The Heavens May Fall (26 page)

The best cafeteria in the area sits in the basement of the Government Center. Max went there and ordered a cup of chili and a Reuben sandwich. He took a table as far out of the way as he could find. In his head he went over his testimony from that morning, looking for anything he may have left out or needed to clarify. He’d testified in hundreds of cases in his career, everything from speeding tickets, back when he was on patrol, to murder. He felt comfortable with his morning’s work.

As he was about to finish off the first half of his sandwich, he sensed someone watching him. He looked up to see Lila Nash standing over him with a tray in her hand. Max smiled.

“Want to join me?” he said.

“I do, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to. We’re kind of on opposite sides.”

“I’ll tell you what, we’ll make it a rule that we don’t talk about the case at all. Will that work?”

“Works for me,” Lila said. She put her food on the table, a fruit bowl and a cup of yogurt.

“I see you’re working for the defense. I had no idea.”

“I’m just helping out—researching and such.”

“So I take it you made it into law school?”

“Just started my second year.”

“Won’t your boss want you to eat with him? Where is he anyway?”

“Not during trials. He wants to be alone with his thoughts, so he brought a ham sandwich and a can of Pepsi. I saw him heading out to the courtyard, to one of the benches outside.”

“Are you and Joe . . .”

“Still a couple? Yeah, we’re still together.”

“And what about Joe’s autistic brother . . . I can’t remember his name.”

“Jeremy. Yes, he’s with us and we have a dog named Shadow. We’ve become quite the little family.”

“Jeremy’s lucky to have you and Joe.” Max dabbed a napkin to his mouth as he talked, a tick that only showed itself when he ate a meal with a female. “And what’s Joe doing these days?”

“After he graduated, he took a job with the Associated Press.”

“It’s good to see that things are going well for you both. You deserve a happy future after . . . well . . .”

“I’ve been meaning to send you Christmas cards over the years, but I don’t have your address, and you’re unlisted.”

Max pulled his wallet out and withdrew a business card. “You got a pen?”

Lila found one in her purse. Max wrote his home address and personal cell-phone number on the back and handed it to her. “Now you have no excuse,” Max said.

“I figure a Christmas card is the least I can do for the man who saved my life.”

Max saw Lila pull the sleeves of her blouse down to cover the scars on her wrists. “Just doing my job, ma’am.” Max tipped the brim of an imaginary hat and smiled, hoping the conversation might steer away from the darkness of that night.

“Professor Sanden told me that you saved his life too.”

“Well, that might be a stretch. I pulled his client off of him, but the bailiff would have taken care of it, had I not been there.”

“Not the way he explains it.”

Max’s eyes softened into a faraway look as he remembered. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“I would think that if someone was going to cross-examine me in court and try to make me out to be wrong, I’d hold a grudge.”

“Wait, Boady’s going to try and make me out to be wrong?” Max exaggerated the words to show his sarcasm. Then he shrugged. “Boady has his job. I have my job. We understand that. We don’t make it personal. That’s just how it’s been with us.”

“I don’t think I could ever cross-examine you—not after everything that happened. It would be like kicking my dog.”

“So I’m a dog in this scenario?”

“Yeah, but I really love my dog.”

Chapter 44

Dovey didn’t finish his questioning of Max Rupert until just before lunch on the second day of the trial. After lunch, Dovey turned the witness over to Boady.

Before Boady could ask his first question, a strange wave of panic washed over him. He paused to let it pass. He recognized the residue from those days when the death of Miguel Quinto filled his hands with a tremble so severe that he could barely hold a pen. His insides churned and his chest worked to pull in the next breaths. But it was more than the ghost of Miguel Quinto that gripped him, and he knew it. He had prepared a blistering cross-examination for Max Rupert, one that would inflict wounds on the State’s case—and on Max himself. Boady had been preparing that cross for weeks, and now the time had come.

