The Heavens May Fall (16 page)

Boady stepped out from behind his memories as the first few students of the summer-session class began to file out of the room. He waited across the hall, and when the torrent turned to a trickle, Lila emerged, books in hand. She smiled when she saw him, and he waved her over.

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Boady asked. He could see a flicker of surprise cross her face. “Um . . . sure.”

“Unless you have somewhere you need to be.”

“No, I have time for coffee.”

Boady smiled and motioned toward the stairs that led to the common area in the basement of the law school.

“Are you teaching a class this summer?” she asked.

“No, not this summer. I’m just here taking care of some scheduling details. How’s con-law going?”

“Not bad. It’s a little dry.”

They entered the common area, a smattering of tables, a bookstore, student mailboxes, and in the corner, vending machines. Boady pulled out his wallet and slid a buck into the slot and watched the paper cup fill with coffee so weak it barely deserved the name. He slid another dollar in and let Lila select her own roast.

He’d seen Lila often over the course of her first year, navigating the corridors, while debating points of law with her peers. He would wave or nod as they passed, but they never had a chance to chat. He remembered drinking coffee with her the last time they were together. On that occasion, they talked as friends do. Now that he was her professor, their conversation seemed stiff and contrived. He tried to get past that formality. “How’s Joe doing?” he asked.

She smiled. “He graduated and has a job with Associated Press.”

Boady nodded thoughtfully. “I see you made law review. How’d you do in your research and writing class?”

“Second in the class. I love the research part. As for the writing . . . well, let’s just say it’s good to have Joe around to give me advice.”

“I’m glad to hear that you like research, because I have a proposition for you. I am going on sabbatical this fall. I may be going back to court to defend a friend of mine. If it comes to that, I’ll need a good researcher. Someone with the eye of a puzzle solver. It’s part-time so you can do it around your school work. And it pays, oh let’s say, thirty bucks an hour. Does that sound fair?”

“Thirty dollars an hour? Hell yeah, I’ll do it . . . I mean if you think I’m the person for the job. What kind of things will I be doing?”

“Researching case law, drafting motions, maybe a little digging into the case. Right now, I’m just doing prep work.”

“What kind of case?”

“Did you hear about that woman they found in an alley last week? Jennavieve Pruitt?”

“I saw it on the news, but I haven’t been following it.”

“Her husband, Ben Pruitt, used to be my law partner. He’s asked me to represent him.”

“They think he killed his wife?”

“That seems to be the direction they’re headed. And, Lila, before you agree to do this, you should know that Max Rupert is the lead investigator.”

Lila’s eyes flashed with surprise and then fell to the table as her thoughts turned inward. “We’re going against Max?”

Boady watched as Lila subconsciously moved her fingertips over the scar on her wrist, a scar put there by a killer’s rope.

“Lila, I know you owe Max a great debt, and I’d certainly understand if you can’t—”

“No, I can do this,” she said. She followed Boady’s gaze to where the index finger of her right hand gently stroked the scar on her left wrist and she drew her hands apart, balling them into fists and let them rest on the table. “I can do this,” she repeated.

Chapter 23

The grand jury was set to convene at 10 a.m. on a rainy Thursday morning, chillier than it should have been for mid-August. Max and Niki received their subpoenas along with a note from Dovey setting up a meeting to go over their testimonies. Max still didn’t understand the logic—or lack of logic—in Dovey’s decision to rush this case to the grand jury. Max’s investigation folder still seemed thin.

He and Niki were led to the same conference room where they met with Dovey before. The room was empty, but Max spied the Pruitt file on the table. It looked every bit as thin as Max’s file. Max tapped the back of a chair, the one directly across from the file, and gave a single nod to Niki, who took that seat. Max took the seat next over.

When Dovey entered, he paused, looked at Niki, then at Max, then at the file. He strode, confidently, to the seat opposite Max, sat down, and pulled the case file in front of him.

Max and Niki shared a glance.

“I’m going to lead off with you Max,” Dovey said. “You’ll lay out the case from beginning to end in a logical, no-nonsense way.”

