The Heavens May Fall (19 page)

Miguel’s lame story about finding Deavor dead and then ransacking the apartment had been the truth. Miguel Quinto had been innocent.

Chapter 28

Max walked into his bedroom and slipped off his tie, placing it on a rack in his closet. He hated wearing ties and only did so when the occasion demanded it, like weddings, funerals, and giving testimony at grand-jury proceedings. The grand jury had very few questions for him this time—his third time up, and he had very little additional information for them, as it had only been two weeks since his first appearance before them.

By now, they knew about Kagen’s belief that the Pruitts’ marriage was on the rocks. They knew about the prenuptial agreement that would screw Ben Pruitt if Jennavieve were to ever divorce him. They knew that Ben had the motive to kill his wife, although technically motive isn’t an element of a crime that needed to be proven at trial.

The grand jury heard Malena Gwin’s testimony about Ben Pruitt showing up in a red sedan around the time of Jennavieve Pruitt’s death. None of the jurors thought to ask about the tollbooth surveillance tapes, which still hadn’t arrived.

After that third trip to the grand jury, Dovey told Max that he would be asking the jury to deliberate with what they had.

“We don’t have the tollbooth footage yet,” Max said. “We don’t have computer forensics yet.”

“Max, are you having doubts? Is that what I’m hearing?” Dovey’s tone, both snarky and smug, reminded Max of a grade-schooler on the verge of taking his ball and leaving. “If you think someone other than Ben Pruitt did this, then by all means, enlighten me.”

“Ben Pruitt killed his wife,” Max said. “But if we move too fast—”

“Are you telling me how to do my job, Detective?”

“No, but this guy has to pay. It’s not enough to just get the indictment; we need a conviction. Pruitt’s smart. Don’t underestimate him.”

“I’ve done this long enough to know that the goal is a conviction. Trust me, Max. I’ll get the indictment and then I’ll get the conviction. Ben Pruitt will pay.”

Max rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “It’s your show, Frank.”

After that, Max had gone home to switch out of his good suit and slip into a pair of jeans and a less formal jacket. It was not yet noon and he still had a lot of work on his desk back at City Hall. He threw a hot dog into a pan of water and fired up the stove. No sense going back to the office before he ate a bite for lunch.

While the water heated up, he went to his porch and grabbed his mail. Flipping through it as he returned to the kitchen, he tossed the bills into one pile on the countertop and the junk mail into another. When he’d finished, he still held a large, white envelope. His name and address had been printed on it with a laser printer. No return address. He looked at the postmark and saw that it came from a post office in Minneapolis. In the center of the envelope, a lump protruded against the paper. Max felt the lump, about the size of bullet, and next to it, something round and flat like a silver dollar, only not as heavy.

He tore open the envelope and slid the contents onto the counter. It wasn’t a bullet. Rather, it was a key, short and round, the kind used on bicycle locks or a storage unit. It was attached to a key ring, and on the key ring, a rubber circle, blue, with the number 49 written on it. Max examined the key for a moment and set it aside.

Also in the envelope was a letter. He pulled the letter out and opened it. The letter held three short sentences in simple type, but the words of those three sentences burned him as though the paper itself had somehow caught fire. He dropped the letter and stepped back. His heart pounded in his chest. His hands and fingers trembled.

The letter lay open on the counter where he’d dropped it. Something inside of him refused to believe what he’d seen. He went to pick it up again but stopped. It might have DNA or fingerprints on it. He stood over the letter and read it again.

Your wife’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered. Here’s the proof
.

Chapter 29

Boady was staring at a blank yellow sheet of paper on his legal pad when the doorbell rang. He’d been looking at that page since just after supper, waiting for an idea to come to him, some brilliant thought that would allow him to derail the grand-jury process. He welcomed the doorbell, the distraction from his clogged brain. It didn’t matter that it was almost nine o’clock, a time of night that Diana always said was too late for visitors.

