The Heavens May Fall (29 page)

Ben and Boady both stood. Boady thought he might throw up, and he couldn’t imagine how Ben must have been feeling.

“In the case of the State of Minnesota versus Benjamin Lee Pruitt, to Count One of the indictment, murder in the first degree, the intentional killing of another, committed with premeditation, we the jury find the defendant—Guilty.”

Chapter 48

The day had turned to night before Boady could bring himself to call Diana. He sat at his desk in his home office, surrounded by small piles of law books. He had two different legal pads, one with notes for the motion for a new trial; the other filled with precedence and case law to be used in the appeal. He would argue that a new trial was necessary because Judge Ransom allowed the jury to hear Malena Gwin’s grand-jury testimony. The motion for a new trial would be heard by Ransom and the appeal would be going over Ransom’s head to the Minnesota Supreme Court. He didn’t expect Ransom to reverse himself, but he wanted to give it a shot.

After hearing the verdict, Boady remained at Ben’s side as Judge Ransom sentenced him to life in prison—no parole. Ben could barely stand as Ransom pronounced the sentence. Boady had his hand on Ben’s shoulder and could feel his friend’s body convulse as he struggled to breathe.

Boady left the courthouse and drove home to begin work on the motion. He hadn’t eaten lunch or supper. He looked at the clock and saw that it was almost 9 p.m. Although he didn’t have the stomach for it, he knew he needed to eat. Chicken noodle soup, maybe. That usually went down easily.

When he stood to go to the kitchen, he got a look at his image in the window behind his desk. Maybe it was the imperfect reflection against the glass or the eerie glow that rose from the desk lamp behind him, but he looked half-dead, bags under his eyes, his hair cresting in an odd direction atop his head, his cheeks hanging slack from his bones. Diana would have scolded him for not taking better care of himself. If she’d spoken her mind, Boady was fairly certain that Diana would have scolded him for going back into the courtroom to begin with.

He needed to call her. He would let supper wait.

“We got the verdict today,” Boady said, struggling to gather the words together. Then he added, “They found Ben guilty.”

Diana inhaled sharply, but said nothing.

“I don’t know what I did wrong. I thought . . .”

“You didn’t do anything wrong, honey. This isn’t on you.”

“I’m the attorney. It’s absolutely on me. I should have won this. A better attorney could have gotten an acquittal. The State had nothing. Just speculation. I don’t know how I messed this up. It’s Miguel Quinto all over again. I’ve sent another innocent man to prison.”

“A better attorney? Like who, Ben Pruitt? Remember, Boady, he’s an attorney too. He was there in court with you every step of the way. If he thought you were missing something, he’d have told you. This isn’t Miguel Quinto. Ben was as much of a co-counsel as he was a client. You prepped the case together down to the last detail. I will not let you blame yourself for this. You did everything you could.”

“No. I missed something. I had to have missed something. I don’t know what, but it’s got to be here, right in front of me, and I missed it.”

“Boady,” Diana said in a gentle voice, “honey, don’t do this. Don’t let this eat you up. Guilt nearly killed you before. Don’t let that happen again. You’ll be no good for anyone, including Ben.”

Boady closed his eyes and noticed how much effort it took to open them again. “What are we going to tell Emma?”

Diana didn’t answer.

“Judge Ransom already sentenced Ben. He’s on his way to prison.”

“Do we . . . are we Emma’s parents now?”

With everything else going on, that thought never crossed Boady’s mind. “This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. The decree was only supposed to be for the time being, but it was binding.”

“What do we tell her?” Diana asked.

“We have to tell her the truth. We tell her that her father was convicted. Tell her that sometimes people get wrongfully convicted, and we have a Supreme Court that can fix that. Tell her we’re appealing her father’s case, and we won’t give up.”

“I’ll tell her. But is there a chance? Do you have a realistic shot to win at the Supreme Court?”

“I have some arguments. I’m still researching, but I think we have a chance.”

