by Allen Eskens
And when the reporters came, Boady had a snippet ready. “The State is racing to a conclusion that simply isn’t true. It’s political expedience in the guise of justice, but it’s not justice . . . it can never be justice when it snares an innocent man.” That would be enough for the television stations—a quick sound bite to put the potential jury pool on notice that Ben Pruitt was innocent. Boady stayed at the Government Center answering more questions, but he knew which quote would be on the evening news. And he was right.
Ben sat in a plastic chair in the attorney meeting room, a visiting room where sound recordings were prohibited. Boady handed Ben the bail study, a report put together by Probation with a recommendation for Ben’s bail amount. It was the first piece of bad news that Boady had to deliver that day. Ben went to the page with the recommendation, and his face froze.
“Ten million dollars?” He read it again. “Are they fucking crazy? Who do they think I am, a mob boss? Jesus Christ!”
“Calm down, Ben. You know this is only a recommendation.”
“Yeah, but you know it’s easier for a judge to rubber-stamp the bail study than to do any independent thinking. Who’s doing first appearances?”
“Judge Moncliff. What do you know about her?”
Ben nodded thoughtfully. “Not a bad judge. Big on rules and procedure. Imagine an old-fashioned schoolmarm. She’ll hold a prosecutor’s feet to the fire just as often as a defense attorney.”
“Any proclivities when it comes to bail?”
“She’s more fair than most. If we can get bail down to between one and five million, I should be okay.”
“Not necessarily,” Boady said. He reached into his case and pulled out the injunctive order freezing Ben’s assets and slid it in front of Ben. Boady watched the confusion in Ben’s eyes meld into concern, then fear.
“They can’t do this.” Ben whispered as though to himself. “I have to get out of here. I have to be with Emma. Why would they do this?” Ben continued to read.
“There’s a prenuptial agreement attached to the order,” Boady said. “Is that legit?”
Ben turned to the eight-page attachment and flipped through it. “Yeah, but . . .”
“Are your assets all traceable back to Jennavieve’s trust money?”
“Not all. I had a job too.” Ben’s voice rose to a level that could have been heard outside of their room. Boady held his hands up to shush Ben.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the prenup?”
“I didn’t think about it.” Ben shrugged and rolled his eyes. “I had no idea they would try to freeze my assets. I mean what kind of a person would . . . Anna did this?” Ben shook his head in disbelief. “How can anyone be so cold-hearted? I just can’t believe she’d do something like this.”
“I’m not talking about freezing your assets, Ben. Don’t you see? This prenup gives the State their motive.”
“What?”
“This document, as I read it, says that if Jennavieve died during the marriage, you inherit everything that is jointly owned by you two. But if she divorces you, she takes everything with her that can be traced back to her trust money. I’m assuming that’s a lot?”
Ben looked at Boady, his brow bent in thought, his eyes bouncing away now and then as though collecting another asset and adding it to the pile of what he would have lost in a divorce. “Good Lord,” Ben whispered. “That’s why I’m here? Because of that damned prenup? I have—or had—a successful law practice. I don’t need her money. I don’t want her money. Besides, if I kill her, I don’t get a dime. The slayer statutes would stop me from inheriting a thing. Didn’t they think of that?”
“They probably figured you didn’t think you’d get caught.”
“I can’t get caught if I didn’t do anything!” Ben’s voice again filled the room to overflowing. His face flushed red and his eyes took on a sheen.
“I know that, Ben. I’m on your side, remember?”
Ben lowered his head into his arms on the table and took in some deep breaths. “I know that, Boady. I know you’re just playing devil’s advocate. It’s what I’d do if I were in your chair. It’s just hard to believe this is happening. This isn’t supposed to be my life. I had a family and a career and everything a man could want, and now, I’m in jail getting shoulder-checked by big men with tattoos on their neck who feel a need to make some point. How’d this happen? I don’t understand.”
“Are you worried about your safety? We can ask for segregation.”