Boady opened the door to find Ben and Emma Pruitt on his porch. Ben had his eyes fixed on Summit Avenue, looking one way, then the other. “Can we come in?” he said before Boady could offer.

“Of course,” Boady said and stepped aside.

Ben walked into the front room and put Emma on the couch. “Can you stay here for just a bit, sweetie? I need to talk to Mr. Sanden for a minute.”

Emma nodded without saying a word.

Ben nodded toward Boady’s office and the two went there, and Ben closed the door.

“What’s going on, Ben?”

“I’m not sure, but I think something’s happened.”

Boady took his seat behind the desk, and Ben opposite him. “We went to the house tonight. We hadn’t been there since Jennavieve died. We’ve been staying up at the cabin. But Emma needed clothes and I needed some stuff. The crime-scene tape wasn’t up. We could have been living there if we wanted, but, I just couldn’t.”

Boady saw the shake in Ben’s hands and said, “Would you like something to drink?”

“No, thank you,” Ben said. “I thought that since we were in the neighborhood it might be nice for Emma to spend some time with her friend, Catie Kolander. She’s a neighbor. So I parked in the driveway, as usual. We loaded our things and got the car packed. Then we walked down to the Kolander house. I spent the evening with Catie’s mom, Terry, and her husband, Bob, while Emma and Catie played.”

Ben looked over his shoulder, through the glass of the French doors to where Emma sat on the couch. “I’ve been so worried about her. I thought it would be nice for her to have just one evening of normalcy. Just a few hours with a friend, like before.”

“Did something happen to Emma?”

“No, I’m sorry. We had a perfectly nice evening. The Kolanders have always been very nice to me and to Emma. But when we left, we were walking back to our house. I saw a police squad car in front of the house. I crossed the street to get a better view and saw a second squad car in the driveway. Two officers were at the front door. Two others were standing back a ways, in the driveway. They had their guns drawn.”

“What?”

“I’m sure of it, the two in the driveway had their guns out of the holster and the two at the door had hands on their grips. Then a third squad pulls up and parks in the street.”

“What’d you do?”

“I casually took Emma around the corner and watched from a distance. Pretty soon, I heard some yelling and then they broke through the front door and went in.”

“What were they yelling?”

“I couldn’t hear the words, but it looked to me like they were executing an arrest warrant. They must have spotted the car and figured we were there.”

Boady stood and turned to look out the window behind his desk. He saw no suspicious activity, no squad cars, no unmarked cars.

“How did you get here?”

“I took Emma down to the soccer field nearby and called a taxi.”

“You never heard them actually say ‘arrest warrant,’ did you?”

“No.”

“So as far as I’m concerned, you and Emma are my guests. You will be spending the night here.”

“Let’s assume that those cops were there to execute an arrest warrant—”

“Then the grand jury has come back with a true bill, and you’ve been indicted for murder. That’s the most logical assumption.”

Ben began to shake. His breath puffed in short spurts. “How . . . I don’t understand. I wasn’t even in Minneapolis. They know that. What’s going on?”

“They must know something we don’t.”

“What the hell could they possibly know? I didn’t kill my wife. They can’t know anything because there’s not anything to know. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen, I was in fucking Chicago.” Ben’s voice rose and Boady could see Diana on the other side of the French doors; she was sitting with Emma but looking at the office.

“Calm down, Ben. Emma needs you to keep it together. I need you to keep it together. We don’t know that you’ve been indicted. We’ll walk you down there tomorrow. If we’re wrong, then all this worrying is for nothing.”

“And if we’re not wrong? If they indicted me for murder?”

Boady sat back down. “Well, that’s what we’ve been preparing for.” He tried to offer a reassuring smile. “You know the old saying, a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. If that is the case and you’ve been indicted, we walk you down to the police station on our terms. And we’re not going in until Monday. No sense spending the weekend in jail before we get to see a judge. We’ll check it out first thing Monday. No photographers. No press. We walk in with our heads high. They still have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the battle we’ve been preparing for.”

