by Allen Eskens
“Ma’am, can we talk . . . somewhere that we won’t be overheard?”
“Um . . . sure. Come on in.”
Max nodded to Percell, who nodded back and left to return to the Pruitt house. Catie’s mother led the way through the house and out the back. She brought Max to a gazebo painted the same blue and white as the house and that overflowed with an array of flowers. On the gazebo they took seats opposite one another.
“My name is Detective Max Rupert.” He held out his hand and the woman took it.
“I’m Terry Kolander,” she said. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not at all, Ms. Kolander. I’m going to tell you some things that I need you to keep to yourself for a little while. Can we have that understanding?”
“Of course. I used to be a nurse. I understand confidentiality.”
“That’s good.” Max leaned forward in his chair so that he could talk in a hushed tone. “Did Emma spend the night here last night?”
“Yes.”
“What time did she come over?”
Terry thought for a moment. “A little after five. Jennavieve called and asked if I could watch Emma for the night. She said she had something she had to attend to. I said yes, of course. Catie and Emma are best friends.”
“Did Mrs. Pruitt say what she was going to do last night?”
Terry raised a hand to her lips. “Has something happened to Jennavieve?”
“Was it a business meeting or something personal?”
“Oh, no. I mean, um . . . I don’t think she said. She just said . . . she said ‘Can you watch Emma for the night? I have . . .’” Terry furrowed her brow in thought. “‘I have some things to take care of.’ That’s what she said. I just assumed it had something to do with her foundation.”
“Her foundation?”
“Yes. Jennavieve is the director of a foundation that restores wetlands. She’s always having meetings in the evenings. She was in the paper not too long ago. Her foundation won a big court case.” Terry stopped talking, as if a new thought kicked its way to the forefront of her consciousness. She locked her eyes on Max’s. “What happened? Why are you here?”
“When’s the last time you saw Mrs. Pruitt?”
“Detective Rupert, what happened to Jennavieve?”
Max dropped his head, knowing that his conversation would not continue until she had an answer. He raised his head back up, looked her in the eye, and said, “We found a body this morning. We believe it to be the body of Mrs. Pruitt.”
Terry gasped and looked toward the house, to an upstairs window where two young girls stood, watching the gazebo.
“I need you to be calm, Ms. Kolander,” Max said, drawing her attention back to him. We haven’t had an ID of the body, and we’re waiting for Mr. Pruitt to get here from Chicago. I’m hoping you can watch Emma until we get things squared away.”
“Absolutely.” Ms. Kolander’s eyes began to tear up.
“And I need you to act like nothing has happened. If it turns out to be Mrs. Pruitt, we’ll let her father decide how best to let Emma know.”
“Sure.” Terry slid a fingernail under each eye, catching the forming tears in the corners and wiping them on her pleated shorts.
“What can you tell me about Mrs. Pruitt?”
Terry took a breath to settle her emotions before answering. “She’s incredible. I know she comes from a wealthy background. Her family owns a bunch of businesses. I think they made most of their money in paper milling. They own a ton of land up north and a handful of paper mills. But Jennavieve isn’t the corporate type. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s a powerful woman, on the Board of Governors for the Minneapolis Club, a big donor at the Guthrie and Hennepin Theater Trust. She’s very involved with just about every important local charity, but her baby was the Adler Wetland Preservation Foundation.”
“Adler?”
“That’s her maiden name. She devoted a lot of time to that foundation.”
“And what about Mr. Pruitt? What can you tell me about him?”
“We weren’t close friends with the Pruitts. Not that we disliked them. People live busy lives. We’d see them around the neighborhood, they seemed nice. They came out a couple weeks ago for the Fourth of July. We have a little get-together every year. Nothing fancy, just drinks and steaks.”
“How’d they seem?”
Terry scrunched her face—the look of a woman who had a thought but wasn’t sure about sharing it.
“Anything you can tell us might be helpful,” Max said.
