by Allen Eskens
“So where’re the husband and daughter?”
“I have a theory, but I’m not a big fan of Ben Pruitt, so I don’t want to jump to any conclusion too quickly. We’ll need a warrant.”
Niki glanced around the room as if taking mental notes for her probable-cause application, then nodded. “I’m on it.”
Max handed her the photo of Emma. “Also, do an Amber Alert. Let’s assume that Pruitt has the child and is running.”
“Kills the wife and takes off with the child?”
“It’s as good a theory as any at this point.”
“But why take the bedding? Why haul the body to the bookstore parking lot?”
“I don’t know. But the best I can come up with is either Pruitt killed his wife and is on the run with Emma, or Pruitt didn’t kill his wife and the odds of us finding another body go way up.”
Chapter 7
Max stationed one officer at the front of the property and another in back, then called Bug to tell him that they found the crime scene. Bug and his partner, Dennis, had just finished combing through the contents of the dumpster behind the bookstore. As expected, they found nothing of interest. They would be at the Pruitt house shortly.
Max went to his squad car, an unmarked Dodge Charger, and slipped a digital recorder out of his jacket pocket. Then he used his phone to search the Internet for Ben Pruitt’s office number. He found it right away. He turned on the digital recorder and dialed.
A woman answered. “Pruitt Law Office, how can I help you?”
“I need to speak to Ben Pruitt.”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Pruitt isn’t available at the moment. Can I take a message?”
This didn’t surprise Max. He’d have been surprised if Pruitt had been in the office. “Is he at court, or do you expect him back soon?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t discuss Mr. Pruitt’s schedule. Can I take a message, or would you like his voice mail?”
“Can you give me his cell-phone number? It’s vitally important that I reach him.”
“I’m sorry, but I cannot give out his cell-phone number. Let me put you through to his—”
“Miss, my name is Detective Max Rupert of the Minneapolis Police Department. I’m not calling Mr. Pruitt about a case. I have a matter of life and death I’m dealing with, and it involves Mr. Pruitt. I need to reach him immediately. This isn’t a matter to go to voice mail. Do you have the ability to reach him or not?”
“Well, I . . . I could have him call you.”
This came at odds with what Max expected. “So you know where he’s at?”
“I do, but I am not at liberty to say, seeing as I don’t know who you are for sure. Give me your number, and I’ll get a message to him to call you. That’s all I can do.”
Max gave her his number and hung up to wait for a call he didn’t believe would come. After five minutes, his phone rang. Max turned on the recorder again and answered.
“Detective Rupert?”
“Mr. Pruitt?”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk to you, and I’d like to do it in person.”
“No problem. Just stop by my room, number 414 at the Marriott on Michigan Avenue.”
“Michigan Avenue?”
“Yeah. Chicago. So you can either fly down here to chat, or you tell me what this is all about over the phone.”
“Is your daughter with you?”
“What?” The tone in Pruitt’s voice lost its edge of cockiness. “My daughter? What do you mean, ‘is she with me’? No, my daughter isn’t with me. What’s going on? Is Emma missing?”
“Mr. Pruitt, calm down.”
“You’re scaring me, Detective. What’s—”
“Mr. Pruitt, we’re trying to find your daughter. Do you know—”
“Where’s my wife? Let me talk to Jennavieve. She’ll know. She has to know.”
Max searched Pruitt’s voice for any hint of pretense. He sounded genuinely upset and confused. “Mr. Pruitt, your wife isn’t here. We need to know where your daughter might be. Do you have any idea?”
“No. I don’t know where Emma is . . . I . . . I don’t understand.”
“Mr. Pruitt,” Max paused for a second to put the words together in his mind before he spoke them. “Mr. Pruitt, a body was found this morning, deceased. We believe it’s your wife.”
“My . . . but . . . I . . . I can’t breathe. Give me a second. I just need to . . . breathe.”
“Do you have any idea where Emma might be? Any at all?”
