by Allen Eskens
“Got anything yet?” he asked.
“Nothing that helps us. I’ve knocked on all the doors in the immediate area and no one heard or saw a thing. No surveillance cameras. None of the neighbors recognized the picture, but the bookstore manager, who came by to open up the store, thought our victim looked familiar, like she’d been in the store browsing around at some point, but she couldn’t put a name with the face. If she’s been to the bookstore, it’s more likely than not that she has some tie to Kenwood. Any luck on your end?”
“Nothing yet, but I’m waiting to hear back from a diamond merchant in Canada. The earrings were branded and had a serial number. We might be able to get a name if we can track that serial number. But for some reason, the guy from Canada is reluctant to—”
The phone buzzed in Max’s hand. He looked at the screen and saw the number from Toronto.
“Gotta go, Niki. This should be him.” Max switched callers, and a voice he didn’t recognize, a woman’s voice, greeted him.
“This is Victoria Lowell. I’m the vice president in charge of customer relations here at Hercinia Diamonds. I’ve been authorized to help you locate a store that sold a pair of our diamond earrings. If you give me the serial number, I can tell you which retail outlet sold them, but I’ll have no way of knowing the buyer.”
“That’s okay,” Max said. He read the serial number and listened to the sound of her keyboard clicking.
“Those earrings were purchased from us by Galibay Jewelry in Minneapolis.”
Max had never heard of the store. He did a search on his computer and read that Galibay Jewelry was a small shop in Uptown that catered to high-end jewelry buyers. No store hours, the only way to see their merchandise was by appointment. The website had a phone number for making appointments, but no e-mail address or fax number.
“Ms. Lowell, I don’t suppose you have a fax number for Galibay on file?”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. Then, “Yes, I do have a fax number.” She read the number to Max, who typed it into the subpoena form, along with the other pertinent information about the store. After he ended his call from Toronto, Max sent the completed subpoena to the County Attorney’s Office for a signature and called the number for Galibay Jewelers. A pleasant-sounding woman answered the phone.
“This is Detective Max Rupert of the Minneapolis Police Department. Could I speak to the owner or manager there?”
“This is Miriam Galibay. I own the store.”
“Ms. Galibay, I’m trying to ascertain the identity of a woman found dead this morning.”
Ms. Galibay gave a slight gasp.
“I need your help.”
“Certainly, but how . . .”
“The deceased was wearing a pair of Hercinia diamond earrings. We contacted the company, and they informed us that the earrings were purchased by you for resale. We need to find out who bought those earrings.”
“Oh . . . Oh my, I . . . I’m afraid I cannot help you. Our clients rely upon us to protect any information given to us. I mean, you’re just a voice on the phone. I can’t give out client information to anyone who calls. You understand, don’t you?”
Max looked at his inbox and saw the completed administrative subpoena scanned into an e-mail. He sent it to the printer. “Ms. Galibay, I’m going to fax you an administrative subpoena. It requires you to provide me with the name of the owner of those earrings. I understand your situation, but this is important.”
Max walked to the printer with his cell phone pressed to his ear, pulled the subpoena, and sent it to Galibay as they talked.
“But, Detective, how do I know that you are who you say you are? I don’t know what an administrative subpoena is. I have a reputation to protect.”
“Ms. Galibay, call the Minneapolis Police Department and ask for Detective Rupert. They’ll connect you back to me so you know that I am who I say I am. If I have to, I could drive down there and hand-deliver the subpoena, but this is urgent. Can you just call me back? You’ll see that I am who I say I am.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.” The line went dead.
Max went back to his cubicle and waited for his phone to ring. Thirty seconds. One minute. A minute and a half. Two minutes. Finally, after two minutes and fifteen seconds, the phone rang.
“Max Rupert here.”
“Detective Rupert, this is Miriam Galibay. I have that information for you. The name of the person who purchased those earrings is Benjamin Pruitt.”
Max nearly dropped the phone. “Ben Pruitt, the attorney?”
“Well, I don’t know if he’s an attorney, but I have an address on Mount Curve Avenue, if that helps.”
Max scribbled the address down, thanked Ms. Galibay, and ended the call. The urge to spit caused Max to tighten his lips together.
Max typed Ben Pruitt’s name into the computer, and the Internet fed Max thousands of responses. He did a search for images and found dozens of pictures of the man he knew to be Ben Pruitt. About halfway down the page, he saw a picture of Ben standing next to a stunning redhead—the woman from the alley. Max clicked on the link and read a caption identifying the couple as Ben and Jennavieve Pruitt, attending a political fundraiser.
Max called Niki as he ran out the door, giving her the victim’s name and address. He would meet her there.
Chapter 5
On the drive back to Kenwood, Max thought about the last time he saw Ben Pruitt. It had been in a small conference room in the office of the Minnesota Professional Responsibility Board two years earlier. Pruitt’s disciplinary hearing lasted a little over an hour, but the road to get there took the better part of a year.
