The Last Dead Girl (13 page)

She answered after a thoughtful pause. “She asked me that too, your friend Jana. ‘What would Cathy think of all this?' she said. And she really wanted to know. It was important to her. What if there was no confession? What if Gary turned out to be innocent? Cathy wouldn't want him to suffer, would she? And of course that's true. She hated the way he had betrayed her, but she wouldn't have wanted him to spend his life in prison for something he didn't do.”

Megan Pruett stood up tall and straight again. “But that's all hypothetical. He killed her. I sat through the trial, every day of it. I was convinced—even without the confession.”

W
hen I left Megan Pruett I drove about a mile to the house Cathy and Gary Pruett had shared. It was a two-story place painted pale blue, taller than it was wide. It had a strip of grass on either side and hedges to separate it from the other houses. More grass in front, unmowed, sprinkled with dandelions.

I thought seeing the house might give me a sense of the couple who had lived here. It didn't. But I had another reason for coming. Megan Pruett had told me her husband was staying here. They had separated after the trial.

“It was just too hard,” she'd said, “staying together.”

When I rang Neil Pruett's doorbell, he answered right away. He'd been expecting me; his wife had called to let him know I was coming. He led me through to the back of the house and sat me down in the kitchen. The place looked a little rough—dishes piled in the sink, crumbs on the counter.

“I apologize for the mess,” he said.

“It's not too bad.”

“Megan doesn't think I'll last, living on my own. She thinks I'll wind up dressing in rags and eating off the floor.”

Maybe he would, eventually. He wasn't there yet. He was dressed well enough, in a white oxford shirt, khaki pants, and loafers—the wardrobe of a high school science teacher. He had taken off his tie: navy blue with yellow stripes. I could see it dangling over the back of a chair. He was around forty, with sandy-blond hair cut short and a round, plain face.

“You talked to her,” he said. “What's your impression?”

I realized he meant his wife. “She has strong opinions,” I said. “About Gary.”

He laughed. “Strong opinions. That's true. That's why she's there and I'm here. When you think your brother's innocent and your wife is sure he's guilty, it tends to put a strain on the marriage.”

He let the subject go with a shrug, and we talked for a few minutes about Jana. Pruett confirmed that she had come around to see him. He told me he was sorry for my loss—she seemed like a nice young woman—and asked if the police were making any progress. I told him what little I knew and he sat quietly, taking it in. But after a while he steered the conversation around to his brother's case. He knew Jana had been working with Roger Tolliver on Tolliver's Innocence Project. He assumed I was too.

“Do you have news for me?” he asked.

I told him I didn't and he took it well. I didn't mention that I wasn't a lawyer or even a law student.

“Well, it's still early days,” Neil Pruett said. “Gary's lawyer warned me not to get my hopes up. She's pessimistic about winning an appeal.”

“Does she believe that Gary's innocent?” I asked.

“It's hard to know. If she didn't, I don't think she'd say it. She has a sort of mercenary attitude, if you ask me. She certainly charges enough.” Pruett made a sour face. “Gary borrowed from his retirement account to pay for his defense. He took out a second mortgage on this house. He owes more on it now than it's worth. We could have let it go into foreclosure, but I decided to keep up the payments. I figured its value would go up eventually, and in the meantime we could rent it out. I never thought I'd be living here.”

We talked a little about his brother's trial. I wanted to know what he thought about Napoleon Washburn, about the alleged jailhouse confession.

“It made no sense to me,” Pruett said. “Even if Gary was guilty, why would he tell a stranger? Washburn was a criminal. He was lying in order to get his own sentence reduced. I assumed the jury would see through him.”

“Why do you think they didn't?”

Neil Pruett scratched the side of his sandy-blond head. “Probably because Gary never testified. He never had a chance to deny the confession. His lawyer convinced him not to take the stand.”

“You think that was a mistake?”

“I don't know. It was the strategy they went with. It could've worked. There were a lot of holes in the prosecution's case. They couldn't pinpoint when Cathy died. She was stabbed, but no matter how much they searched they could find no evidence that it had happened in this house. They never found the knife. They found Cathy's body in a field, and they couldn't say for sure how long it had been there. And there was nothing to prove that Gary had put it there.”

I remembered something Tolliver had said.

“They found strands of her hair in the trunk of his car.”

“That's true,” said Pruett. “But the hair could've been from a blanket she'd used. And if her body had been in the trunk they should have found blood. They didn't. Gary's lawyer thought she could make a case for reasonable doubt, as long as Gary didn't testify. If he testified, he could be opened up to cross-examination—on all kinds of subjects.”

