The Heavens May Fall (24 page)

“There are other routes,” Max said. “He must have skirted the cameras.”

“I thought you said he’d have to take the Interstate to make it back here on time. Didn’t you say that? Or have I been hearing things?”

“He would have had to break speed limits if he took the back roads. That’s risky when you’re on your way to murder your wife. But it’s theoretically possible.”

“So I’m left with ‘theoretically possible’ for my case? Do you have any idea how far theoretically possible is from ‘proof beyond a reasonable doubt’?”

“I can’t change the tapes. You asked what I found and I’m telling you. Besides, you have Malena Gwin. She saw him here, so all you need is ‘theoretically possible.’ Her testimony makes it a fact. He made it back here from Chicago to kill his wife. Whether he drove the Interstate or a back road doesn’t matter. He was here.”

Dovey brought his hand to his chin and rubbed. “What can Boady Sanden get on her? Anything I need to be worried about?”

Niki, who’d been sitting motionless next to Max, spoke up. “I’ve looked into her and there’s not much to know. She’s a widow. Doesn’t work. Has some money left from her husband’s insurance policy that she lives off of. I’ve asked around the neighborhood, and other than being a bit nosey—which works in our favor—she’s absolutely normal. No criminal history. No ax to grind with Ben Pruitt. They’re going to have a tough time knocking down her credibility.”

“What about the computer forensics?” Dovey asked. “Find anything there?”

Niki shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing that moves the ball forward. I was hoping to find evidence that Mrs. Pruitt was talking to an attorney about divorce. I looked at her search history, and there’s nothing there. No venomous e-mails to her husband, or from him. I haven’t seen a thing about their relationship.”

“Great. Brilliant,” Dovey said. “We’ve had Pruitt in custody for two weeks, and we’re no closer now than we were then. What happened? You’re supposed to be the A-Team.”

“Watch it, Dovey.” Max leaned onto the table.

“You told me Pruitt did it.”

“He did.”

“Then, damn it, get me my proof!”

Max stood, angry enough to spit nails. A dozen insults whirled in his sleep-addled brain. But before he could open his mouth to speak, a memory blew in cold and swift like winter through an opened door.

It was his brother, Alexander, over-the-top pissed off at their wrestling coach. He’d won a wrestle-off and should have been on the A squad, but the coach put Alexander on the B squad. Said Alexander threw a punch to win his match. Max had to hold his brother back. Went so far as to carry him out of the gym.

It had always been Max’s job to settle his brother down. Be the level head while Alexander got to spin like a pinwheel. “Max the Boy Scout.” That’s what Alexander always called him. And Jenni called him her rock. But Jenni was gone now. Alexander was gone now too. And Max could feel the ghost of that Boy Scout fading away to nothingness.

Max remained standing, let a slow breath leave his body, and walked out.

Chapter 40

When Emma Pruitt awoke on the morning of her eleventh birthday, she didn’t smile. Diana made her a breakfast of pancakes and bacon, one of the few meals that Emma would actually eat. The pancakes had the words “Happy B-day” spelled out with chocolate chips. When Emma saw this, she started to cry and ran to her room.

Emma had been a guest in their house for over a month, and the number of words she spoke in that time barely surpassed the number of days she’d been there. She cried often and would sleep until noon if Diana allowed it—which she did not.

One day they brought in a psychologist under the guise of her being a family friend. The three of them attempted to engage Emma in conversation. The psychologist asked Emma about her friends and about school. Emma’s responses were monosyllabic and gave no release to the pain that churned in her veins. After three attempts over the course of a week, the psychologist gave up.

“There’s no sense paying me to come out here anymore. She won’t talk to me. I think she suspects our ruse.”

“I’m worried about her,” Diana said. “She only talks when it’s absolutely necessary. She’s been acting up in school, refusing to obey the teachers. They tell me she doesn’t talk to her friends or anyone else for that matter. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Going to school may not be the best thing for her right now,” the psychologist offered. “The children in her neighborhood are at the heart of what she wants to avoid. Those children have parents who knew Mrs. Pruitt. They’ve been talking. The kids will know that Emma’s father is on trial for her mother’s death. Putting her into that environment may be the last thing she needs.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Boady asked. “Ship her to a new school? Someplace where she has no friends? She can’t even talk to us. How’s she going to survive a new school?”