“No. It’s okay. I’ve got it under control. I’ve convinced a couple of the bigger apes that I can help them strategize their cases. They have public defenders, so now they think they have the ear of a real lawyer.”
Boady smiled to himself, remembering the years he toiled as a public defender, hearing those same criticisms. “I’m going to offer to surrender your passport,” Boady said.
“Absolutely. I’m not going anywhere. I just want to be out so I can take care of Emma. Not that I think you and Diana won’t do a great job. But she needs her father.”
“On that score . . .” Boady took a third set of papers out and slid them across the table.
Ben read the custody order and gripped the plastic table with his free hand. “No. This is crazy. We can’t—”
“Calm down.”
“If she thinks she’s getting Emma—”
“Ben!” Boady pulled Ben’s attention away from the papers. “I’m appearing on a motion to dismiss on the custody action at three o’clock. I’ve already filed the custody consent decree we signed. That’ll be in the judge’s file by the time we have the hearing. You’re the sole parent here. Anna Adler-King has no dog in this fight. She can squawk all she wants to, but she has no authority. Her only possible argument is that Diana and I are not fit to take custody—and that’s never going to fly. So we’ll win that one.”
Ben nodded. His hand grew slack and he released the table edge. “What about the order freezing assets? I need access to my accounts if I’m going to make bail.”
“I’m not challenging that just yet. We’ll use the Court’s order freezing your assets to argue that you don’t have access to funds, maybe keep bail down to a manageable amount. After the bail hearing I’ll bring a motion to vacate that order as well.”
“Is that one winnable?”
Boady frowned.
“We have a chance, though, don’t we?”
Boady, again, thought back to his days as a public defender, sitting with clients who came to the fight with no weapons, no defense, and were facing a mountain of evidence. No matter how bleak things looked, they wanted to hear words of hope. Boady remembered how he would tell his clients that there was always hope. It wasn’t a lie, even if that hope was a spider’s thread holding up a guillotine blade. “Yes, we have a chance,” Boady said. “I’ll do everything I can.”
Ben looked at Boady with a raw fear that Boady had seen in so many of his clients in the past, a fear he hadn’t expected to see in Ben. Ben dropped his head into his hands and breathed the shallow breaths of a man on the brink of psychological collapse. “I’m not making bail am I? I’m not getting out?”
Boady reached out his hand and rested it on his friend’s shoulder. “We need to take this one step at a time, Ben. Let’s get through the first appearance before we throw in the towel on making bail. I’m going to head over to court now and organize my thoughts. They’ll bring you through the back way. I want you to walk with your head held high. We’re going to fight this, Ben. We’re going to fight it and we’re going to beat it—one way or another. You hear me?”
Ben looked up, and Boady could see the tears that Ben strained to hold back.
Boady squeezed Ben’s shoulder again. “We’re going to win this, Ben.”
“Okay.” Ben tried to sound confident, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him. “I trust you,” he said.
Chapter 36
Boady had been in the courtroom many times since he ended his private prac
tice. He ran the Innocence Project for the State of Minnesota. That role required him to appear before judges on motions to vacate convictions or grant new trials. Boady brought the miracle of DNA to old cases, prying open what had once been considered sealed, forcing the State to re-examine evidence—usually eyewitness testimony—that had falsely convicted his clients. A great many guests within the various correctional facilities in Minnesota sought to roll those dice. And on that rare occasion when the DNA could conclusively exonerate a person, Boady would get things rolling and then hand the case off to the public defender or private attorney if a retrial were ordered.
But in the years since the Miguel Quinto case came crashing in on him, he’d never stood with a client in court. His clients were all incarcerated. He hadn’t sat at counsel table with a living, breathing client in years, and the last time he did, the guilt he felt over the death of Miguel Quinto nearly paralyzed him.
That malingering thought kept Boady company as he waited for Ben Pruitt to be brought up from his holding cell.
First appearances normally occurred in clusters, with deputies hauling five or six inmates at a time to court. Because of the media attention given to the Pruitt case, they set his first appearance as an individual hearing. Boady had read and reread the bail study, looking for mistakes, finding none. In the end, their recommendation for a ten-million-dollar bail came from nothing more than an educated guess. They would want a number that Ben would have a difficult time putting together, a number that would discourage him from running off.