“I’m not sure I can do that,” Max said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have the beginning, but I don’t have the end yet. We have the lab reports, but we still don’t have the forensics from the computer. We don’t have the forensics from her phone. There are still witnesses that we haven’t contacted. Don’t you think we should wait until we button up those loose ends?”

Dovey rubbed his chin as if he was considering Max’s concern, but his gesture seemed hollow, as though he was only pretending to ponder. “You know, Max, I thought about it long and hard before calling the grand jury. What it came down to is this: There’s a killer wandering the streets. I believe Ben Pruitt killed his wife. I believe he’s a smart sonofabitch. And I don’t believe the computer forensics will give us anything more than what he wants to give us. Think about it, Max. Ben Pruitt knows how this works. Hell, he knows our investigation tactic as well as we do. He’s not going to plan his wife’s murder with this kind of care and then be stupid enough to leave something incriminating on his computer. Besides, if we find anything on the computer, we’ll just add it to the pile. We have enough now to get the indictment, and every day that Pruitt roams around free is another day that a murderer is on the loose in my city.”

Nice speech
, Max thought. A little too rehearsed, and Max wondered if he’d given that same speech to his boss when he proposed the convening of the grand jury.

“So I’ll be putting you on the stand first, Max,” Dovey said. “The way I see it, our biggest weakness is the travel issue.” Dovey stopped talking and looked at Max.

Max took that as his cue to pick up the thread. “We should be getting surveillance video from the tollbooths within the next week or so. The neighbor, Malena Gwin, is certain she saw Ben Pruitt park a red sedan on the street in front of his house within an hour of Jennavieve Pruitt’s death.”

“What’s the window of opportunity for Pruitt’s alibi?”

Max looked at his notes. “His hotel key-card data shows that he entered his room at precisely 4:49 p.m. on the day of the murder. Room service delivered a sandwich to his room at 5:20. After that there’s no activity until his key card registers him entering his room at 8:32 the following morning.”

Dovey poked his index finger on the file. “The fact that he entered his room at 8:32 in the morning is proof that he just got back from the drive. Why else would he be going into his room at that early hour?”

“Remember,” Max said, “in his statement to me, he said that he’d started down to the conference, but went back to the room to get his schedule.”

“Seems damned convenient,” Dovey said.

“He’s a smart one,” Max said. “But it still leaves us with a window of time that fits. He gets to the house in Kenwood around midnight, when Malena Gwin sees him. He had an hour to kill his wife, clean up, and dump her body. Figure it’ll take a little longer to get back to the hotel because of rush-hour traffic and the 8:30 return fits perfectly.”

Max pulled out some still shots of a man in a tan jacket and black baseball cap exiting through the lobby of the hotel. “We don’t have anything specific. This picture shows a man, the right build and height, leaving the hotel about the right time, but we have no face shot.” Max pulled out a second photo of a man with a dark jacket and a red baseball cap on his head walking through the lobby of the hotel, going the opposite direction. “This was taken at 8:28 a.m. that morning. Again same height and build, different-color clothing, but his cap is pulled down over his eyes, just like the guy leaving the night before. Could be Pruitt, or it could be a couple random guys.”

Dovey studied the pictures with hawkish intensity. After a couple minutes he stood up and left the conference room, came back with a magnifying glass, and resumed his examination. Dovey was focusing on the man’s shoes.

Niki glanced at Max and then said, “We blew the pictures up and looked at everything. The clothing is all different. He even had different shoes on.”

With those words, Dovey put the magnifying glass down. “So what I’m hearing is that . . .” Dovey again spoke to Max as if Niki weren’t in the room. “Ben Pruitt changed his clothes after he murdered his wife.”

“If he’s smart he would,” Niki said. “That gets rid of the trace evidence.”

“Did you search his suitcase when he got back?” Again, Dovey looked at Max as he spoke.

Niki answered him. “We secured the contents of his suitcase when he came back from Chicago. The clothes in that picture . . .” Niki pointed at the picture from the morning surveillance camera. “Those clothes were not in his suitcase. He must have anticipated that we’d get the footage from the lobby, and he made sure that we couldn’t match anything to him.”

“When we get the tollbooth footage it’ll seal his fate. Is there any alternative route that he could have taken to get around the tollbooths?”