“Like the affair,” I said. “Angela Reese.”

“Right. The local news people had already picked up on it, and I'm sure the jurors were aware of it. But if the prosecutor had been able to pick over every detail in court, it would've made Gary look horrible.”

“What did you think when you found out about the affair?”

Neil Pruett's mouth twisted in distaste. “I thought it was incredibly stupid,” he said, “and it marked Gary as a lousy husband, and maybe a rotten human being. But that doesn't make him a murderer—in spite of what my wife might say.” He spread his hands. “She and I have gone round and round about this. I still hope she might change her mind, or at least admit the possibility that Gary could be innocent.”

“What about you?” I said. “Are you willing to admit he could be guilty?”

“I've thought about it. It's tempting to give in to the idea—if only to make peace with Megan.” He let out a soft breath. “If he did it, I can't believe he meant to. It must have been a mistake.”

“You think he stabbed Cathy accidentally?”

“I don't think he stabbed her at all. I'm just saying that things happen, sometimes in an instant, and you can't take them back. When we were kids—”

He stopped suddenly. Looked uncertain.

“What happened when you were kids?” I asked.

He thought it over, searching my eyes. I don't know what he found, but he decided he could tell me the story.

“One summer, when Gary was fifteen and I was ten, he wanted a hunting bow. Our parents wouldn't let him have one, so he saved his money and bought one without letting them know. He couldn't afford a good bow; the one he got was made of plastic. But it wasn't a toy. The arrows were real, with metal tips. One afternoon when our parents weren't home, he took the bow into the backyard to try it out.

“He shot at trees for a while, but when that got old he waited for a dove. Our mother grew sunflowers, and doves would come around to eat the seeds. Gary took aim at one of them, and I don't think he expected to hit it, but the arrow went through one wing and into the body. I was watching. Both of us froze. The bird lay in the grass with one wing flapping. After a while it stopped.

“I knew Gary would be in trouble if our parents found out. They'd be angry. And I was ten and he was my big brother. So naturally I threatened to tell them. He had one last arrow left. He fitted it to the bow, aimed it at me, and told me I'd better not. He didn't have the string pulled back all the way, didn't really mean any harm, but his fingers slipped and the arrow whizzed past my neck. The metal tip grazed my skin as it went by.”

Neil Pruett touched the collar of his shirt on the right side. “We buried the dove and gathered the arrows,” he said, “and Gary never shot that bow again. We both knew how close he had come to something he could never take back.”

His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I don't believe he killed Cathy, but if he did, it must have been something like that. Maybe they argued and she felt afraid of him. So she picked up a knife to feel safe. Maybe he tried to take it away from her and they struggled. And the knife slipped, like his fingers on the bow. And then it was too late. That's the only way I can imagine it.”

O
n Friday the ninth of May, three days after my conversation with Neil Pruett, I drove two hundred miles to the town of Dannemora to visit his brother, Gary, in prison.

Several things happened in between.

On Wednesday the police fished a body out of a section of the old Erie Canal. It had been discovered by a pair of teenage boys playing hooky from school. The local TV stations covered the story heavily, cutting away from the usual soap operas and talk shows.

By the time I tuned in late in the afternoon, they had identified the body as that of a woman named Jolene Halliwell. The six o'clock news showed a photograph: a blond party girl in a low-cut blouse with a drink in her hand. She'd been caught laughing and pointing at the camera.

A reporter did some legwork and found the woman's mother, who closed her door in his face, and some of the woman's friends, who were willing to talk. There were three of them, sketchy types in their late twenties. Two men with shaggy hair and goatees, a woman with a pierced eyebrow. They told the reporter they hadn't seen Jolene in a few days. When he tried to pin them down, they decided she had definitely come by last Tuesday night. “For beer and tequila,” one of the men said.

“How long did she stay?” the reporter asked.

“Until the next morning,” said the woman with the pierced eyebrow. “I remember she took a shower before she left. Used all the hot water.”

“And that would have been?”

“A real downer,” the woman said. “When I got in the shower I practically froze.”

“I meant, what time would it have been,” the reporter said, “when she left?”

“Oh. Maybe noon?”

The reporter had some other questions, like whether Jolene Halliwell would have gone walking by herself along the Erie Canal. “She liked nature,” one of the men volunteered.

Was she cautious? the reporter asked. Was it possible she had gone off with someone she didn't know very well? The three friends exchanged glances. “Oh, sure,” they said, almost in unison.

The interview took place in front of an apartment building, and when it ended the reporter stood alone for a moment with his microphone, summing up. The camera pulled back a little, to take in the wider scene. And I recognized the location: Reed Terrace, the apartment complex right across the street from Jana's duplex.