“I’m not suggesting that, either. I’m saying that you should look into maybe homeschooling her. Just for a semester. See how it goes. She has no one in her life she trusts—no one she feels safe enough with to open up. Until she feels safe, until she can talk to an adult, no therapist will be able to reach her. She needs time and love. You can’t force her to get through what she needs to get through.”

That morning, after Emma left her birthday breakfast untouched on the table, she holed up in her room with the door shut. Boady and Diana discussed whether to intrude on her privacy. In the end, they did nothing, mostly because Diana had two house showings to go to that morning, and Boady had no inclination to attempt such a maneuver on his own.

After Diana left, Boady went to his study to work on Anna Adler-King’s cross-examination. Lila had been digging up old bones on the socialite, and one in particular showed promise. If Boady could coax the woman into the right trap, the jury would have to start second-guessing the State’s case. But setting that trap would be difficult and time-consuming. He covered his desk with everything he knew about Anna Adler-King: her statement to the police, her testimony at the custody hearing, her affidavit supporting the injunction to freeze Ben’s assets. He had newspaper articles about her and corporate filings and court records from every case that bore any imprint of her presence. Lila had been thorough in her research.

But as Boady moved the various parts around on his desk, his thoughts continued to wander up the stairs to the silence coming from Emma’s bedroom. Anna Adler-King’s life lay scattered across his desk like the pieces of a model airplane waiting to be assembled, yet the thought of Emma’s tears stopped him from moving. He put his legal pad down and went upstairs.

As he climbed the steps, the echoes of unfulfilled hopes swirled around his mind. His childless marriage was not his choice, nor was it Diana’s. From their earliest days, when they knew they would be together for life, they’d laced their conversations with plans of having a big family—filling every room of whatever house they might own with the laughter and noise of children. As the years passed, the medical truth grew roots that tangled around them, choking them in a way they would never have imagined.

Now, as Boady approached Emma’s room, that memory held him back. In his dreams of being a father, he had imagined making this kind of trip. He was about to sit with a frightened, crying child and attempt to take away her pain. He’d never felt more ill prepared for any task in his life. But that was what a father would do, so it was what he would try to do for Emma.

Boady knocked on the door using a single knuckle. There was no answer. He knocked again and this time unlatched the door, letting it creak open.

“Emma?”

She didn’t answer, but he saw her sitting on her bed. She had put on one of her father’s T-shirts over her other clothing, and she had pulled her knees up to her chest, tucking her legs under the shirt. She rested her face on her forearms, perched atop her knees.

“Emma, can I come in?” He entered without her answering.

She made no move to acknowledge that she even heard him.

“Emma . . .” He sat at the foot of the bed. “There’s no way for me to understand how you feel. Sometimes the world hits us with more than we think we can bear. And to have this all hanging over you on your birthday, I can’t—”

“Did my dad kill my mom?” Emma did not look up when she asked the question.

“Emma, honey, no.” Boady’s words came out quick and sure. “Your father didn’t kill your mother.”

“The people on the news said they arrested Dad because he killed my mom. Why would they say that? If he didn’t kill her, why’d they put him in jail?”

Boady moved a few inches closer to Emma as he shook off his first thoughts, explanations that delved into the history of jurisprudence and the role of probable cause and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. These were ideas that passed over the heads of many law students and were notions completely unworthy of this child’s question.

“Emma, when I was a child, kids used to tell stories about the boogey man or monsters or other things that made us afraid. I grew up in the woods of Missouri, and when I was about seven or eight, a friend told me that there was this Bigfoot kind of creature that lived in the hills around my area. They called him ‘Momo.’ That was supposed to be short for ‘Missouri Monster.’ Well, after hearing about that, I was afraid to step foot in the woods.”