“There are, but it’s going to really eat into his travel time. He’ll be going through suburbs and towns with stop signs and reduced speed limits. It’s possible, but he’d be taking a huge risk.”

“Well, then,” Dovey said. “All we need is to confirm how he got back here to Minneapolis, and Pruitt’s a sitting duck.”

“If that’s the case,” Niki said, “wouldn’t it be better that we hold off on the grand jury until we have that footage?”

For the first time since they arrived, Dovey turned to Detective Niki Vang and addressed her directly. His features twisted as though a foul odor had just assaulted him. “Detective, you do your job and I’ll thank you to let me do mine.”

Niki’s cheeks reddened as she slunk back into her chair.

Max stood and leaned onto the table. “Dovey? Listen to me very carefully,” he said, narrowing his eyes on the red-faced prosecutor. “This is Detective Niki Vang, one of the best minds on the force. She’s my partner, and she’s my friend. Although you may have never heard of her before this case, you have heard of me. And if you’ve heard of me, then you know that I’m a very serious man who is not one to suffer assholes lightly. I still have enough clout around this city to muck up the plans of a political hack like you. So if you ever treat Detective Vang with that kind of disrespect again—”

“Now wait a second, Detective,” Dovey sputtered. “I meant no disrespect. I was merely pointing out that we each have our jobs to do. My job is to—”

“Right now, your job is to apologize to Detective Vang.”

“You know I didn’t mean to—”

“Not me,” Max said. “Talk to her.”

A deep-red blush flashed across Dovey’s fat, pale cheeks, and he began to blink in quick beats, as though Max’s words had dried the man’s pupils. For a few seconds, a thick, gray silence filled the room. Then, after the blinking stopped, after Dovey regained control of his breathing, he turned to Niki and spoke in a tone so removed from his normal voice that it almost held a British accent.

“I apologize,” he said.

When he turned back to Max, Dovey had once again found his smugness. “Happy, Detective?”

Max looked at Niki and jerked his head toward the door. Niki rose and followed Max out of the conference room.

Chapter 24

Boady sat down at the dinner table, about to dine on the meal of broiled walleye, potato slices, and asparagus, when the phone rang. He thought about not answering it, assuming it would be the cable company calling to get him to upgrade to a more expensive package, or maybe some bogus charity with the word
cancer
or
diabetes
or
firefighter
in the name looking for a donation. But then he remembered that he had a client again, and he answered the phone on the off chance that it might be Ben Pruitt. It was.

He asked if Boady might be around for a bit and could Ben drop by? Of course. But then Ben asked if Diana would also be at home. Boady didn’t know why that would matter. He answered yes, and to his surprise, Ben sounded relieved.

By the time Ben arrived, Boady and Diana had finished supper and the dishes. Boady had moved to the front porch, where a cool summer rain gave somber weight to the evening. When Ben arrived, he stepped out of his car and opened the back door for Emma. He picked her up so that they could share his umbrella as he carried her to the porch. Emma curled her face into her father’s chest, her eyes staring at nothing beyond the colors of the world that moved past her father’s shoulder.

Boady stood as Ben ascended the steps. Ben put Emma down, held out a piece of paper, and said, “It’s starting.”

“Would you like to talk in my office?” Boady opened the door for his guests.

“I think that’d be best,” Ben said. “Any chance Diana could sit with Emma for a bit?”

“I’m sure Diana would be happy for the company.” Boady could hear Diana still in the kitchen and called her to come to the front room.

When she walked in, Diana leaned down and in her most comforting voice said, “I’m so happy to see you again. Last time I saw you, you were just a tiny thing. My goodness, did you grow up pretty.”

Ben gave a slight bow to Emma. “Mr. Sanden and I have some things to discuss. I won’t be long. I promise.” The men walked to Boady’s study. Once in the study, with the door closed, Ben handed the paper to Boady to read.

“A subpoena?” Boady read some more, then looked up.

“They served me this morning. They convened a grand jury, they want me to testify.”

“Don’t worry,” Boady said, “I’ll have this quashed before lunch tomorrow.” Boady sat in a leather chair behind his desk and motioned for Ben to have a seat opposite him.