Boady sat at the table to wait. Eight people sat in the gallery behind him. He recognized most of the faces as being reporters from the press conference the day before. He glanced at his watch and saw that he had ten minutes to wait until the hearing time. As he looked at his watch, he noticed a slight shake in his fingers. He hadn’t eaten lunch; his stomach wasn’t up for it. Now he began to suspect that that was a mistake. He drew little circles on his legal pad to give his nervous fingers something to do.
The door opened in the back of the courtroom and a man with flabby jowls and a black briefcase entered. With him walked Anna Adler-King and the process-server guy whom Boady had chased off his driveway the day before. Anna glanced at Boady but took no further notice of him.
The man with the jowls approached the prosecutor’s table, and Boady assumed the man was Frank Dovey, the prosecutor who ran the grand jury. He’d never met Dovey before, or if he had met him, Boady didn’t remember the experience.
“Are you Sanden?” Dovey asked.
“I am.” Boady knew damned well that Dovey would have watched the news coverage from the night before and would have seen Boady’s face. So the whole “are you Sanden” bit was nothing more than middle-school posturing—the beginning of the dance. Boady could feel a slight chill at the edge of his hairline where perspiration had begun to form. “And you are?”
“Frank Dovey, Assistant Hennepin County Attorney.” Dovey opened a briefcase and pulled out a stack of papers three inches thick, with a big manila envelope clipped to it. He handed the packet to Boady, and Boady flipped through it to see police reports, transcripts of witness statements, and reports from the computer forensic examination of Ben’s computers. In the envelope was a large stack of CD-ROMs. He didn’t look any further. He slid the discovery into his own briefcase.
“Is this it?” Boady asked in his best ho-hum tone. He thought he heard a slight quiver in his own voice.
“So far,” Dovey said. “If more comes in, you’ll get it.”
Had Dovey walked in and introduced himself to Boady in a civil manner, Boady would have returned the gesture in kind. Winning had everything to do with knowing the case better than your opponent and nothing to do with feather ruffling. If Boady had his way, Dovey would form the opinion that Boady was incompetent and ill-prepared. Boady considered whether he should be working so hard to mask his nervousness. After all, a show of weakness never failed to produce overconfidence in the other side. For now, Boady decided to simply mirror Dovey’s manner.
The clank of a heavy key in a steel door drew Boady’s attention to his left. The door opened and Ben Pruitt entered with his jail escort. Ben wore handcuffs on his wrists with a chain that laced through a metal loop on a leather belt around his waist. He had shackles on his ankles, and he shuffled the fifteen feet to his chair.
Ben sat down and Boady leaned over to whisper in his ear. “Anna Adler-King’s in the gallery. Don’t look. I don’t want her to think it matters, and I don’t want the press to pick up on her presence. I suspect they’ll have a press conference after this anyway.”
Ben nodded and kept his eyes forward.
The ratcheting sound of an automatic lock from behind the judge’s bench drew everyone’s attention, and a woman walked in and called for all to rise. Behind her, a short, bespectacled woman with cropped black hair and a black robe entered and took a seat behind the bench. Without looking up she announced: “Please be seated.” She took a moment to get situated, opened her file, and pulled out the bail study. “Call the first case,” she said.
Her clerk read from a sheet of paper. “File 27-CR-16-19887, State of Minnesota versus Benjamin Lee Pruitt.”
“Counsel, please state your appearances for the record,” Judge Moncliff said.
“Frank Dovey for the State.”
Boady stood. He cleared his throat to speak, but the words weren’t there. The air in his lungs didn’t move. He looked down at his legal pad, at the scribbles he’d been drawing. He thought of Diana, standing beside him, holding his hand. He cleared his throat again. “Your Honor,” he said, “I’m Boady Sanden for Mr. Pruitt, and Mr. Pruitt is present in Court.” With those words, his voice returned.