“Well, it’s probably nothing, but when they were here, Ben was being very attentive to Jennavieve.”
“Was that unusual?”
“I don’t know if it was unusual . . . I don’t know them well enough. He just seemed . . . I don’t know . . . maybe ‘overly charming’ might be how I’d describe it. He can be a charming man to begin with, but that day he was floating around here like Gene Kelly. Kept asking Jennavieve if he could refill her drink or get her a napkin, that kind of thing.”
“And how was Jennavieve?”
“She was her normal self. Between the two of them, she’s the serious one. At one point, Ben found an oleander blossom that one of the kids must have broken off, and he brought it over and put it in Jennavieve’s hair. I said ‘Wasn’t that sweet.’ And Jennavieve said ‘It’s all for show.’ I wasn’t sure how to take that. I mean, Jennavieve can be so serious. I didn’t know if she was joking or not.”
The chime on Max’s phone dinged, and he looked to see a text from Maggie Hightower. Starting the postmortem. You want to be here?
“Excuse me,” Max said. “I need to respond.” He texted Maggie back. Go ahead and get started. I’ll be there in a bit. “Sorry about that. So, do you think the Pruitts were having marital problems?”
“Not to my knowledge, but like I said, we weren’t close. If it weren’t for the children being inseparable, we’d probably never see the Pruitts.”
“But people hear things.”
Terry shrugged. “I don’t engage in gossip. There are some neighbors who are nosier than others, but I don’t care to hear that kind of prattle. People know that about me, so I’m usually kept well out of the loop.”
“Suppose I were to track down these nosey neighbors, what might their names be?”
Terry gave Max a look of disapproval. She had no idea how important nosey neighbors were to solving crime. Max held her gaze then raised an eyebrow.
“You might start with Malena Gwin. She lives right across the street from the Pruitts. She tends to have her nose in most things going on around here.”
“I appreciate your help, Ms. Kolander.” Max stood to leave.
Terry walked Max to the front door, and partway to the street, pausing there to have one last moment of privacy. “What’s going to happen to Emma?”
“Her father will be here in a little while. We can put him in touch with professionals to help him break the news to Emma. It’s not going to be easy for her.”
“She’s very quiet, and sweet. This is going to be very hard on her.” Terry glanced over her shoulder at the house. The windows were all empty. “At least she has her father,” Terry said.
Max didn’t respond.
Chapter 10
Max Rupert remembered his first autopsy, the hint of formaldehyde and rotting meat barely noticeable behind the acidic pungency of bile. He watched a doctor pull organs from a dead man’s body, examine them, weigh them, and then put them in jars. The ME worked with an efficiency that could only come from years of experience. It reminded Max of a day when he was a child and he watched his father replace the carburetor on their Dodge Dart. No wasted movements. Every part set aside on the garage floor in an orderly formation. It was nothing to get emotional about—just a task that needed doing.
In the years since that first postmortem, Max found that if he harkened back to that day in his father’s garage, he could better handle watching autopsies. They were bodies, not people. They had pa
rts that needed removing, parts that had been damaged, parts that sometimes held the secret to finding a killer. Any personality, any spark of individuality that had once inhabited those bodies, had departed long ago, expelled in that last, silent exhale.
When Jenni died, however, the delicate wall that separated him from these victims splintered into a thousand shards. He hadn’t watched his wife’s postmortem, of course, but every time he entered that room, he knew that she had been there. She had lain on a stainless-steel table. She had her ribs cut open—ribs that Max used to tickle as they lay in bed on lazy mornings. They had lifted her heart out of her chest—just a handful of dead muscle. How many times had he listened to that heart beat against his ear over the years? She had been dissected by a doctor just doing a task that needed doing. The hands that cut her apart had no idea how special she was. How loved she was. They had no idea of the magnitude of loss her death meant to the world—to Max.