•   •   •

I
tried to go out to the spot where they found Jolene Halliwell's body. Seifert Road, on the western edge of the city. I got there at twilight, after the television crews had packed up. The police were there in force, and they had set up a barricade to keep the gawkers out. They were checking IDs, only letting local people through. I got close enough to see the police cars lined up by the roadside—no sign of Frank Moretti's Chevrolet—and then a uniformed cop stopped me and made me turn the truck around.

I drove northeast and made my way to Jana's street. A few lonely porch lights illuminated the apartments of Reed Terrace. I saw a handful of cops going door-to-door, trying to coax people out to talk.

I found Moretti's black Chevrolet in the lot and parked next to it. Got out of the truck and walked along the perimeter, looking for spots where there were gaps between the trees—spots with a view of Jana's front door on the other side of the street. I found more than one.

I went back to the truck and waited. Frank Moretti came out of one of the apartments, tried the next door, got snubbed. The door after that opened for him. I watched him hold up a photograph and get a head shake in return. The door closed again. Moretti turned around and spotted my truck. He wandered over at his unhurried cop pace.

“You want to tell me this has nothing to do with Jana's death?” I said, climbing down to meet him.

His eyes narrowed. “I don't want to tell you anything.”

“According to the news, Jolene Halliwell was here last Wednesday morning,” I said. “The day Jana died. Do you still think Simon Lanik killed Jana—after an argument about the rent?”

“I don't answer to you.”

“Because it doesn't make sense. The timing. Jolene left her friends' apartment around noon. Jana died between six and seven in the evening—you told me that. Are we supposed to believe Jolene Halliwell stuck around here all that time?”

“There's no ‘we,' Mr. Malone.”

“What's the theory? Jolene sees Lanik leaving Jana's apartment. And he sees her. So he has to kill her, because she's a witness? And he drives her out to the canal and dumps her?”

Moretti rubbed the back of his neck wearily. “I suppose you have a better idea.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the truck. “I do. Someone was watching Jana's apartment that day, from a parked car in this lot. Not Simon Lanik, someone else. The same person who had watched Jana before from the woods. Jolene Halliwell saw him here, and he worried that she would remember him. So he killed her.”

Moretti nodded along with everything I said—an automatic nod that had nothing to do with agreement. He held up a hand when I finished, as though he feared I might start up again.

“I don't know yet what happened to Jolene Halliwell,” he told me, “and neither do you. It's my job to find out. Not yours. So why don't you go on. You don't belong here.”

•   •   •

I
went home where I belonged, but the day had one more bit of drama in store for me. Sophie cooked us a late dinner and I washed up after. She camped out on the sofa, because she was scrubbing in on a surgery in the morning and needed to go over her notes on the procedure. I took care of some business in my office.

Around ten-thirty I came out, heated some milk on the stove and made hot chocolate. I gave a mug to Sophie and took mine onto the balcony. A cool night under a half-moon.

I barely had time to sit down before I heard it: the click of something small hitting the glass of the sliding door. A few seconds later it happened again. This time I saw a pebble bounce off the glass and skip along the floor of the balcony.

I went to the rail and saw him down below. A long white coat over a shirt and tie. Brad Gavin, surgical intern. The one who owned a house and always shot the best game of pool. Brad of the Condom Wrapper.

He tossed another pebble up, drunkenly. He wasn't holding a bottle, but he might as well have been. There'd been a bottle in his recent past. When he saw me, he waved me off. He was at a concert and I was the opening act he didn't want to see. He was impatient for the main event.

“Sophie!” he called, in a drunk's approximation of a whisper.

“Sophie,” I said over my shoulder. She heard me through the screen and came out.

“Brad,” she said. “For god's sake.”

“Sophie,” he said, louder now. “I need you.”

“No. You don't.”

He pointed up at her and then back at himself. “There's something here,” he said.

“No. There isn't.”

“It's real, I can feel it. We owe it to ourselves . . .” He stumbled a little, over what they owed themselves. Then he recovered. “We have to see,” he said. “We have to try to make this work.”

“We're not doing that,” Sophie said. “I already told you.”

“It's not fair,” he said. “You've been avoiding me.”

“Well, that part's true,” Sophie said to me quietly.

“I can't accept that,” Gavin said. “You're too important to me.”

He had a long speech ready to let her know how important she was. I missed most of it. I went in from the balcony, took my mug of hot chocolate with me. Slipped my shoes on before I went out the door of our apartment. Down the stairs to the ground floor, out through the main doors.

