The Last Dead Girl Page 36

  She didn’t recognize the danger. It was a few minutes past five in the afternoon. Still daylight. How much danger could there be?

  She drove past the trailer, parked her car on the roadside. Doubled back and followed them at a distance. When they turned toward the ruined farmhouse, Cathy made for the barn. She hid herself there. And watched.

  Luke opened the door in the earth and Neil went down. Luke waited above—which wouldn’t have fit with the gay-lover hypothesis. What would Cathy have thought then? Would she have started to worry?

  She’d be safe in the barn, out of sight. But how long could she stay still? She’d want to move around, maybe find a better view. There were plenty of holes in the barn wall.

  Luke didn’t hear her moving. But there were swallows in the barn, and the swallows heard. Four of them took flight through the empty frame of the roof.

  Luke saw the swallows.

  Neil had no clue to what was happening. But after he’d been down with Jana Fletcher for ten minutes, he heard shouting from above. Luke’s voice yelling, “K!” A woman’s scream.

  Up the stairs and out under the blazing sky, and he sees Luke Daw dragging Cathy from the barn, shoving her to the ground. Luke’s hand dips into his pocket and comes out with a knife. The blade folds out, liquid silver in the sunlight. Cathy scuttles away like a crab.

  She spots Neil. Pleads, “Help me!”

  Luke says, “What the hell, K? How’d she get here?”

  Then she’s up and running, and Luke is tackling her, rolling her onto her back. The blade sinks into her stomach.

  It happens so fast that Neil thinks his eyes are cheating him, until she screams.

  Luke seems dazed. He lets go of the knife. He’s on his knees, leaning over her. She tries to push him away. When she starts to scream again, Neil is there. He claps a hand over her mouth.

  She squirms in the grass. Slaps at his arms. Luke pulls the knife out and holds it up for Neil to see. Bright red on silver. Neil takes it and tosses it away.

  “Hold her down,” he says. He uses his take-charge voice, the one he brings out when he needs to control a rowdy classroom.

  Luke obeys. He grabs Cathy’s wrists, pins them to the ground.

  Neil has a hand over Cathy’s mouth and it’s not enough. Two hands. He bears down. Her eyes are wide and wet with tears. Neil looks away from them, but then he’s drawn back. He wonders what he looks like from her perspective. She’s staring up at him and seeing his face upside down.

  He bears down harder as she writhes in the grass. Her eyes are full of life. She’s still breathing. He takes one hand from her mouth and pinches her nostrils shut. She writhes more desperately and almost throws off Luke Daw. But it’s only temporary. Neil holds fast and Luke recovers. Cathy closes her eyes. If there’s a moment when she dies, Neil misses it. He’s thinking about how uncomfortable it is, kneeling on the hard ground.

  • • •

  That was the twenty-seventh of July, 1996. It would be months before Neil Pruett returned to the farm.

  He let Luke deal with the body. It made sense. Neil was the more vulnerable one. Cathy was his sister-in-law; he was more likely to fall under suspicion.

  He thought trusting Luke might be a problem, but once the shock of the situation wore off, Luke seemed to return to his old self.

  “Leave it to me, K. I’ve got it under control.”

  “If you want help, I can help.”

  “No. I’ve got all the help I need.”

  He was referring to his cousin, though Neil didn’t know it at the time. In September, when he heard about Eli Daw’s death, Neil began to put things together. The news reports took for granted that Luke had shot Eli. Neil knew there could be a different explanation.

  He waited till November to drive out to the farm. He climbed the slope of the hill on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The hidden door was covered over with a blanket of autumn leaves. He opened it and went down with a flashlight. The light sent things scurrying into dark corners. Neil aimed it briefly at what was left of Luke Daw’s face.

  He knew then that Jana Fletcher had gotten out—though at that point he didn’t know her name. It didn’t worry him. He didn’t think he would ever see her again.

