s still time for us.

But I don’t. Because I don’t know if either of those statements is true. The state of our relationship is not something we’ve discussed. Everything was so bizarre, after all. Things between us were strained, then she told me she was pregnant and I confessed my drug addiction, and we were together, joined at the hip, maybe forever. And then a few days later, she shoots Alexa and I’m locked up. Quite the bumpy hill.

Can we come back from that? It’s not something either of us is ready to explore at the moment. There are too many other things occupying our attention.

So instead, I just say, “We’ll get through this, Shauna. One way or the other, we’ll get through this,” and we both pretend to believe it.

PEOPLE VS. JASON KOLARICH

TRIAL, DAY 7

Monday, December 23

113.

Jason

The court clerk gavels the mobbed courtroom to order as Judge Judith Bialek assumes the bench. My case is called, and the room goes silent.

It’s been six days since Shauna cross-examined Detective Vance Austin. Roger Ogren asked for a continuance of a week, minimum, to consider any rebuttal evidence he might have. Noting that a week would be Christmas Eve, the judge truncated the request by one day, to December 23. That was more than enough time, she said.

During that time, the prosecutors mobilized their extensive resources to try to salvage their case—I mean, seek out the truth. The word is that Roger Ogren tried to reopen the inquiry into Marshall Rivers’s suicide, to consider the possibility that he’d been murdered. His argument was simple enough: By the coroner’s estimate, Alexa could have died as early as nine P.M., giving me three hours of free time, so to speak, before I dialed 911. Plenty of time for me to have driven to the home of Marshall Rivers and killed him, typed the fake suicide note, planted evidence, whatever, after killing Alexa, or even before killing her. The word I heard back, via Joel Lightner, is that the police detectives told Ogren that his theory was far-fetched, which I find somewhat amusing given that it’s exactly what Alexa Himmel planned to do—fake Marshall’s suicide, kill Shauna, and pin it on Marshall.

Roger Ogren, in fact, found resistance everywhere he turned. First, the press, more enamored with Marshall Rivers than with me, far preferred the idea that the North Side Slasher had claimed a sixth victim—which meant that I was a man wrongly accused, another cause a hungry media eagerly embraced. I was embarrassed to learn that an entire following built up around this idea of me as the victim, including a “Free Jason Kolarich” website and Facebook page. My role in taking down a corrupt governor, Carlton Snow, which has never been confirmed by me or anyone else, became accepted as fact and Exhibit A in my cause. That’s what I’ve become, a crusade.

James Drinker—the real James Drinker, the one whose apartment door I crashed through, complete with the mop of red hair and the protruding stomach—came forward and told his story of how I accosted him before realizing that I had the wrong guy. That corroborated my story that Marshall had used that fake name. It also showed me as the conscientious defense lawyer who was trying to stop his client, the serial killer, only to realize that he didn’t know his real identity. Drinker also said that he’d seen Marshall several times at a burger joint that was located between Higgins Auto Body and the dry cleaner’s where Marshall worked. Not hard to imagine Marshall sizing up Drinker, thinking he was roughly the same size, that with a red wig and a belly suit, he could pull off a decent impersonation. Good enough for his purposes, at least.

The police also got around to remembering that, among the thousands of anonymous tips they received, someone had sent a letter to Detective Vance Austin identifying James Drinker as the north side killer. The letter leaked out and became public fare, the words cut out of a magazine like some ransom note in a 1950s mystery movie. There might have been some suspicion that I was the one who sent that letter. But that’s not how it all came out. Why?