The Heavens May Fall (15 page)

“Truth is, I wasn’t feeling so well. I thought maybe the hot dog from Navy Pier didn’t agree with me.”

“That’s a pretty big hole in your alibi. How long does it take to get from Chicago to here?”

“Well, not counting flight delays, just under an hour.”

“No, I mean driving.”

“Um. I don’t think that I’ve ever driven from Chicago to here.” Ben pondered some more, then nodded. “No, I’ve never driven it.”

Boady pulled his computer keyboard to the edge of his desk and typed in the query. He clicked on different options and found that the most direct path to drive from Chicago to Minneapolis took just over six hours. He frowned as he did the math in his head.

“What?” Ben asked.

“You don’t have an alibi at all.”

“Of course I do.”

“No, Ben, you can get from Chicago to Minneapolis in just over six hours. We have the phone call and texts that put you in the room between five and five thirty. There’s no evidence that you stayed in your room after that. No phone calls. No computer log-in. No contact with anyone, am I right about that?”

A shadow of panic passed over Ben’s face, washing away what little color he had. His eyes darted from one imaginary point to another as though he was searching his memory for some touchstone that would confirm his presence in his hotel room. “I didn’t talk to anyone.”

“If it takes six hours to get from there to here, and no one saw you after six p.m. . . .”

“Oh, Christ. There’s got to be . . .”

“Any contact at all? Anything that might leave a trail?”

“Can the hotel tell if I turned the TV channel?” he asked.

“Not unless you purchased a pay-per-view channel. Did you?”

“No. I watched news programs.”

“Key cards will record every time you unlock your door from the hallway. Did you go out for ice?”

“I . . . I don’t think so. I might have, but I’m almost positive I didn’t leave the room.”

“So we have a problem.”

“But I didn’t have a car. I flew there. I have no way to drive back here.”

“That’s a different issue. If we could find one little piece of evidence, something irrefutable that puts you in that hotel room after . . . say, eight o’clock, then there’d be no need to discuss how you might have gotten back here. If we cannot find that piece, then we have to prove the negative—prove that you didn’t and couldn’t have driven back here.”

“What about the hotel surveillance? If there are any cameras, that’ll show I didn’t leave.”

“True. I’ll get that letter out today.”

“If they say no, I’ll also put a call into Max Rupert and ask that he secure it.”

Boady turned to a new page on his legal pad and wrote the word “Motive” at the top of the page. “We’ve covered opportunity, now let’s talk about motive. Rupert’s likely going through your life with a magnifying glass right now looking for reasons why you might want to kill Jennavieve. What’s he going to find?”

“I had no reason to kill Jennavieve. Things at home were pretty good.”

“Pretty good?”

“I mean, every relationship has its ups and downs.”

“Were you in an up or a down when you flew to Chicago? Tell me about these ups and downs.”

Ben didn’t look at Boady as he prepared an answer. “It’s been quiet around the house lately.”

“Lately?”

“Maybe a year now. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was like she didn’t want to do anything anymore, at least not alone with me. If Emma came along, we all had a great time. We went and rented one of those little sailboats on Lake Harriet last month. Had a blast. We took Emma to see
Pippin
when the touring company came through in February. Got all dressed up. Ate dinner at the Capital Grille. It was a terrific evening.”

Ben began to tear up again and paused to let the emotion pass. “But if I ever suggested a date night, just Jennavieve and me, she’d always have some reason why she couldn’t go. Or she’d invite another couple to join us and not tell me.”

“Did you ever talk to her about it?”

“I tried a few times, but she swore it was just my imagination. She seemed to need to be away from home as much as she could, going to events at the Minneapolis Club, sitting in on extra committee meetings for the theater trust, working extra hours at the foundation. I could understand wanting a break from me, but by staying away from the house, she was also staying away from Emma. That’s the part that didn’t make sense. Emma was her life.”

Boady stared at the legal pad as he contemplated a delicate way to approach the next topic. Finally he asked the question that he needed to ask. “Is it possible Jennavieve was . . .” He looked at Ben and waited for him to finish the question.

“Having an affair?”

Boady shrugged sympathetically and nodded.