Emma lifted her head from her arms and Boady could see the confusion on her face as she tried to fathom how this story had any connection to her father’s plight.

“One night, my mother saw me staring out into the woods with this scared look on my face. When I told her that I was afraid of Momo, she sat me down and explained that there was no such beast, that my friend was just passing on a tall tale that had been whispered back and forth between kids since before Missouri was a state. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I heard that. I almost started laughing, I was so relieved.

“Well, Emma, when you grow up, it’s not boogey men and monsters that make people afraid. It’s things like what happened to your mother. There’s no good explanation for what happened to her. It makes people afraid. And the way that people lose that fear is to lock someone up for the crime. It doesn’t matter if the person that they locked up didn’t actually commit the crime, as long as they believe he did. They feel safer that someone was locked up. And that’s what happened here. They wanted to lock someone up as fast as possible, and your father was the only one in their sights. They moved way too quickly, and now we get to have a trial in court to show that they got it all wrong.”

Emma looked at her knees as she considered Boady’s story. Then she slid her knees out of her father’s T-shirt and crawled to Boady. She sat beside him and leaned her head against his torso. Boady put his arm around the child’s shoulders and hugged her to him.

“You’ll win, right?” she asked in a voice so soft and pure that Boady felt his throat grow tight.

Again, Boady’s instinct, his training to always think like a lawyer, told him to never guarantee an outcome. That notion had become so sacrosanct over the years that they made it an ethical violation to make such promises. But as Boady held fast to Emma’s shoulders, he wasn’t a lawyer. He was, at that moment, the closest thing she had to a friend. He considered her question and, with the steady timbre of a man telling the absolute truth, he answered: “Yes. I’ll win.”

Chapter 41

The first week of October rolled through Minnesota with the rumble of thunderstorms that filled the evening news with pictures of upturned tree roots and downed power lines. On a morning when the rain fell nearly sideways, Max sat at his cubicle and studied a list he’d been researching for the past week.

Whoever sent that envelope with the letter and key knew things. Deduction, induction, and a tad bit of supposition led Max to his list.

Deduction: The person who authored the letter knew that the Corolla in the storage unit ended Jenni’s life. Deduction: The author of the letter knew details about what happened in that parking ramp. Induction: The words on the note were true; Max’s wife was murdered. Supposition: The murderer had a motive. Supposition: The motive involved Max and his job as a cop. That conclusion seemed to Max inescapable.

So Max pulled together a list of every person he’d convicted since becoming a detective, over one hundred and fifty if he only counted cases where he was the lead. Hidden within that list had to be the driver of the yellow Toyota Corolla. Like one domino knocking down the next, it was the only logical path to explain the note.

Max expected to be shut out of the investigation once he turned everything over, but it amazed him how quickly the door closed. He’d told Lieutenant Briggs and Commander Walker about the events that led him to the storage unit and what he found there. They blinked and nodded and barely raised an eyebrow. When they took the evidence from Max, it felt as though they were peeling the flesh from his bones. Then they politely pointed him back to his cubicle. After that, nothing.

The case was assigned to Tony Voss, the newest member of the Homicide Unit, and a man Max didn’t know all that well. That same day, Max invited his new colleague out for a beer. A week later, Max bought Voss another beer as they discussed the lack of trace evidence on the letter and key, a fact that Max already knew. At their next meeting, Voss confirmed that it was Jenni’s blood that stained the front of the Corolla. Except for those few meetings, Max had no contact with the investigation—at least not the official investigation.

That morning he typed yet another name from his list into the computer, Artie Mesdorf, a junkie who beat his girlfriend to death when they were living in a homeless shelter. The computer answered Max with an article about Mesdorf dying of natural causes at Lino Lakes Prison a year earlier. Mesdorf was not a likely candidate, but Max decided to look at every name. They were his only leads. He thought about Mesdorf. The man was already in prison before Jenni died. He had no clout and no friends. Thus, it was unlikely that he had the ability to reach out from behind prison walls and commit any crime, much less a murder. Max crossed Artie from his list.