He and Jenni were going to see Europe. They were going to have a child—adopt if necessary, or maybe become foster parents. They were going to grow old together. Everything they were working toward still lay ahead of them. On the day she died, Max learned how crushing the sheer weight of those dreams could be. Everything ended so abruptly that it felt as though he had driven into an oncoming train. And in the days immediately after her death, there were moments when he would forget to breathe and times when he was sure his heart would stop beating.
In that impact, not only did he lose the ability to see the bodies as just bodies, but they began to follow him around. He would hear their whispers in the breezes that passed by his ear. Their reflections would beckon to him from muddy puddles or dirty windows. They judged him as he fought to find sleep at night. How often had they come to him in his dreams, the black stitching, the gray eyes? No matter how handsome or beautiful they had been in life, they came to Max as he had seen them on that examination table.
Max thanked God that he had never seen the pictures from Jenni’s death. He was the husband, not the detective. He was prohibited from having anything to do with the investigation of her hit-and-run, but that didn’t stop him from hearing things. It didn’t stop him from taking a peek at some of the reports. The detective in charge was a friend, a man okay with turning a blind eye.
But Max never looked at the photographs. He couldn’t bring himself to do that. He had read enough of the reports to understand why her funeral had a closed casket. He understood why she had to be identified using dental records. Her death had been messy, not the clean bounce-off-the-car that the stuntmen do in the movies. The car that hit Jenni had dragged her before it took her life. Then the car sped away and no one ever paid for her death.
Now the body of Jennavieve Pruitt lay on a stainless-steel table in the center of the room, with a stitched-up incision in the shape of a Y starting at her shoulders and ending at her pelvis. Another incision, not yet stitched shut, opened the side of her neck where the knife wound had been. A strand of the woman’s red hair had fallen across her face, and Max had to resist an urge to brush it back.
“The wound on the neck was the cause of death,” Maggie said from her seat at her computer. “Cut both the carotid and the jugular.”
Max turned to her as he cleared away distracting thoughts. “We have a preliminary ID on the body,” he said. “Jennavieve Pruitt. She’s the wife of a criminal-defense attorney named Ben Pruitt.”
“Ben Pruitt? That name rings a bell. I think he’s cross-examined me once before.” She turned away from the computer monitor to give the name her full attention. “Yeah, if I recall the right guy, he’d be middle to late forties now, dark hair, kind of handsome—when his mouth is shut?”
“That’s him.”
“You got him figured for this?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. He pulled some shit on me during a case once. Let’s just say I wouldn’t lose any sleep if I had to send him to prison. Did you get a TOD?”
“I can give you a fairly tight range. I’d put her time of death at pretty close to midnight. Body temperature can do only so much, especially because we can’t be certain when she was moved outdoors.”
“What caused the neck wound?”
“A blade.” Maggie turned back to her computer, clicked past a number of photos of organs being extracted and weighed, and stopped at photos of the neck. “I cleaned the wound, and if you look at this close-up, you can see that the incision is about an inch and a half wide. And look here.” She pointed at the ends of the cut with the tip of a pencil. “This blade is double-edged. No flat side.”
“Like a dagger?”
“Generally speaking, yes. And the killer stabbed the blade all the way in.” Maggie pointed to a couple dots about the size of a pencil eraser equally spaced on either side of the incision. “This dagger has a cross guard that’s curved in toward the blade in an arc. The tips of the guard left bruises on her neck.”
Max pulled his phone out of his pocket and brought up the photo Bug had sent him of the knife display case they had found in the bedroom. “Any idea on the blade length?”
“Not for sure, but it was long enough that it penetrated through to the other side of her neck.” Maggie clicked to a picture from the left side of the woman’s throat and a small half-inch incision.
Max showed her the display-case photo.
Maggie compared Bug’s measurements to her own. “The incision is a few millimeters wider than the blade you have here, but with a double edge like that, you’re going to cut on the way in and on the way out. The length of the blade fits and the points on the tips of the cross guard are a perfect match. I’d say that if this isn’t your murder weapon, it’s a dagger very much like it.”