Ben seemed to lose himself in his thoughts, undoubtedly stacking and restacking his recent memories, exposing them to this new light to see if they mutated into something ugly. After several minutes, he spoke in a whisper. “I don’t think so. I mean, I suppose it’s possible, but . . . no, not Jennavieve. She wasn’t that kind of person. You knew her. Granted, it’s been six years since we spent any real time with you and Diana, but you knew her. She’d never do something like that. I can’t see it.”

“I’m going to hire a researcher to do some digging. Maybe we’ll come up with something. I’ll also be getting the hotel surveillance footage. That might be all we need to get you off of Rupert’s suspect list.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. Any evidence you bring to the table will automatically be rejected by any jury. Let me do my work. You take care of that little girl of yours.”

Ben nodded and stood to leave. Boady followed him out to the living room, where Emma had fallen asleep on the couch. Beside her lay the sketch pad. Boady picked up the pad as Ben lifted his exhausted daughter, her head coming to rest on his shoulder.

Boady opened the door and watched as Ben carried Emma to his car, carefully laying her in the back seat. Ben stretched a seatbelt across Emma and shut the door. Then he waved to Boady and drove off.

After Ben left, Boady looked at the sketch pad and at the picture Emma had drawn. It almost took away his breath. She’d drawn her mother, and not the stick-figure-type drawing where you would need context to know what she was drawing. No. This picture was the product of a talented hand. The face and hair were that of Jennavieve Pruitt. She lay on her side on the ground, stretched out beneath a tree. Emma drew Jennavieve’s hands pressed together and tucked under her head in a makeshift pillow, and she wore a princess dress.

Above Jennavieve’s head, Emma had drawn a dialogue bubble, the little circle that animators use to show when someone is speaking. And in the bubble she wrote: “I miss my Emma.”

Chapter 21

The next day, just before three in the afternoon, Max Rupert rolled up to the Plaza Nineteen tollbooth in Rosemount, Illinois. He checked his watch and wrote down the time, this being the last of the eastbound plazas. As he neared the outer ring of Chicago, his options for alternate routes multiplied, so he would want to pay particular attention to the footage from tollbooths closer to the Wisconsin border, especially South Beloit. It would have been damn-near impossible for Pruitt to get back to Minneapolis in time to kill his wife without going through South Beloit.

Max started his trip that day from in front of the Pruitt house in Kenwood, where he leaned against his car and imagined Mrs. Pruitt’s murder taking place inside, doing his best to time the action: the killer stabbing her in the throat, forcing her onto the bed, holding her down as she bled out, grabbing the blankets from Emma’s bed, wrapping the body, hauling the body to the car. Then the killer returned to take the bedding from the master bed. Exactly why he took the sheets off the bed, Max hadn’t yet figured out. It would come to him in time. It always did.

Then Max got into his car and drove to the bookstore parking lot. He watched in his mind as Ben Pruitt backed the red sedan up to the dumpster. He tried to keep the killer faceless. He even fought against making the killer a man. But Ben Pruitt kept showing up. He saw Ben open the trunk, then open the dumpster lid. Full. So he pulls his wife’s body out of the trunk and drops it on the asphalt.

Max looked at his watch. About forty-five minutes. If the killer did any additional cleaning up, the time might round up to an hour.

Then Max got back into his car and set out for Chicago. He knew that the timing of his trip would not be scientifically accurate, given the flow of rush-hour traffic, but he wanted to travel in the path that Ben Pruitt would have taken. He wanted to put himself into the killer’s mind as much as he could.

The day before, he’d spent two hours on his computer, mapping and remapping various routes between the Marriott Hotel in Chicago and the Pruitts’ house in Kenwood. The timing would be tight. The computer maps showed that the fastest route, the Interstate, took just under six and a half hours. The back roads, with at least one stoplight in every little town that it passed through, would not have been fast enough to fit that window.

If Pruitt left the hotel after the text to his wife at 5:30, the drive would put him in Kenwood at midnight, just like Malena Gwin said. He kills his wife. Dumps her body. That puts him on the road by 1:00 a.m. The drive back would put him in Chicago at 7:00 a.m. Add in a little morning rush-hour traffic, and he’d be back in time to catch the first speaker of the morning.

Max had just passed Toll Plaza Nineteen when his phone rang. It was Niki.