“My God. Detective Rupert, you have to find her. You have to find Emma.”
“Where could we look? We need a place to start.”
“What happened? When did she go missing? I . . . I have to get home.”
“Mr. Pruitt, we’re doing all we can to find your daughter. Does your daughter have a cell phone?”
“No. We were going to get her one for her birthday in October. What happened to Jennavieve? How’d she . . . I mean . . . are you sure?”
“We’ll need you to make a final ID, but we believe it’s her. I can’t discuss any more right now.”
“I’m on my way. I’ll catch the next flight back. If you hear anything, I mean anything, you’ll call me, right?”
“Sure, but in the meantime, if we could look through your house, maybe there’s a note or something else that will tell us where Emma is.”
“Absolutely. You can search anywhere you like. Do what you need to do to find my daughter.”
Max disconnected with Pruitt, tucked the recorder back into his pocket, and called Niki. “How’s the warrant coming?”
“I’m just getting ready to run it over to the courthouse.”
“Add this to the probable cause: ‘The victim’s husband was located by phone, but the victim’s daughter is still unaccounted for. The victim’s husband claimed to not know the whereabouts of their daughter.’”
“You believe him, Max?”
Max thought about the fear he heard in the man’s words. Pruitt was either genuine, or very good at playing the part. “I’m holding off making a judgment right now. He seemed shaken up. He even granted consent to search his house.”
“We have consent? So we don’t need a warrant?”
“Get the warrant anyway. You don’t know this guy. I don’t want him pulling his consent and screwing with us. Also, get an order to seize his business computer. He’ll probably claim attorney-client privilege, but let’s secure it so he can’t delete anything. We’ll let the County Attorney figure out what we can look at later.”
“You think Pruitt’s a good bet for this?”
“He says he’s in Chicago, and he sounds like he’s freaking out about his missing daughter, but that could all be bullshit. He could be on the level, but the guy’s a snake. Let’s be extra careful on this one. I don’t want to step into any traps.”
Chapter 8
The open front door of the Pruitt home was thick enough to stand up to a medieval battering ram and smelled of wood oil. Max stood just outside of the door and watched as Bug and Dennis inspected the runners of the mansion’s elegant stairway for footprints. Niki arrived with the search warrant just about the time that Bug gave them a nod that it was okay to enter the house. Max and Niki slipped cloth booties over their shoes, put on gloves, and made their way upstairs to the master bedroom.
Nothing in the room gave the impression of a fight. Books on the nightstand stood next to a water glass and a charging cell phone. Knickknacks, a jewelry box, and pictures on the dresser appeared orderly. The bed, with its missing sheets and bloody towel, held the only signs that something bad took place in the room. Max waited for Bug to snap a few pictures of the towel in the middle of the king-sized mattress before picking it up and inspecting it. He found three long strands of red hair matted into the blood in the towel. They were consistent in both color and length with the hair he’d seen wrapped around Jennavieve Pruitt’s face that morning.
Max pulled out his digital rec
order and began dictating notes for his report. “Three strands of red hair were matted within the area of dried blood on the towel found on the bed in the master bedroom. These strands appear to be visually consistent with the hair of the deceased, Jenni Pruitt.”
“Jennavieve, you mean,” Niki said. She was on her hands and knees looking under the bed.
“What?”
“You called the deceased ‘Jenni.’ Her name is Jennavieve.”
“Did I say Jenni?”
“I’m pretty sure.” Niki reached under the bed, her arm buried up to her shoulder, her eyes focused on something at the end of her reach. “Hey, Bug, come get a picture of this.”
Bug got on his belly and snapped four shots of whatever it was that Niki found. Then Niki pulled out a second towel, white with splotches of blood, in long oblique patches, staining half it. Niki turned the towel sideways as if she were going to wrap it around her body, and the blood stains matched up to where the blood would have spurted out of Jennavieve Pruitt’s neck.