“They’ll hold me over for a bail hearing.”

“We’ll get you in and out as fast as possible.”

“And what if the judge denies bail?”

Boady stopped talking and just looked at Ben for a few seconds, long enough for Ben to realize that he already knew the answer. If he can’t make bail, he’ll sit in a jail cell and watch the clock tick away until he goes to trial.

“You know the worst-case scenario, Ben. We need to go make a bedroom for Emma. You’ll stay with her through the weekend. We don’t know whether there is a warrant. Until we do, you and Emma are guests here. We can spend the weekend getting her comfortable. You can explain what you need to explain to her. On Monday morning, we’ll take you downtown and see where things stand.”

Ben sat back in his chair and started to laugh under his breath, a laugh that grew the more he tried to control it.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “It’s like some farce—I mean, this is Monty Python kind of stuff. It’d be funny if it weren’t for the fact that it’s going to kill my daughter. She lost her mother, and she’s devastated. How do I explain to her that I’m going to jail because they think I killed her mother? What do I tell her? What do I say?”

Boady pondered that question for a long time, unable to come up with a good answer. Finally, he said, “You tell her that you love her. You tell her that you’ll be back with her as soon as you possibly can. You tell her to have faith.” Boady looked Ben in the eye, his words offered for Emma, but meant for Ben. “You tell her that you will win this case. You will make it back to your little girl. I promise you, you’ll be back here, together. Tell her to believe that.”

Boady offered his hand to Ben, and as Ben shook it, the tremor in Ben’s fingers seemed to fade away. Then, Ben smiled first genuine smile he’d been able to manage in some time.

Boady smiled back. “Now let’s go see what we can do to turn our guest room into a room worthy of your little girl.”

Chapter 30

There is a fog that can infect a person’s brain, a thick, feverish sludge that engulfs sound and thought with an effect similar to being submerged in a tub of water. Max had experienced that fog after his wife died. He visited it once again the week his brother died, that time finding the fog in the bottom of a bottle of scotch. And in the hours after getting the anonymous letter, the fog returned. Max’s world shrank—from murder investigations and grand juries down to a letter, and a key with the number 49 attached to it.

Max didn’t return to work that day. He stared at the items on his kitchen counter for an eternity, which barely spanned the lunch hour. That’s when Max the cop stepped in to relieve Max the stunned husband.

This will reopen Jenni’s case
, the cop said to himself.
I need to turn this in
.

But the husband piped up.
They’ve had this case before and it went nowhere. They don’t care about Jenni. She’s just another name on a page to them
.

I can’t investigate Jenni’s death. There’s a policy. I’ve been ordered to leave it alone. My involvement could create problems of proof
.

But it could be a prank
, the husband said.
This could be nothing more than a wild goose chase
.

Maybe
, the cop said.
It could be some dick I arrested in the past, come back to fuck with me. Yeah, that’s possible. I should keep this private until I know it’s legit, at least
.

Max shut off his phone and put the new evidence in a paper grocery bag. He could ask Bug to take a look at it. Test it for DNA and other trace evidence. Bug would do it for him, and Bug would keep it quiet.

Before he went to bed that night, Max checked his phone. He’d missed four calls from Niki. The first three were Niki asking Max where he was and why he hadn’t come back to the office after testifying at the grand jury. The last message was different.

“The grand jury came back,” Niki said. “They indicted Ben Pruitt. We have squads out looking for him now. Dovey’s calling him a flight risk, so everything’s under seal until we have him in custody. Also, the County Attorney and Dovey will be holding a press conference once we have Pruitt in custody. Dovey wants us to be there. Window dressing. Call me. Or not. Hope you’re okay.”

He wants us at the press conference
, Max said to himself.
A show of unity. Let the public see the team that’s going to put Ben Pruitt away—and put Dovey on the bench
.

Fuck ’em
, the husband said.

Yeah, fuck ’em
.