“Did you eat tonight?”

She knew him so well. “Yes, I had a bite.”

“A bite?”

“I’m on my way to the kitchen as we speak. I’ll eat something.”

“Boady, you did everything you could.”

He shook his head, even though there was no one there to see it. “I wish I knew that to be true.”

Chapter 49

Cases often lingered with Max Rupert, long after the jurors went back to their lives. The smell of death, the faces of the victims, the words of the guilty as they tried to talk their way out of the punishment they deserved, those fragments floated free in the waves. But the Pruitt case clung to Max heavier than most, sticking to his skin like old cigarette smoke. He would see Jennavieve’s face in the sideways glance of a passerby.

In those moments when the other sounds around him fell still, he would hear Boady’s words, and he would again feel the pain of that cross-examination. He had tried to exorcise that demon many times, but it continued to return. After court that day, Max drove home, where he hoped to find solace among the artifacts of a life he no longer recognized. The pictures of Jenni that adorned his walls seemed to look down upon him with reproach. He’d let her down. He’d exposed her memory to judgment. He had uttered her name amidst the push-and-shove of a murder trial, and it made him hate Boady Sanden. Boady brought Jenni’s name into that trial. Boady committed the betrayal. Boady Sanden had once been the kind of guy who would sneak into a cemetery after hours to check on a friend. Max didn’t have many friends like that, and now he had one fewer.

That night, Max parted the curtains of his anger and ended his friendship with Boady Sanden. He mourned that death for the few seconds that it deserved, and then he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

In the four days since Max sent Ben Pruitt to prison, a cold front had settled in over the Twin Cities, spoiling Halloween for thousands of children, forcing them to wear coats over their costumes. Max spent that morning sitting at his desk, piecing together the players in a drive-by shooting that he and Niki were now working. Two cubicles away, he heard Detective Voss tell his partner that he was heading down to the crime lab to meet with a tech.

Max stood and stretched to get Niki’s attention. “I think I’m going to go for a walk. Clear my head. You want a pastry if I pass by a place?”

Niki swiveled to Max, rubbing the bridge between her eyes. “You’re doing what?”

“I’m going to go for a walk. My head’s too full. I need to grab some fresh air and clear things up a bit.”

“It’s thirty degrees out there.”

“I promise I’ll wear my coat, Mom.”

“Fine.” Niki shrugged. “Anything cream-filled.”

Max nodded, grabbed his coat and left.

For a month now, Max kept away from his wife’s file—at least the one Voss had on his desk. He’d not spoken to Voss, just as Briggs and Walker ordered, other than the casual hello as they passed each other in the hall. Max received no updates. He went back to being the dutiful soldier, turning his attention to putting Ben Pruitt in prison. And he’d done what he’d been asked to do.

Maybe he felt that he deserved a reward for that, nothing big, just some small update on whether Jenni’s case had caught traction. But he got nothing.

As Max waited in his car outside of the crime lab, he went over the conversation he would have with Voss when they “accidentally” ran into each other in the parking lot. When Max saw Voss exit the building, Max stepped from his car and headed in the direction of the lab door. Max felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He looked and saw that it was Niki. Max shut the call down and returned the phone to his pocket.

“Hey, Voss,” Max called out.

“Hi, Max. What brings you down here?”

“Checking on some prints we took in a drive-by. And you?”

“That lady in Uptown with the crease in her head. They think it may have been a wrench. I just wanted to touch base with the techs before we did a second search.”

“So you’re not here about my wife’s case.”

“Max . . .” Voss took a half-step back. “You know I can’t talk to you about that case.”

“Christ, Tony. I’m not asking to be part of the team. I just—”

“Briggs told me not to talk to you about it. ‘Blackout.’ That was the term he used. He wants a complete information blackout where you’re concerned.”

“Briggs is a political dick. You know that, Tony.”

“That may be, but he’s still my boss. Yours too.”