“Excellent,” Max said. “What else you got for me?”
“Some unusual bruises.” Maggie again moved through her computer photos to a series taken of Jennavieve Pruitt’s back. “It’s here.” She circled an area of the woman’s shoulder with the tip of her pencil. “It’s hard to see through the lividity, but there is a definite bruise on her right shoulder and here on the back of her left arm, and some finger-shaped bruises on the back of her head and neck. You can almost see a handprint.”
Max looked at the pictures and moved his hands around to try and match the bruise pattern. Then he got down on one knee and looked up at the picture again. “If the killer held her down . . . if she was facedown on the bed and the killer held her down like this, with a knee on her right shoulder, one hand on the back of her head, and the other on her left arm . . . would that explain the bruise pattern?”
Maggie went through the photos again, comparing them to Max’s simulation. “I think that fits pretty well. You think she was held down?”
“We found the crime scene. She was stabbed a few feet from a bed, but then either fell or was pushed onto the bed, where she bled out.”
“And the killer held her down while she bled to death. That would explain the lack of blood on the bedding you found her in.”
“Any chance of prints from the skin?”
“We can try, but it’s very unlikely.”
“Any indication of sexual assault?”
“Nothing definite. If she had sex recently, it was with a condom and not rough enough to leave a mark.”
“What about stomach contents?”
“She had a salad for dinner—I’m guessing a late dinner—and wine.”
“She had wine in her stomach?”
“I didn’t sip it to verify, but I sent a sample in for a toxicology test.”
“Any sign of defensive wounds?”
“No bruises, other than the ones I showed you on her shoulder, arm, and neck. No skin cells under the finger nails. Her death came quickly. With both the carotid and the internal jugular cut, she would have lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.”
Max walked over and looked at Jennavieve Pruitt’s body, taking in the contrast between her cold white skin and the black zigzag of the stitching that held her chest
and abdomen together. He looked at her face, knowing that it would come to him in those moments when sleep and wake lived in equal parts in his mind. He wanted this face to come to him. He wanted her to speak to him in those quiet moments of the night. If Ben Pruitt killed his wife, Max would make sure he paid for that crime. Although the math didn’t add up perfectly, Max could sense a certain equilibrium to it. He may never be able to bring his own wife’s killer to justice, but this man squandered a gift. He killed his wife, a woman who loved and trusted him. Pruitt threw away that which Max would kill to have back.
If he could bring Jennavieve Pruitt the justice denied to his own wife, she might help him find some small measure of peace. He knew this bordered on fantasy, maybe even insanity, but deep inside he hoped it to be true.
Chapter 11
Max was finishing up with Maggie when Niki called him. “Ben Pruitt’s here,” she said, “at his house.”
“How’s he acting?” Max asked.
“Maybe a bit over the top but not out of control. I have him waiting outside.”
“Is his car there?”
“I let him park in the driveway so it’s covered in the search warrant.”
“Excellent. I’d like to get a look in his trunk and in his suitcase, so don’t let him take anything out of the car.”
“I already sent an officer to secure it.”
“Have I told you lately that you’re a damn fine detective?”
“Can never hear it enough.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll buy you a parrot and teach it that one phrase. I hear parrots live to be about sixty.”
“And I hear parrots taste like chicken. In the meantime, what should I do with Mr. Pruitt?”
“Have a squad car bring him downtown. I’ll see if he’s interested in talking. Depending on how long that takes, I should be back in time to canvass the neighbors with you.”
“See you then.”
Max hung up, said his good-bye to Maggie, and headed back to City Hall to prep for his interview with Ben Pruitt.
Pruitt arrived twenty minutes later and was led to the interview room by the unit staff officer. Pruitt looked unsure of himself as he sat across the table from Max. Max held out a hand and Pruitt, with some hesitation, shook it. Rule one: make them comfortable, Max thought to himself.