  He saw her more than a year later. A snowy day in March. By then, Gary had been convicted. Neil had stood by him all along, playing the role of the loyal brother. He had no real compassion for Gary, but it was useful to pretend he did—mainly because it alienated Megan, and he was tired of her. He was glad to have an excuse to leave her.

  So on that day in March, he was living in Gary’s house on Bloomfield Street. He was shoveling the walk in front. A lazy snow falling. Jana approached him, bundled up against the weather, wanting to talk about Gary. Neil didn’t recognize her until he invited her inside, until she took off her winter coat and hat and scarf.

  Everything left him then: his breath, his voice, his balance. He would have fallen over, but he caught himself against a counter. His heart must have been racing, but at that moment he thought he had no pulse at all. Open him up and there would be nothing inside.

  Somehow he made it through their first conversation—Jana telling him how she hoped to see Gary set free. In the weeks that followed, she came back, once to ask him questions, another time just to reassure him that she was committed to seeing the case reopened. Neil convinced himself that she was playing a game with him. She knew him. She knew the truth. Then he decided he must be wrong. It didn’t matter that she had seen his face. Luke had drugged her.

  One night in April, Neil couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed thinking about Gary getting out of prison, about the police taking another look at Cathy’s murder. He worked himself into a dark state, convinced himself it was only a matter of time before Jana remembered him from the wooden room.

  He didn’t despair. He got angry. He was turning into a cliché.

  He rolled out from under the covers and went to the bedroom closet. The highest shelf held a shoe box with a dusty lid. He took it down and opened it. Nothing inside but a few empty zip-lock bags. A memento of Sheila Cotton.

  Holding it reminded him of who he was.

  That was the night he decided to kill Jana Fletcher.

  • • •

  Megan had parked her car directly in front of the house.

  Neil sat in the driver’s seat and listened to the patter of the rain on the windshield. His clothes were wet through. There were beads of rain on Megan’s purse. He’d brought it out and tossed it on the passenger seat. Her key was in the ignition. Her body was in the trunk.

  The hardest part: moving the body from the house to the car. The darkness helped. The power was out all along Bloomfield Street. But there was a full moon. And lightning.

  Nothing he could do about the moon.

  But he had stopped the lightning.

  He had stood inside the front door, ready, Megan’s bundled body slung over his shoulder. And he had thought about the lightning, willed it to hold off. Thought about his neighbors too. There’d be no one on the street, but there could be people looking out their windows at the storm. He concentrated. Pictured them turning away.

  Then out the door, down the porch steps, to the car. He dumped the body in. Closed the trunk. Easy.

  Now, in the driver’s seat, Neil saw the sky light up. He counted three seconds before the thunder.

  He knew what he should do. Take Megan to the farm and put her in the wooden room, where no one would find her. But he didn’t want to.

  He had other plans for the wooden room.

  What if he put Megan in the canal, like Jolene? He would have to do it right this time. Weigh her down. There were landscaping bricks in Gary’s backyard. They would do the job. Neil would need to devise a way to attach them to the bundle. A straightforward problem. He knew he could solve it.

  But
it would be dull work. Neil stared at the rain-blurred windshield. Outside, the lightning flared again. The wind raged. He imagined his neighbors huddling in their houses, timid. But Neil felt charged, like the lightning. This was not a night to be timid. Not a night for dull work.

  He squeezed his right hand into a fist and felt the pain of the cigarette burn. It was meant to remind him to aim higher.

  Megan could wait.

  He got out of her car, got into his own, and drove off.

  45

  The traffic lights were dead along Erie Boulevard. Emergency crews had put up temporary stop signs at the intersections. The rain battered them and the wind threatened to topple them over. We made slow progress heading east toward Bloomfield Street.

  Warren Finn had kept to himself ever since I told him about Neil Pruett. But when we pulled up to one of the stop signs—wipers slapping at the rain, a lost umbrella blowing through the street—he broke his silence.