Max pointed at the towel in Niki’s hands. “She used that one to dry her body and this one for her hair,” he said.
Niki sniffed her towel and nodded. “Body wash.” They put their towels into paper evidence bags.
“Detectives?” Bug had stopped taking pictures and was looking at a wooden display case about the size of a cereal box centered on the fireplace mantle. Niki and Max joined him. The mahogany shadow box had a blue felt interior that appeared to have been molded to hold a missing, ceremonial dagger. Max could tell from the shape of the mold that the dagger’s blade was long and angled on both sides to suggest a double-edged blade. The handle, also long with a walnut-sized pommel at the end, gave the impression that the knife was more of a decorative piece than an actual weapon. The cross guard, the piece of metal that keeps the hand from sliding from the handle to the blade, curved toward the blade almost in a perfect C. An inscription on a gold plate attached to the bottom of the display read: “FOR CARVING OUT MORE PROTECTED LAND.”
“Get a picture of that with measurements and send it to my phone. I want to show this to Maggie. Also check for prints. If that missing knife turns out to be our murder weapon, someone had to hold the box to pull it out.”
Max went back to the bed and followed the blood trail, which started at the side of the bed and led to a bathroom larger than Max’s bedroom, complete with a hot tub, a double-sink vanity, and a tiled shower big enough to host a small party. The floor was dry, but a washcloth wadded up on the floor was still damp. Niki watched from the doorway of the bathroom as Max narrated his thoughts.
“Mrs. Pruitt takes a shower . . . the washcloth is still damp, so sometime last night fits with what Maggie said. She wraps a towel around her body and another around her hair. She . . .” he walked to the vanity, where a bottle of vanilla body lotion lay on its side, and next to it, a hair dryer and night cream. “She puts body lotion on her legs, maybe some night cream on her face. But she doesn’t dry her hair.”
“She’s interrupted,” Niki said. “She hears something.”
Max nodded agreement. “She walks into the bedroom to check.” Max walked to the spot where the blood trail began, just past a corner that separated the bathroom and walk-in closet from the rest of the bedroom. He stood facing the bedroom door. “She turns the corner and sees her killer. The killer stabs her in the neck. Blood hits the wall as she is moving toward the bed. We have blood on the towel around her body. The towel falls to the floor, and she falls onto the bed?”
Niki looked at the trail of blood spanning about seven feet and shook her head. “Maybe the force of the blow sent her to the bed, or maybe the killer pushed her there. She didn’t have defensive wounds, so no struggle.”
“She was either surprised, or she knew her attacker. Either way, the attack happened quickly. There’s very little blood on the floor. She’d have been pushed onto the bed right away. She lands with her throat in the middle of the mattress and bleeds out. The towel around her body falls off or is pulled off and gets kicked under the bed. The killer lets her bleed out here and then wraps her in Emma’s bedspread to haul her to the bookstore.” Max crossed his arms over his chest, bringing his right hand up to grip his chin in contemplation. “But why take her to the bookstore?”
“And where’s the bedding from this bed?” Niki asked. She stepped into the walk-in closet. “It’s not up here anywhere, and it’s not in the laundry room. It looks like Jennavieve Pruitt was getting ready for bed, so logic suggests that the bed was already made.”
“And where is Emma?” Max asked. “No sign of a struggle. The killer took Emma’s bedspread, but the rest of her room is untouched. If she was taken, where’s the fight?”
“She left voluntarily?”
“Left with someone who’s carrying her dead mother wrapped in a blanket?”
Niki, who’d been looking down at the trail of blood in the carpet, suddenly jerked her head up. “Her bed was made.” Niki skirted past Max and into Emma’s room. “Look. Her sheets are still tucked in. Emma didn’t go to bed here last night. If Jennavieve Pruitt was killed within a couple hours of midnight, Emma would have likely been in bed. She didn’t sleep here last night.”
