I step in. “Alexa? Alexa.”
She is sitting in her living room, the lights off, the curtains pulled, the room dark, save for the illumination from the television, an old movie, Doctor Zhivago, I think, with the sound on mute.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Am I. . okay. Huh,” she hiccups without humor. She is motionless, the dancing light from the TV playing shadows across her body, her face.
Something makes me stay where I am, halfway between the front door and the living room where Alexa is sitting, her back to the wall, facing me. The flickering light is messing with my vision, playing with her facial features, masking them, exaggerating them.
“Did you hurt yourself, Alexa?”
She doesn’t answer at first. The smell of food-pizza? pizza-wafts past me. She doesn’t even like piz-
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” she says. “You never did.”
“Tell me.” I raise my hands. “Tell me what’s going on. I couldn’t even understand you on the phone. I thought you said that you were going to kill yourself.”
She makes a noise in her mouth, like a giggle, something fleeting.
“No, Jason, that’s not what I said.”
She raises her hand, holding something, showing it to me in the dark.
“You left your iPhone here,” she says slowly, as if she’s saying something of paramount significance. “There’s a voice mail you should hear from this afternoon.”
She lowers her hand and plays with my phone. A moment later, blaring out from the speakerphone is Joel Lightner’s voice:
“Get ready to be happy, sport. I found him. I found our fucking guy! We were looking for cons recently released from a state penitentiary. This guy came out of a federal facility in January. You got him to confess to a gun charge, like, eight years ago, but you handed him over to the feds and they prosecuted him. We were looking in the wrong damn place! His name is Marshall Rivers. He’s got a history of violence against women and, since he got out, he’s been working at a dry cleaner’s two doors down from Higgins Auto Body! He probably saw James Drinker every day! Anyway, Marshall Rivers, does that ring-”
The recording stops abruptly, mid-sentence. I steady myself with a hand to the wall, squeeze my eyes shut, lower my head, then slowly raise it. Marshall Rivers. Marshall-
Okay.
I remember him. I remember Marshall Rivers.
I remember a bad guy. Pure evil.
I remember a scared witness, a young woman.
I remember what I did to him.
And when he got out, he came back to pay me his respects. He came to my office in disguise, assumed a different name, and watched me sit helplessly while he carved up five women on the north side of the city.
Marshall Rivers is “James Drinker.” Marshall Rivers is the North Side Slasher.
“Finally,” I mumble. Then I look at Alexa, remembering the truncated nature of the voice mail. “Did you pause the message or did it just stop there?” I ask. “Is there more?”
From her dark corner, Alexa stands slowly and inches toward me, crossing the line of the television light, blocking it out, leaving us in darkness, her features changing with each step-
— the face of a ghost, a haunted figure, piercing eyes, a wry grin, a scowl, terror and rage and panic and fear-
“There’s more,” she says to me. “There’s a lot more.”
EIGHT YEARS AGO
90
Jason Kolarich
Assistant County Attorney
The shower water scalded his skin, the way he liked it. The heat would stay on him for hours, keep him refreshed. It was little things like that-small meals, lots of coffee, catnaps when you could get them, and hot showers-that kept him on his game.
Whoever it was who decided to put Felony Review prosecutors on seventy-two-hour shifts had a sadistic streak. He had until tomorrow morning at ten before his shift ended and he could really sleep-unless, of course, he caught a case and had to see that one through post-shift.
He dried off, dressed in the same underwear and the same clothes, knotted his tie and finger-combed his hair. The door in the police locker room popped open, and cool air hit his skin.
“Counselor, we need you.”
“Coming, dear,” said Assistant County Attorney Jason Kolarich.
He was upstairs five minutes later, his shirt still wet from beads of water, his brain foggy. He walked into the detective squad room’s small kitchen, which served as Kolarich’s makeshift office. He put his hand out, and Officer Richard Nova dropped the report in it. Kolarich read it over quickly and then looked up at Nova, looking for any facial expression, finding none.
Kolarich read the report again. “We have the gun.”
“Right.”
“And eyes.”
“Right.”
“Whose eyes? Yours?” Kolarich looked up at Nova. Richie Nova was stocky and fit, young and sometimes too eager, but one of the by-the-book guys, one of the good ones. Most cops were good ones. Some of them were not. It made a difference to Kolarich.
“Mine and Gina’s. Happened right in front of us, the gun toss.”
Kolarich flipped past the officer’s report to the suspect’s priors. Something similar in the past, five years ago-an aggravated assault pleaded down to simple; he’d accosted a woman with a firearm. With the plea, he avoided prison. Six months later, he was arrested for the rape of a teenage girl in an alley off Marquette; the witness had a change of heart and he was released when she refused to testify. In another six months, a gun charge and possession of cocaine that got him three years, give or take. He’d been out just about a year, and now he was back to his first crime, abducting women at gunpoint.
That made three women, including this one tonight, that he’d attacked.
“Marshall Rivers,” said Kolarich. “He sounds like an aristocrat.”
“He’s no aristocrat, this one.”
“Okay. Where’s the witness?”
“She’s in Two,” said Nova.
Kolarich grabbed a notepad, stuck a Bic pen in his front shirt pocket. In Interview Room Two, a young woman was standing over a small wooden crib, where an infant slept with blankets wrapped tightly over her. Kolarich didn’t know where the crib had come from, but they must have kept it around for situations just like this.
It was almost ten o’clock at night. The attack had happened around six, as dusk had settled over the city in early spring.
The woman, the mother, was really just a girl, all of eighteen years, with dark, kinky hair pulled back with a rubber band, a thin face, and large brown eyes. She was wearing a pink cotton long-sleeved shirt and jean shorts, denim cut off a respectable length down her thigh.
Kolarich trod lightly, lifting the wooden chair off the hardwood floor to avoid scraping. “Miss Flores?” he said.
“Yes,” she said with some effort, a hint of j on top of the y. English was not her first language. It might not be her language at all. She sat in the chair opposite Kolarich and laced her hands together, as if in prayer.
“Hablas ingles?”
“Un poquito,” she answered with apology. “Lee-tle.”
“Bueno.” Where the hell was Witness Services? Why didn’t Nova bring up a translator? Gina Alvarez, Nova’s partner, spoke Spanish, but he needed the official translator. It was a union thing. Pass over the certified translator and someone would file a grievance. It took another half hour before Lisa from WitServ showed up.
“Tell her I’m a prosecutor, and would she please tell me what happened?” said Kolarich, which Lisa translated to Caridad Flores.
She felt more at ease with the translator in the room. The story came out in short bites, because each sentence had to be translated, even when Kolarich thought he understood it, so it had an odd quality to it, not simply a freewheeling, natural conversation. Caridad Flores spoke in a soft, restrained voice, fear shaking her words. Fear from what happened, Kolarich thought, or maybe fear of him, of law enforcement.