  “We should have the gun,” he said.

  He meant the Makarov pistol. I could think of lots of reasons why we shouldn’t have it: Warren might be a little too eager to use it. Neil Pruett could be innocent. Even if we had it, we’d be foolish to rely on it. I’d never tested it. I didn’t know if it would fire.

  On the other hand, if Pruett was guilty, then he had a gun of his own—the one he took from Simon Lanik. The mate of the one that was resting in the middle drawer of Jana’s desk.

  “We can get the gun,” I said to Warren, “but I’m holding on to it.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  I turned north at the next intersection and we made a detour to Jana’s apartment.

  • • •

  Twenty-five minutes later, when we came at last to Bloomfield Street, a strobe of lightning lit the sky. We rolled past the pale blue house and there was a car at the curb in front, but it wasn’t Neil Pruett’s.

  The time was well after midnight. I parked the truck down the block. Warren and I walked calmly through the wind and rain. We had our flashlights and I had the gun in my pocket. I also had a steel pry bar from the bed of the truck. I carried the pry bar for the same reason I carried the gun: just in case.

  Dark houses all around us. Windows like empty eye sockets. We climbed onto the porch of the pale blue house and knocked on the door. Waited. Knocked again.

  “He could be sleeping,” I said.

  Warren looked skeptical. “Do you think he’s sleeping?”

  “I think he’s not home.”

  Warren reached for the pry bar and I let him take it. He worked the end into the seam between the door and the jamb, just above the level of the lock. One hard shove was all it needed.

  Inside, we turned on our flashlights. There were pillar candles on a coffee table, recently extinguished. Their blackened wicks floated up from pools of liquid wax. I motioned for Warren to keep still. We listened. No sound but the storm.

  Warren aimed his light at a mirror leaning against a wall. The beam shifted higher and found a series of small holes punched in the drywall—arranged in three lines to make a letter K.

  “That’s not normal,” he said.

  I noted the bow on the sofa. Two wineglasses on the coffee table. I beckoned to Warren and we moved together through the house, keeping our flashlights aimed at the floor.

  Dining room. Kitchen. Dirty dishes overflowed the sink and filled the counter. We moved upstairs. Three bedrooms. Two abandoned, one in use. An unmade bed. Clothes tossed around carelessly. I looked under the pillows, felt under the mattress, opened the drawers of the night table, thinking I might find Simon Lanik’s pistol. I didn’t find it.

  We went down to the basement last. Boxes and old furniture. A file cabinet. No torture chamber. No evidence that a killer lived in this house.

  We returned to the first floor. Warren drifted away from me. I aimed my light around the living room, thinking. The candles on the coffee table suggested that we had missed Neil Pruett by mere minutes.

  He must have had a good reason to venture out on a night like this.

  I wandered into the kitchen and found Warren snooping through the drawers and cupboards.

  “You’re leaving fingerprints,” I said.

  He sighed a put-upon sigh. Grabbed a dish towel and started wiping down knobs and handles. I looked around for something that might tell me where Pruett had gone.

  Warren finished with the towel and tossed it over the back of a chair. His flashlight beam played across the kitchen table. He aimed it at the refrigerator door, at the trash bin.

  I stood by the counter and the soles of my feet hurt. The small of my back too—the place where the bull had gored me. I thought I’d left the bull behind, but I had a feeling he wasn’t very far away. He was here, in this house.

  Warren had left one of the drawers half open. I pointed my flashlight inside and saw silver: knives and forks. And something not silver.

  I opened the drawer all the way. Removed a small cardboard box. Emptied it onto the counter.

  Popsicle sticks.

  “It’s him,” I said quietly.

  Warren didn’t hear me. He was shining his light into the trash bin. He reached in and pulled out a slip of paper. A receipt.

  “Pruett went to a hardware store today,” he said.