“How’s the trip going?” she asked.

“I hit some construction north of Beloit, but it didn’t slow me down too much. And Pruitt would have been making the trip overnight, so he’d have had even less traffic. What’s up on your end?”

“I thought you should know: Dovey got the go-ahead to convene a grand jury. He wants us to have everything ready a week from Thursday.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“He says he has a case and he doesn’t want Pruitt jumping on a plane.”

“Pruitt knows he’s in the crosshairs. Hell, he’s hired a lawyer already. If he was going to jump on a plane, he’d have done it by now.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“Let me guess, he ignored you?”

“Also, I’m hearing rumblings about him. Word around the hall is that he’s put in for a judgeship. The Adler family has strong ties to the Democratic Party, and to the governor. If you do an image search for old-man Adler, you’ll get pictures of him fishing and hunting with the governor. They go back a long way.”

Max shook his head, even though there was no one there to see it. “Well, that explains a lot. I figured there was something lighting a fire under Dovey’s ass.”

“Dovey wants Emerson Adler’s blessing for that judgeship. Dovey gets that, and he’s in like Flynn. The problem he has is that old-man Adler’s dying. Dovey needs to get the case moving fast so he can get the endorsement before Adler dies. My source tells me that if Dovey can get an indictment before the old man croaks, the old man will send a letter to his buddy the governor.”

“Fucking politics.”

“Exactly.”

“We don’t have a murder weapon. The forensics aren’t in for the computers or the phones. All we have is motive with the prenup, and maybe opportunity.”

“We have Pruitt lying. He says he never left Chicago. Malena Gwin puts him at the scene of the murder at midnight. Those both can’t be true. If the jury believes Gwin—”

“But what if Gwin’s wrong?” Max said. “What if I come across some hotel staff person who can put Pruitt here later that evening? Dovey’s jumping the gun. If he waits, we’ll have a tighter case.”

“If he can get the indictment, I suspect he’ll have the Adler name backing him.”

“And if it all blows up, if the case falls apart, you can bet he won’t take the blame. He’ll hang us out to dry. He strikes me as that kind of political asshole. Fucking politics.”

“Such is the life we’ve chosen.” Niki said. “On the plus side, Dovey did send an e-mail to say that the Marriott security is expecting you. They’ll have the hotel footage ready.”

“And the tollbooth cameras?”

“Subpoenaed and on the way.”

Max shrugged into the phone. “At least he’s an organized political asshole.”

“Dangle a little opportunity in front of a guy like that and you’ll be amazed at the tricks he’ll do.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Max needed to focus on his driving so that he could finish the trip with no wrong turns—the timing had to be the centerpiece of the case. So he said good-bye to Niki and restarted his GPS navigation.

There was no way Ben Pruitt was clever enough to pull this off without a mistake. They always made mistakes. The ones who got away with it weren’t good—they were lucky.

And just like that, Max’s mind was back in Minneapolis, standing in the parking ramp where some lucky sonofabitch bounced over Jenni’s body and drove away—unseen, unheard, and unrepentant.

Yeah, that sonofabitch was lucky, alright. Lucky that Max had been frozen out of the investigation. But if Max ever caught up to the driver, he—or she—would be the most unlucky sonofabitch that ever walked the planet.

Chapter 22

The first time that Boady Sanden met Lila Nash, she still had bandages on her wrists and the shadow of old bruises on her face. Her ordeal had been the lead story on every media outlet in the Twin Cities, although her name never appeared in any story. The newspapers referred to her as the college student who would have been the next victim of a cold-blooded killer, had Homicide Detective Max Rupert not saved her life.

At the time of Lila’s ordeal, Boady had been working with Lila’s boyfriend, Joe Talbert, trying to exonerate a man who they believed had been wrongfully convicted of murder. That investigation led them to a man named Lockwood, who didn’t take the intrusion into his affairs lightly. If it hadn’t been for Max Rupert, both Lila and Joe would have been killed.

After the story lost its steam, Lila went back to school and Boady returned to his world of academia. That had been three years ago and Boady never expected he’d see Lila again. But just over a year ago she showed up at his office door, looking to go to law school. Boady could barely contain his fatherly pride when she chose Hamline. She possessed a brilliant mind and was a born puzzle solver.