“And, if she wasn’t here, Mrs. Pruitt would have known where she was.” Max went to the nightstand and picked up the cell phone.
Bug, who still stood beside the knife case, piped up. “You’ll mess up the metadata if you turn that on.”
“We have a missing child.” Max said. “I suspect that Forensics will forgive me this once.” He turned on the phone and saw that it was not password-protected. He also saw an icon for text messages. He touched it and read the most recent text, which came from Ben Pruitt.
At 5:30 p.m. Ben Pruitt texted: “Going out with some folks from conference. Tell Emma I love her and give her kiss good night for me.”
At 5:35 p.m. the reply from Jennavieve Pruitt: “OK.”
“This makes it sound like Emma was going to be here all night,” Max said. “Someone’s plans changed?”
Max was about to dig into older text messages when a uniformed officer called up from the bottom of the steps. “Detective Rupert, there’s a little girl out front. Says her name is Emma Pruitt and that she lives here.”
Chapter 9
Max hurried down the steps, stopping briefly at the front door to remove his latex gloves and booties. At the bottom of the outside steps, standing on the street curb, was a little girl talking to a female officer. Max took a couple deep breaths, not wanting to alarm the child, and strolled down the walk to her.
Emma looked like her picture, strawberry-blonde hair, cut with bangs, skinny arms and legs, gangly and awkward in her stance. She glanced back and forth between the crime-scene tape and the female officer until she saw Max walking down the steps, then her attention turned to him and stayed there.
“Hi, are you Emma?”
The girl nodded her head, but said nothing.
“I’m Max. I’m a police officer.” He slid his jacket aside to show her the gold shield in his belt. “How are you?”
Emma shrugged her shoulders and glanced again at the crime-scene tape behind Max.
“We’re here to meet with your father. He was worried about you.”
“He’s in Chicago,” she said.
“I know. I talked to him on the phone. He didn’t know where you were, so he called us. Where did you just come from?”
Emma pointed up the block and said, “Catie’s house.”
“Does Catie live up that way?”
Emma nodded.
“Is Catie a grown-up, or one of your friends?”
“Friend.” Emma’s eyes danced from Max to the officer then to the house and all of its activities. “Where’s my mom?”
“Do you know if Catie’s mother is home? I’d like to talk to her. Could you show me where she lives?”
Emma looked at the female officer then at the ground. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
The female officer went down on one knee so that she could be at Emma’s level. “That’s right, sweetie. It’s important that you be very careful, but we’re the police. We protect little girls like you.”
Max had seen the female officer around, but he couldn’t remember her name, so he glanced at her name tag. Sandra Percell. “Emma, would you feel better if Officer Percell walked with us?”
Emma nodded.
“Okay. Why don’t you show us where Catie lives?”
Emma walked up the block, the way she’d pointed earlier. As they walked, Max sent a text to Ben Pruitt. Emma is okay. Was at neighbor’s house.
Two blocks later, they approached the front gate of a house that looked like a grown-up version of a doll’s house, two stories of blue siding and white trim capped with cedar-shake shingles. The place even had a turret. Emma led them to the front door, and Max rang the bell. The woman answering the door froze halfway through the motion, a look of fear taking over her features.
“Oh my. Is something wrong?” The woman looked back and forth between Max and Officer Percell.
“Everything’s fine, ma’am. Would it be alright if Emma stayed here for a little while?”
“Of course.” The woman opened the door wider to let Emma pass. “Catie’s upstairs in her room. Go on up.” Emma started running up the stairs but paused near the top to have one last look at Max. Her expressionless face couldn’t hide her understanding. She knew something was wrong. Max could see it in her eyes. She knew he lied to her. Max held her stare for all of two seconds before he looked away and she disappeared up the stairs.
“I know I probably should have walked Emma home,” the woman said. “But she’s ten, and that’s old enough I think. When I was ten, I was babysitting and everything, so I didn’t think there’d be anything wrong—”