  The bull was very near. I remembered talking to Neil Pruett late that afternoon. Hearing him tell me he had used my truck to run errands. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “What did he buy?” I asked.

  Warren handed me the receipt and I read it.

  The bull ran the tip of his horn along my spine.

  “No,” I said. “Son of a bitch. No, no, no.”

  • • •

  Darkness everywhere.

  Neil Pruett stepped out of his shoes.

  He had a penlight that fit in his pocket. He clicked it on and let the narrow beam lead him to what he wanted. He listened to the muffled sounds of the storm, and streaks of rainwater trickled down from his hair, along his temples, to his neck. The beam found a row of drawers.

  The first one he tried held rolls of tape. Scotch tape. Masking tape.

  Packing tape.

  Exactly what he needed.

  He trailed the beam along the floor: kitchen tile and then white carpet. A shimmer of lightning came through a pair of sliding glass doors. The thunder boomed as he crossed the threshold of the bedroom.

  He clicked off the penlight and stood silent beside the doorway.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark. He could make out shapes. The solid mass of the bed. A quilt spilling onto the floor. A sheet covering a sleeping form.

  He could hear her breathing.

  The bed was a queen, big enough for two, but she was sleeping alone, in the middle. Neil walked around to the far side. He put the roll of packing tape on the night table. He laid down the penlight and sat on the edge of the bed. Pulled the Makarov pistol out of his sock.

  Sophie Emerson stirred and rolled onto her back. She touched his arm.

  “Dave?” she said.

  Barely awake.

  Neil picked up the penlight and clicked it on. He wanted to see her. He’d never been this close. She had beautiful skin, like Sheila Cotton. She had chestnut hair that flowed in soft waves over her pillow.

  She squinted into the light. Waking up fast. Neil returned the penlight to the night table, standing it on end so the beam shone on the ceiling. He covered her mouth with his left hand and pressed the muzzle of the Makarov against her forehead.

  “I’m not Dave,” he told her.

  Sophie Emerson tried to scream.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  He watched her realize what was happening. Gave her a chance to catch up.

  “You have questions,” he said. “There’s no time now, but later on we’ll talk.”


  He watched her debating whether to struggle or give in. He pulled the gun back a few inches, to give her a better view of it. To help her decide.

  “It’ll be fine,” he said. “I know a place we can go.”

  • • •

  Keys.

  I still had the keys to the old apartment. Sophie’s apartment.

  We drove there in five minutes, Warren Finn and me. I didn’t pay much mind to stop signs. I swept into the lot in the beating rain and the truck’s headlights showed me Sophie’s car, in its usual space. My heart sank. I’d been hoping to find the space empty—hoping she was at the hospital.

  I remember a squeal of wet brakes and sprinting through the rain. Warren following. I remember coming to the building’s outer door and using one of my keys to open it. Then charging down the hallway and up a flight of stairs, flashlight beams bouncing wildly over the walls. Then another key to let us into the apartment.

  Unnatural quiet. Nothing out of place. But everything looked wrong in the roving beams of light. I broke the quiet, calling Sophie’s name. No answer.

  I crossed into the bedroom. White sheets. Empty bed. Still nothing out of place except for a lamp on a night table with its shade askew. As if it had been knocked over and put back carelessly.

  And one other thing: Sophie’s cat’s-eye glasses on the floor.

  “He’s got her,” I said.

  Warren joined me. “Are you sure?”

  I pointed my light at the glasses. “She wouldn’t leave them.”

  Pruett had her, and I was the one who gave her to him. I let him in. I had given him the keys to my truck that afternoon—I had given him all my keys, because they were all on the same key ring. And he had taken them to a hardware store and made copies.

  “He walked right in here,” I said. “She never had a chance.”

  Warren picked up the glasses. “She’ll want them when we find her.”

  I had my cell phone out, but there was no reception. The storm. I punched 911 anyway and watched the screen. CONNECTING, it said. And then: CALL FAILED.