It began with the trial of a man named Harold Carlson, a roofing contractor who crushed his girlfriend’s skull with a roofing hatchet, a particularly evil-looking tool with a hammer head on one end and a small axe on the other. Her sin had been to kiss another man, one of Carlson’s employees, a man who also owned a roofing hammer. Carlson would take the stand and swear that he never touched her. He had no idea how her arms and legs became burned with road rash and other marks consistent with being thrown from a moving vehicle.
A motorist discovered the woman’s body in a heap along the road, and before the sun rose that morning, a trail of suspicion brought Max to Harold Carlson’s home.
Max found Carlson asleep on his couch, the stench of hard liquor seeping from the man’s pores. Max also found the roofing hammer, with the girlfriend’s hair and blood on it, lying in plain sight on the seat of Carlson’s truck. Max had been alone when he found the hammer, and one of the techs had walked past the truck without having noticed it. Both sides knew that the case rested on Max’s testimony about finding the hammer.
On cross-examination, Carlson’s attorney, Ben Pruitt, grilled Max, suggesting that Max found the hammer along the highway where the body had been found. Pruitt accused Max of then planting the hammer in Carlson’s truck. Pruitt’s questions pointed out that Max had the opportunity to plant the hammer. He’d been at the scene where they found the body. There had been moments when he hadn’t been observed and could have secreted the hammer into his car. He was alone when he claimed to have found the hammer in the truck, a location where a crime-scene tech, a woman trained to observe and find murder weapons, had walked past without seeing the large silver hammer. Max swatted the questions away with honesty. It happened the way it happened, and he didn’t have to explain it any further.
But then Pruitt asked for and was granted permission to approach the witness. He held a single-page document in his hand, and as he walked up to the witness stand he spoke in a loud clear voice so that everyone on the jury could hear.
“I’m showing you defense Exhibit 42. Do you recognize this document?”
Max took a moment to read the document then answered. “I’ve never seen this document before.”
“You don’t remember receiving a reprimand from your superiors for falsifying evidence in a case just two years ago?”
&nbs
p; Max looked at the Assistant County Attorney and wondered why the man hadn’t jumped up to object.
Pruitt continued. “Falsifying evidence, just like planting evidence, is a serious thing for a police detective to do.”
Max glared at Pruitt, wanting more than anything to shove that forged document down the man’s throat. “Mr. Pruitt, I’ve never seen this document before because this document never existed before. I’ve never received—”
Finally the prosecutor stood up and shouted, “Objection, Your Honor. Lack of foundation. Lack of authenticity. This document has never been disclosed—”
“Approach! Now,” the judge ordered. Both attorneys walked up to the bench. The judge pressed a button that filled the court with white noise so that the bench conference would not be heard by the jury. Despite the white noise, Max could hear occasional words or phrases as the exchange grew heated.
“It’s cross-examination, I don’t need to disclose.”
“This document has to be a forgery. Detective Rupert said he’s never seen it before.”
“Detective Rupert’s a damned liar.”
At that last one, the judge piped in and pointed a finger at Pruitt. Max couldn’t hear the words, but the redness in the judge’s face spoke volumes. After sending the two attorneys back to their respective tables, the judge instructed the jury to disregard Exhibit 42 and the statements of Mr. Pruitt. He was asking them to not remember Pruitt’s assertion that Max had been reprimanded for falsifying evidence. And by asking them to disregard that point, he was embedding Pruitt’s words in the brain of each juror.
At the end of Max’s testimony, the Court took a short recess during which Max convinced the prosecutor to get the Court to order that Pruitt provide the State with a copy of Exhibit 42. Pruitt argued against it, saying that because it was not received into evidence, he had no obligation to share his work product. The judge was not in a mood to put up with that, and the State got a copy of the document.
Exhibit 42 turned out to be a carefully forged letter of reprimand confirming that Detective Max Rupert had been found to have planted a syringe in the purse of a woman whose roommate died of a heroin overdose. The case never existed. The letter of reprimand had been the creation of someone’s desperate imagination. But whose?
At Pruitt’s disciplinary hearing, Pruitt testified that his investigator produced that document as part of standard background research on Detective Rupert. Pruitt went on to suggest that his client, the roofing contractor, must have paid the investigator to forge that document.
The investigator denied it and was facing a licensing board himself at the time. In the end, the Board of Professional Responsibility took Pruitt’s license to practice law away for sixty days and issued a public reprimand. The Board concluded that Pruitt knew or should have known that the document was a forgery. It chided his failure to use due diligence to confirm the authenticity of the document before presenting it to a court. His act, in the end, was a fraud upon the court.
Pruitt’s reprimand was a public one and made it into the business sections of both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch. Max smiled when he read the articles. He thought the newspaper articles would end the attorney’s career, but somehow it seemed to have the opposite effect.
Now, Pruitt’s wife was found naked and dead in a parking lot in Kenwood, and a theory was taking shape in Max’s mind.
Chapter 6
The Pruitt’s house may have been a mansion to some, probably not in the eyes of someone who lived in a true mansion, but it was big and square and solid, as though it had been cut from a single block of stone. It stood on a corner lot raised up from the street by a retaining wall that had the appearance of a pedestal upon which the trophy house gleamed. Pruitt had never impressed Max as being an attorney of such a stature that he would be able to afford that kind of house.