There was Brad Gavin, a few yards away on the lawn. He made a passable romantic lead—five feet, ten inches of young-doctor handsome, pouring out his soul to Sophie on the balcony above. She saw me and I heard her say, “Dave, don't.” I must have looked grim, though I wasn't aware of it. When Gavin saw me he said, “Really? Seriously?” And then: “What, are we gonna fight?”

I sipped hot chocolate and ambled toward him. Unhurriedly, like Frank Moretti.

Gavin started shrugging out of his long white coat. “Do you think I'm afraid of you?” he said. “I've studied karate since I was eight.”

I'd never studied karate, but I had one advantage over him. I knew we were going to fight, and I knew we weren't going to talk about it first.

When I got close enough I tossed the hot chocolate in his face.

It wasn't hot enough to burn him, but it was hot enough to make him worry that it would. He had both arms free of the white coat, and now, blindly, instinctively, he brought it up with two hands to his eyes.

I dropped the mug and kept moving, took hold of his shoulders to pull him forward, drove my knee into his stomach. He groaned and bent forward and I stepped to the side and pushed him down to the ground. I got down there too, sat on him, pulled his right arm around to the small of his back.

“Let me ask you something, Brad,” I said in a low voice. “Would they let you operate with a broken thumb?”

He tried to make a fist, but I got a grip on his thumb and bent it a little, experimentally.

I'll give him credit: he didn't scream. He cursed less than he might have. He said, “Don't do that. Please.”

By then Sophie had come down. I heard her say, “Dave, let him up.”

I eased off on his thumb, but I didn't let him up. “Call him a cab,” I said.

“I don't need a cab,” he said. “I've got my car.”

I patted his shoulder in a friendly way. “You're too drunk to drive, and I wouldn't want anything to happen to you.”

Sophie was still there, hands on her hips.

“Call a cab,” I told her, “and I'll let him up.”

I must have seemed calm, because she went upstairs to make the call. She wasn't worried I would damage him. While she was gone, I put some pressure on his thumb again. I leaned close to his ear and borrowed a line from Moretti.

“You don't belong here,” I said. “I don't want to see you again. If you come back, I'll break both your thumbs, and all your fingers. We'll see what that does for your career. Maybe you can hold a scalpel with your toes. How does that sound?”

He didn't answer, which was just as well. We passed a minute or two in silence until Sophie came back down, and then I got up and went inside, stopping only to pick up my mug.

She stayed with him until the cab arrived, and when she came back into the apartment I was lying on the sofa, one arm dangling to the floor.

She stood over me, close enough to touch. There was music playing, a John Coltrane CD—what she'd been listening to as she went over her notes.

She said, “I asked him to stay away from here.”

“So did I.”

“I'm not sure how I feel,” she said, “about what just happened.”

I knew how I felt, and it was a dark feeling, a primitive one—the feeling of a caveman when another caveman tries to steal his mate. I looked at Sophie with her pinned-up hair and those glasses. Her blouse a wisp of nothing, capri pants, bare feet. Only a few buttons between me and her naked body. I wanted to reclaim her.

I think she felt the same way. I can't be sure. What I know is that she was within reach, and I reached for her, traced the swell of her calf. I saw her hands moving, slowly, as she looked down at me, her fingers working a button of her blouse. She would have done each of them like that, taking her time. I didn't want to wait.

The blouse got torn. My shirt too. There was a lot of tearing.

The first time was as primitive as you like, there on the living room floor. Hands and knees, hard and fast. Sprawled on the carpet after, eyes shut, breathing deep.

Sophie got up to run a bath. The second time was slippery wet, steam and bubbles, her legs wrapped around me, her cheek against my neck, her nails digging into my back.

Then towels and bed. Cool sheets. The third time almost didn't happen. I was drifting on the edge of sleep. I felt the skin of her thigh sliding along mine. Her hand coaxing. She was patient about it and I watched her in the light from the other room. Looming over me, her glasses off, her hair down around her face. Then a sweet gasp as she took me in, and I felt her moving, and I surrendered, closed my eyes.

She followed a rhythm of her own, quick and slow, advance and retreat. I opened my eyes to watch her, laid a palm against her stomach, told her to put her hands on top of her head, to arch her back.

“That thing you do,” I murmured.

A small break in her rhythm, less than the click of a pebble on glass. Almost undetectable. Then she arched her back and sent me over, and followed me a moment later.

But we both knew. That wasn't a thing she did. Not Sophie.

We fell asleep together and the next morning I woke up late. She was gone, and so were her clothes from the night before. Mine were still strewn around the living room. I left them and went through to the kitchen. Found a note on the table. A single line.

Maybe one of us should think about moving out.