Boady started his cross slowly, asking Max about what the State did not have in the way of evidence. The State had no evidence to explain how Ben Pruitt would have gotten back from Chicago. The State had no forensics to tie him to his wife’s dead body. And other than Malena Gwin’s statement, the State had no evidence that Pruitt didn’t spend the night at the Marriott. That was the thing about cases built around circumstantial evidence; the defense could spend hours talking about what was
not
there—and Boady did.

Boady spent the afternoon getting Max to say “it’s possible” to alternative interpretations of each key piece of evidence. He led Max through the tollbooth footage, underscoring for the jury that Max had examined each possible lane of travel, looking for that red sedan, and found nothing.

“You and your partner did a forensic search of Mr. Pruitt’s computers, correct?”

“Yes.”

“His computers contained no Internet searches for tollbooths or maps to Chicago.”

“We didn’t find any.”

“And you had the hard drives examined so that any searches that may have been deleted could be found, correct?”

“Yes.”

Boady nodded and flipped to the next page of notes. He took a drink of water, cleared his throat, and stood up at his table to ask the next question.

“You’re familiar with Anna Adler-King?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the deceased’s sister?”

“Yes.”

“And you interviewed Mrs. Adler-King?”

“I did.”

“She told you in that interview that she and her sister, Mrs. Pruitt, were the heirs to a massive family-owned business enterprise?”

“She explained that your client and his wife had a prenuptial agreement that—”

“Your Honor, I would ask that the witness be instructed to answer the question that I put to him.”

“Detective?”

“Sorry, Your Honor. Yes, Mrs. Adler-King mentioned that her father was in failing health and that control of the company might soon pass to her.”

“And it would have passed to the two daughters together had Jennavieve Pruitt not been murdered.”

“They would have shared control of the company, yes.”

“Mrs. Pruitt, being the older sister, would have held one voting share more than Mrs. Adler-King, so in fact Mrs. Pruitt would have held control of the company.”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Don’t you think that gaining control of a billion-dollar company is relevant in a murder investigation?”

“Anna Adler-King had an alibi. We cleared her.”

“That’s right, she was at an opening-night party at the Guthrie Theater. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Boady looked at his notes. The time had come to draw blood. “Detective, I’ve gone through your investigation, and I found something that I don’t quite understand. You have your reports in front of you?”

“I do.”

“Let me refer you to the first page of your report, written on the day you found Jennavieve Pruitt’s body. Do you have that page?”

“Yes.”

“How many times on that page alone did you refer to Mrs. Pruitt by name?”

Max paused to count. “Twelve.”

“Now how many of those twelve times did you refer to her by the name Jennavieve?”

“Excuse me?”

“How many times did you call her Jennavieve?”

“Um . . . nine.”

“And what did you call her the other three times?”

Max looked up at Boady with either concern or confusion pulling lines across his forehead.

“What name did you write in your report instead of Jennavieve, Detective?”

“I wrote Jenni.”

“Your Honor, may I approach the witness?” Boady asked.

“You may.”

Boady picked up a stack of transcripts and walked to the witness stand next to Max. “Detective, these are statements taken by you and your partner, Detective Vang? Would you be so kind as to go through these witness statements and find a single occurrence when a friend or relative of Jennavieve Pruitt ever referred to her as Jenni?”

Boady walked slowly back to the table, listening to Max shuffle through the pages in a halfhearted manner. Boady turned at his table and remained standing, staring at Max, who was fumbling through page after page, looking for anyone who may have called her Jenni. Boady knew that Max would find no such reference, and when Boady felt that the point had been made, he spoke. “Detective, isn’t it true that no one, not one family member, not one business associate, not one neighbor, not one friend, ever referred to Jennavieve Pruitt as Jenni?”

“Possibly.”

“Detective, you received a reprimand last week—”

“Objection!” Dovey was already rounding the table and on his way to the bench before Judge Ransom gave a two-fingered wave to approach.

“Your Honor,” Dovey huffed. “This reprimand is completely irrelevant to the matter at issue in this case. Counsel is using it to smear the reputation of an otherwise-stellar detective, a Medal of Valor recipient. That kind of character assassination has no place in this trial.”