“What if this were your wife, Tony? Would you be carrying Briggs’s water if it was your wife they murdered?”

“Don’t do this, Max. You don’t need to know this stuff. If it was my Brenda that got killed, I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t want to know this stuff.”

“Yes, you would,” Max said. “If that had been Brenda who got run down by a car, you’d want to know. You’d be standing in this parking lot in this cold November wind, and you’d be asking me to throw you a bone. You’d be begging me the same way I’m begging you. Let me in—just a little bit. I need to know.”

“You’ll get in trouble if they find out. And I’m not talking a letter of reprimand this time.”

Max knew this to be true. He’d been wrestling with that thought for weeks now, ever since getting called on the carpet in Walker’s office. Something about that meeting had left a bad taste in his mouth. At first he thought it was the reprimand, but as time went by, he realized that that wasn’t it. He came to understand that what bothered him was how easily he put his job ahead of everything else. His job had become the most important thing in his life. His job had always come first, even when it came to Jenni. In the end he asked himself, as a man, what was more important to him? And the answer came to him.

He looked hard into Voss’s eyes. He wanted the man to see that he meant what he was about to say.

“Voss, if having this job means that I turn my back on my wife, then I don’t give a fuck about this job. There’s right, and there’s wrong. When the rules get in the way of doing what’s right, do you follow the rules? Is that the kind of man you want to be? Or do you do what’s right? That’s a question that every man has to answer for himself. Well, I’ve answered that question. I have no choice. I have to see to it that my wife gets justice. And, quite frankly, fuck Briggs and fuck Walker and fuck any man who tries to stop me. I owe this to my wife. So, Voss, the question is, What kind of man are you?”

Voss shifted from foot to foot as he thought about his answer. At first, he couldn’t look Max in the eye. Max could tell that the man was struggling with his decision. Eventually, Voss looked at Max and nodded. “I’ve been working every angle, Max. I checked out the owners of that stolen car. I mean I vetted them like they were fucking al Qaeda. But they’re legit. Their car was stolen and that’s all there is to that. Whoever drove the car cleaned it out good. Not even skin cells on the steering wheel.”

“But they left my wife’s blood on the front.”

“And her hair.”

The sudden image that flashed past Max’s eyes must have been evident to Tony. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

“No.”

“We hit a wall, Max. The name on the storage-unit lease was fake. Paid in cash through the mail. No DNA on the payment or the envelope. No cameras. No trace evidence in the car or in the storage unit—I mean, other than what belonged to your wife.”

“So why keep the car in the first place? That doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes no sense; I agree,” Tony said. “The best we can come up with is that the car was maybe leverage or held onto for blackmail purposes. Either that or the perp just didn’t know a better way to make it disappear.”

“But then why send me a key to the unit?”

“Like I said. It makes no sense.”

Max’s phone buzzed again, and Voss looked at Max’s pocket and back to his face.

“You going to get that?” Voss asked.

Max ignored the phone and reached out a hand to Tony. “I appreciate the word. I promise I won’t be in your hair on this.”

“What hair?” Tony smiled and ran a hand across his nearly bald head. Max smiled back. “And, Max, you’re right. If this were my Brenda, I’d be saying ‘fuck Briggs and fuck Walker.’ If anything comes up, I’ll let you know.”

Max gave Tony a pat on the shoulder and turned back to his car, giving up any pretense that he’d come there for any purpose other than to talk to Tony Voss. On the way to the car, his phone buzzed again, this time a single buzz indicating a text. It was from Niki.
Am at Pruitt house. You need to get here ASAP
.

Max replied:
On my way
.

Chapter 50

Max walked into the Pruitt house to find Niki standing next to two men. One wearing khakis and a jacket, the other in dirty work clothes. They stood in a semicircle around a wad of cloth. When Max looked closer, he saw sheets, cream-colored with a large patch of black—dried blood—blooming from the center.