Niki stood at the door of the house with a uniformed officer at her side. Two more officers stood on the sidewalk at the base of a set of steps cut through the retaining wall. One more officer arrived just behind Max. Max signaled for the officers to follow him up the steps to Niki’s position.
“I’ve rung the doorbell and knocked. No answer.”
Max turned to the small group of uniformed officers. “Okay, we’re doing a welfare check here. We found a body this morning; we believe foul play is involved. We’ve identified the victim as Jennavieve Pruitt, and this is her house. We don’t have a warrant, so we’re going in just to make sure that there are no other victims, like maybe a family member in need of help. No going through drawers or cupboards. Just look for bodies. If you see anything else in plain view, call Niki or me, got it?”
The officers all nodded.
“You two,” Max pointed at two of the officers. “Go around back and check the garage and any out-buildings.” Then he addressed the remaining two officers in turn. “You go with Detective Vang, and you with me.”
Everyone drew their weapons. Max tried the handle on the door, and the door clicked open. Unlocked.
“Benjamin Pruitt!” Max yelled. “This is Detective Max Rupert of the Minneapolis Police Department! We’re coming in! Mr. Pruitt, are you here?” Max entered the foyer and turned to the left, his companion officer behind him. Niki turned right.
“Mr. Pruitt, it’s the police!” Niki shouted. “If you’re here, call out. We’re here to help!”
Max’s path took him into a study, a room with mahogany walls and twelve-foot ceilings—a corner office with paintings on the wall, the blurry kind that Max knew to be the work of an impressionist, the kind of painting that his Jenni loved so much but that he never quite understood.
On another wall Max saw a row of family photos, one of Pruitt standing beside Jennavieve. Next to that, a picture clipped from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, with Ben Pruitt standing next to Jennavieve. The caption identified the couple as well as a third person in the picture, their daughter, Emma. Max hadn’t even noticed the girl, about eight, maybe nine years old, peeking out from behind her mother’s black evening dress, the girl’s lower lip pulled into a bashful bite.
“They have a daughter,” Max yelled to Niki. “Her name is Emma.”
Max passed through the study to a mudroom and back porch, rain boots, three pair, in a neat row, unused slickers hanging on hooks, the smell of cedar and cloves rising from a wooden bowl of potpourri in the corner. Nothing amiss.
Max continued to call out his presence, as did Niki from the other side of the house. The mudroom connected to a pantry stocked full of canned and dry goods, organized by category, then content, then size. Max passed though the pantry and entered the kitchen at the same time that Niki entered the kitchen from the dining room.
“Anything?”
Niki shook her head no and opened the last unchecked door, which led down to a dank-looking basement. Niki called down. “Mr. Pruitt? Emma? It’s the police. We’re coming down.”
Max motioned and led his officer back to the entry and the staircase leading upstairs. They took the stairs two at a time. The first bedroom they came to had been turned into a storage room, filled with boxes and Christmas ornaments and old exercise equipment. The officer went to check the closet and shook his head no to Max.
Across the hall, Max found Emma’s room, painted in little-girl colors with a canopied bed, its sheets—horses and stars—matching the spread that had been wrapped around her mother at the bookstore. Whoever killed Mrs. Pruitt had used Emma’s bedspread to haul her out of the house.
Max looked around the room. Emma played soccer and had won four trophies, which filled a corner of her dresser. She’d pinned pictures of her and her mother and father on the wall above her bed, pictures taken on a warm beach with a bright-blue ocean in the background. Another set of pictures captured her and her father riding on horseback in a jungle. On her dresser, next to her soccer trophies, stood an eight-by-ten of Emma, a school portrait.
At a minimum, this little girl’s bed was
now connected to a murder. It was possible that he might also have a missing child on his hands. He had probable cause to issue an Amber Alert. Max eased the back off the frame and slipped the picture out.
At the end of the hall they came to the master suite. There Max found his crime scene. To the left of the king-sized bed, blood spattered in a broken arc hitting the wall, spraying the keepsakes on a bedside table, and ending in the middle of the high-end Amish-built bed that had been stripped of its bedding. In the middle of the bare mattress, a large towel lay half folded, half wadded. Max pulled latex gloves from his pocket, snapped them on, and lifted a corner of the towel to expose a stain of blood the size of a turkey platter.
Max motioned for the officer to stand still and not move while he checked the bathroom and walk-in closet. He stepped carefully so as not to disturb anything, and he made no move beyond what was absolutely necessary to make sure there were no other bodies. Then he pulled his phone out and called Niki.
“Anything in the basement?”
“Nothing out of place.”
“Come on up here to the master bedroom. I found our crime scene.”
Max instructed the officer beside him to go down and check in with the two officers searching the out-buildings. “Tell them to finish the search for bodies, then secure the perimeter. Stay put until we get a search warrant.”
When Niki entered, Max pointed at the first traces of blood in the carpet between the master bedroom and the master bath. “It starts here. I think your shower theory works. The blood seems to follow a path, as if the victim was stabbed here and was then thrown onto the bed, where she bled out. The bedspread we found on the victim came from the daughter’s bed down the hall.”