Judge Moncliff moved through the first appearance, reading Ben Pruitt his rights and informing him of the charges against him, an exercise required by the rules even though Ben was an experienced attorney. When the judge was satisfied that a proper record had been made, she asked Boady how he wanted to proceed.
Boady stood up. “Your Honor, we would ask that Mr. Pruitt be arraigned at this time and have his omnibus hearing set within seven days.” With that, Boady laid out the first tactic of his trial strategy—speed.
“Very well. How does your client plead, Mr. Sanden?”
“Your Honor, Mr. Pruitt pleads not guilty to the indictment.”
“A not guilty plea will be entered.” The judge said, “Would the State wish to be heard on the issue of pretrial release?”
“The State would.” Dovey stood. “Your Honor, I’ve received a bail study from Probation that, I believe, is woefully inadequate.”
“Here it comes,” Ben whispered into Boady’s ear.
“Your Honor, the defendant is charged with the cold-blooded and intentional murder of his wife, a murder that was, at the very least, intricate and methodical in its planning. On top of that, Mr. Pruitt is a man of significant means. He has access to millions of dollars to pay bail. He has his primary residence here in Minnesota but also has at least three other homes that we are aware of at this time, including a residence in France and one in Aruba. There may be more that we haven’t uncovered. It would be a simple matter for Mr. Pruitt to jump on a private jet and leave the country. If Mr. Pruitt is able to make it out of the country, we’ll likely never see him in this courtroom again.”
Dovey picked up the bail study and held it in the air. Small red blotches began to form on his neck as he amped up his tone. “Your Honor, you have to understand, if the net worth in this report is anywhere close to the truth, Mr. Pruitt will have an overwhelming incentive—once he sees the strength of the evidence against him—to just take off and live out his life somewhere where the United States cannot reach him. The State is asking that Mr. Pruitt be held without bail.”
Dovey sat down, tossed the bail study into his file like he was disgusted by it, and leaned back in his chair.
Judge Moncliff’s face remained expressionless. “Mr. Sanden?”
> “May I approach?”
“You may.”
Boady pulled out the ex parte order freezing Ben’s assets, handing a copy to Dovey as he passed on his way to the bench. After giving a copy of the order to the judge, he returned to counsel table. “Mr. Dovey presented this honorable Court with speculation on Mr. Pruitt’s net worth but failed to tell the Court that all of those assets have been frozen by court order. Either the State knew about this order and intentionally kept it from Your Honor, or in their zeal and rush to judgment, they made a decision before they had all the facts.”
“Mr. Pruitt doesn’t have the net worth set out in the bail study. If this Court set bail at one million, it would have the same effect as if bail were denied. Mr. Pruitt understands that he’ll be forfeiting his passport. He has no intention of leaving the state. He wants to be with his daughter in this time of grief. He wants to prove his innocence in her eyes, in the eyes of this Court, and in the eyes of the public at large.”
Boady put his hand on Ben’s shoulder for the final plea. “I implore you, Your Honor; do not set bail in excess of one million dollars. He will likely not be able to make that bail with his assets frozen. But at least give him a chance. Let him return to his daughter. Let him be with her while he exonerates himself.”
“Mr. Sanden, I appreciate your comments, but I feel that I would be remiss if I didn’t set bail in a substantial amount, given the nature of this case.”
From the corner of his eye, Boady saw Ben’s head sink to the table.
“I am compelled to set bail in the amount of ten million dollars.” Judge Moncliff said. “Should he make bail, he will be required to surrender his passport, remain law-abiding, not leave the state, and appear at all future hearings.” The judge folded her papers together and placed them in the file.
Dovey turned, made eye contact with Anna Adler-King, and gave her a smile.
Boady sat down beside Ben, who held his face in his hand. He put his hand on Ben’s back. He could feel the trot of his friend’s breath shake against his chest; he could hear the sound of sobs muffling through the man’s fingers. He knew, as did Ben, that there would be no release from custody until the jury rendered its verdict.