by Allen Eskens
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.
Boady stepped out from behind his memories as the first few students of the summer-session class began to file out of the room. He waited across the hall, and when the torrent turned to a trickle, Lila emerged, books in hand. She smiled when she saw him, and he waved her over.
“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Boady asked. He could see a flicker of surprise cross her fa
ce. “Um . . . sure.”
“Unless you have somewhere you need to be.”
“No, I have time for coffee.”
Boady smiled and motioned toward the stairs that led to the common area in the basement of the law school.
“Are you teaching a class this summer?” she asked.
“No, not this summer. I’m just here taking care of some scheduling details. How’s con-law going?”
“Not bad. It’s a little dry.”
They entered the common area, a smattering of tables, a bookstore, student mailboxes, and in the corner, vending machines. Boady pulled out his wallet and slid a buck into the slot and watched the paper cup fill with coffee so weak it barely deserved the name. He slid another dollar in and let Lila select her own roast.
He’d seen Lila often over the course of her first year, navigating the corridors, while debating points of law with her peers. He would wave or nod as they passed, but they never had a chance to chat. He remembered drinking coffee with her the last time they were together. On that occasion, they talked as friends do. Now that he was her professor, their conversation seemed stiff and contrived. He tried to get past that formality. “How’s Joe doing?” he asked.
She smiled. “He graduated and has a job with Associated Press.”
Boady nodded thoughtfully. “I see you made law review. How’d you do in your research and writing class?”
“Second in the class. I love the research part. As for the writing . . . well, let’s just say it’s good to have Joe around to give me advice.”
“I’m glad to hear that you like research, because I have a proposition for you. I am going on sabbatical this fall. I may be going back to court to defend a friend of mine. If it comes to that, I’ll need a good researcher. Someone with the eye of a puzzle solver. It’s part-time so you can do it around your school work. And it pays, oh let’s say, thirty bucks an hour. Does that sound fair?”
“Thirty dollars an hour? Hell yeah, I’ll do it . . . I mean if you think I’m the person for the job. What kind of things will I be doing?”
“Researching case law, drafting motions, maybe a little digging into the case. Right now, I’m just doing prep work.”
“What kind of case?”
“Did you hear about that woman they found in an alley last week? Jennavieve Pruitt?”
“I saw it on the news, but I haven’t been following it.”
“Her husband, Ben Pruitt, used to be my law partner. He’s asked me to represent him.”
“They think he killed his wife?”
“That seems to be the direction they’re headed. And, Lila, before you agree to do this, you should know that Max Rupert is the lead investigator.”
Lila’s eyes flashed with surprise and then fell to the table as her thoughts turned inward. “We’re going against Max?”
Boady watched as Lila subconsciously moved her fingertips over the scar on her wrist, a scar put there by a killer’s rope.
“Lila, I know you owe Max a great debt, and I’d certainly understand if you can’t—”
“No, I can do this,” she said. She followed Boady’s gaze to where the index finger of her right hand gently stroked the scar on her left wrist and she drew her hands apart, balling them into fists and let them rest on the table. “I can do this,” she repeated.
Chapter 23
The grand jury was set to convene at 10 a.m. on a rainy Thursday morning, chillier than it should have been for mid-August. Max and Niki received their subpoenas along with a note from Dovey setting up a meeting to go over their testimonies. Max still didn’t understand the logic—or lack of logic—in Dovey’s decision to rush this case to the grand jury. Max’s investigation folder still seemed thin.
He and Niki were led to the same conference room where they met with Dovey before. The room was empty, but Max spied the Pruitt file on the table. It looked every bit as thin as Max’s file. Max tapped the back of a chair, the one directly across from the file, and gave a single nod to Niki, who took that seat. Max took the seat next over.
When Dovey entered, he paused, looked at Niki, then at Max, then at the file. He strode, confidently, to the seat opposite Max, sat down, and pulled the case file in front of him.
Max and Niki shared a glance.
“I’m going to lead off with you Max,” Dovey said. “You’ll lay out the case from beginning to end in a logical, no-nonsense way.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” Max said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I have the beginning, but I don’t have the end yet. We have the lab reports, but we still don’t have the forensics from the computer. We don’t have the forensics from her phone. There are still witnesses that we haven’t contacted. Don’t you think we should wait until we button up those loose ends?”