Judge Ransom turned to Boady, who spoke next.

“First off, I’m surprised to hear that my esteemed colleague is even aware of the reprimand, because it wasn’t disclosed as part of my ongoing discovery demand. We came across it by chance when we served a request directly on Detective Rupert’s supervising commander earlier this week.” Boady had kept an accusatory stare on Dovey as he spoke.

“Second,” Boady continued. “The defense theory of the case is that this investigation was flawed from the very beginning, that Detective Rupert ignored alternative suspects. Detective Rupert was reprimanded for not following instructions, disobeying his superiors, and, most importantly, violating department policy in conducting an unauthorized investigation that distracted him from his job. It goes to the heart of my case and is absolutely admissible.”

Ransom turned back to Dovey. “You knew about this letter of reprimand?”

“I learned of it last week.”

“And you didn’t disclose it to defense counsel?”

“It has no relevance to the case.”

“Mr. Dovey,” Ransom said with impatient rigidity. “You don’t get to determine what evidence is relevant. That’s my job. The letter comes in.”

Boady returned to his standing position behind counsel table and continued. “Detective, you were given a letter of reprimand just last week, is that correct?”

“Yes.” The words hissed through Max’s teeth.

“That reprimand was because you disobeyed your commander’s orders not to take part in a certain investigation?”

“Yes.”

“And, not only did you take part, you snuck the case file out of City Hall and took it to your home?”

“I carried it to my home, yes.”

“And this happened over the same period of time that you were supposed to be investigating the murder of Jennavieve Pruitt?”

“Yes.”

“And what is the name of the person whose case you were investigating in violation of orders?”

“Her name . . .” Max looked at Dovey, who wore an inexplicably smug look on his face, the kind of look that said, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Boady saw a charge of tension pass between the two men. “Her name was Jenni Rupert.”

Boady paused for a beat or two to let the name resonate with the jurors. Then he said, “Jenni . . . Rupert . . . your deceased wife?”

“Yes. She was my wife.”

“And you decided to investigate your wife’s four-year-old hit-and-run instead of conducting a proper investigation in the Pruitt case.”

“I conducted a proper investigation—”

“Isn’t it true that you became obsessed with your wife’s case?”

“No.”

“You stole her file from City Hall.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

“So you had permission to take that file home?”

“No, but—”

“And you confused your wife’s death with the murder of Jennavieve Pruitt.”

“I didn’t confuse them.”

“You already admitted that you sometimes called Jennavieve Pruitt by your wife’s name. You called her Jenni when no one else on Earth did.”

“That was just a mistake.”

“A mistake . . . in a murder investigation?”

Boady gave the jury a moment to digest that answer. He could see the well of emotion rising behind Max Rupert’s eyes: anger, pain, disgust—maybe all three at once. Boady had crossed a line. He knew it.

Boady remembered what Lila had asked him.
What happens if you have to go after him, I mean really tear into him?
But then Boady thought of Emma Pruitt and the promise he’d made. He would bring her father back to her. He would exonerate Ben Pruitt. If this had been any other cop in any other case, Boady would have asked those same questions, without hesitation. It had to be done, even if it meant losing a friend.
Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall
, Boady thought to himself.

Boady took a breath to reset his mind. Then he returned to his questioning. “Detective Rupert, you zeroed in on Ben Pruitt from the very beginning of this investigation?”

“Mr. Pruitt was a person of interest.”

“To the exclusion of all others.”

“I would disagree with that.” Max was beginning to sound tired.

“You were very thorough in investigating Mr. Pruitt.”

“We sought to be thorough in all aspects of the investigation.”

“Even Mrs. Adler-King?”

“Like I said before, Mrs. Adler-King has an alibi.”

“So does Mr. Pruitt.”

“Mr. Pruitt couldn’t account for all his time in Chicago.”

“Isn’t it possible that Mrs. Adler-King might have slipped out of the reception at some point and returned later?”

“We found no reason to believe that she did.”

“And what did you do to confirm that she was there all evening?”