Dovey rubbed his chin as if he was considering Max’s concern, but his gesture seemed hollow, as though he was only pretending to ponder. “You know, Max, I thought about it long and hard before calling the grand jury. What it came down to is this: There’s a killer wandering the streets. I believe Ben Pruitt killed his wife. I believe he’s a smart sonofabitch. And I don’t believe the computer forensics will give us anything more than what he wants to give us. Think about it, Max. Ben Pruitt knows how this works. Hell, he knows our investigation tactic as well as we do. He’s not going to plan his wife’s murder with this kind of care and then be stupid enough to leave something incriminating on his computer. Besides, if we find anything on the computer, we’ll just add it to the pile. We have enough now to get the indictment, and every day that Pruitt roams around free is another day that a murderer is on the loose in my city.”
Nice speech, Max thought. A little too rehearsed, and Max wondered if he’d given that same speech to his boss when he proposed the convening of the grand jury.
“So I’ll be putting you on the stand first, Max,” Dovey said. “The way I see it, our biggest weakness is the travel issue.” Dovey stopped talking and looked at Max.
Max took that as his cue to pick up the thread. “We should be getting surveillance video from the tollbooths within the next week or so. The neighbor, Malena Gwin, is certain she saw Ben Pruitt park a red sedan on the street in front of his house within an hour of Jennavieve Pruitt’s death.”
“What’s the window of opportunity for Pruitt’s alibi?”
Max looked at his notes. “His hotel key-card data shows that he entered his room at precisely 4:49 p.m. on the day of the murder. Room service delivered a sandwich to his room at 5:20. After that there’s no activity until his key card registers him entering his room at 8:32 the following morning.”
Dovey poked his index finger on the file. “The fact that he entered his room at 8:32 in the morning is proof that he just got back from the drive. Why else would he be going into his room at that early hour?”
“Remember,” Max said, “in his statement to me, he said that he’d started down to the conference, but went back to the room to get his schedule.”
“Seems damned convenient,” Dovey said.
“He’s a smart one,” Max said. “But it still leaves us with a window of time that fits. He gets to the house in Kenwood around midnight, when Malena Gwin sees him. He had an hour to kill his wife, clean up, and dump her body. Figure it’ll take a little longer to get back to the hotel because of rush-hour traffic and the 8:30 return fits perfectly.”
Max pulled out some still shots of a man in a tan jacket and black baseball cap exiting through the lobby of the hotel. “We don’t have anything specific. This picture shows a man, the right build and height, leaving the hotel about the right time, but we have no face shot.” Max pulled out a second photo of a man with a dark jacket and a red baseball cap on his head walking through the lobby of the hotel, going the opposite direction. “This was taken at 8:28 a.m. that morning. Again same height and build, different-color clothing, but his cap is pulled down over his eyes, just like the guy leaving the night before. Could
be Pruitt, or it could be a couple random guys.”
Dovey studied the pictures with hawkish intensity. After a couple minutes he stood up and left the conference room, came back with a magnifying glass, and resumed his examination. Dovey was focusing on the man’s shoes.
Niki glanced at Max and then said, “We blew the pictures up and looked at everything. The clothing is all different. He even had different shoes on.”
With those words, Dovey put the magnifying glass down. “So what I’m hearing is that . . .” Dovey again spoke to Max as if Niki weren’t in the room. “Ben Pruitt changed his clothes after he murdered his wife.”
“If he’s smart he would,” Niki said. “That gets rid of the trace evidence.”
“Did you search his suitcase when he got back?” Again, Dovey looked at Max as he spoke.
Niki answered him. “We secured the contents of his suitcase when he came back from Chicago. The clothes in that picture . . .” Niki pointed at the picture from the morning surveillance camera. “Those clothes were not in his suitcase. He must have anticipated that we’d get the footage from the lobby, and he made sure that we couldn’t match anything to him.”
“When we get the tollbooth footage it’ll seal his fate. Is there any alternative route that he could have taken to get around the tollbooths?”
“There are, but it’s going to really eat into his travel time. He’ll be going through suburbs and towns with stop signs and reduced speed limits. It’s possible, but he’d be taking a huge risk.”
“Well, then,” Dovey said. “All we need is to confirm how he got back here to Minneapolis, and Pruitt’s a sitting duck.”
“If that’s the case,” Niki said, “wouldn’t it be better that we hold off on the grand jury until we have that footage?”
For the first time since they arrived, Dovey turned to Detective Niki Vang and addressed her directly. His features twisted as though a foul odor had just assaulted him. “Detective, you do your job and I’ll thank you to let me do mine.”