The Last Dead Girl Page 38

  “What if you drove him to the apartment?” I asked Sophie. “Could you treat him there?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Maybe,” said Sophie.

  I handed her my keys. “The truck is down by the trailer. Come back for me when you can.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Warren said, nodding at Pruett. “Not while he’s alive.”

  I got down on my knees so I could look Warren in the eye.

  “I’ll take care of him,” I said. “I promise you.”

  • • •

  I stood by the side of the barn and watched Sophie lead Warren down the hill. I tracked their progress in the moonlight and in the occasional flare of lightning. Warren did okay. He kept on his feet.

  When I returned to Neil Pruett I found him standing, trying to get a broken finger onto the trigger of his empty pistol. I grabbed it away from him.

  “Come on,” I said, taking him by the arm. “We’re not finished.”

  I led him toward the farmhouse, and when he staggered I helped him along. The door in the ground stood open. Pruett didn’t want to go down. I didn’t give him a choice.

  I switched on Warren’s flashlight. The stairs were wet from the rain. Halfway down, Pruett slipped. Or pretended to slip. He fell back against me. Maybe he was trying to knock me over. I fended him off. Pushed him. He tumbled the rest of the way down the stairs and I’m afraid he made a hard landing at the bottom. He broke his fibula, one of the bones of the lower leg.

  The bone came through the skin and tore through his left pant leg. I could see it jutting out, like the splintered tip of a spear.

  There was shrieking.

  I dragged him through the doorway into the room.

  He lost consciousness and I got some relief from the noise. I laid him on his back on the mattress and wrapped the chain around his neck. I fastened it in place with the padlock and took the key.

  I tore the tail off my shirt and used it to wipe my fingerprints from the chain and the lock.

  Pruett woke. Hazy. He brought a swollen hand up to touch the links of the chain.

  “You can’t leave me here,” he said.

  I went looking around the room for Luke Daw’s bones, the larger pieces, the ones Warren might have handled. When I found them, I wiped them down.

  Pruett touched his broken nose and groaned. He trailed his hand along his left leg until his fingertip found the jagged end of his fibula.

  “I wouldn’t touch that,” I said. “It’s what you call an open fracture. It’d be easy to get it infected.”

  He moved his hand to his stomach and it came away bloody. He brought it up to his face so he could see.

  “This is bad.”

  “I know it seems that way.”

  “I need help.”

  “Maybe you’ll pull through.”

  I found Luke Daw’s wallet and driver’s license and wiped them down.

  “You have to get me out of here,” Pruett said.

  I went to stand over him. “Maybe you’ll make it out on your own.”

  “This is serious.”

  I still had Jana’s quarter. I showed it to him. “She got out with just this,” I said. “So we know it can be done.” I put the quarter away. “You got any change in your pockets, Neil?”

  He didn’t answer. He was quiet for a while, and I went back to wiping Luke’s bones. Five minutes went by, maybe ten. I heard Pruett breathing hard. I put the light on him. He was trying to sit up.

  The effort did him in and he fell back.

  “This is a cruel way to die,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You don’t have to do it this way,” he said. “You could shoot me.”

  I had the Makarovs in my pockets. I laid the flashlight on the floor and took them out.

  “These guns are junk,” I said. “They’re counterfeits. It’s a wonder they worked as well as they did.”

  “Just do it. Shoot me.”

  “I don’t really want to.”

  Neil Pruett struggled again to sit up. Managed to brace himself on his elbows.

  “I’ll tell you something about Jana,” he said.

  I returned the empty Makarov to my pocket. Kept the other one out.

  “She remembered me at the end,” Pruett said, “when I had her on the floor.”

  He straightened his arms, pushed himself up.

  “She remembered me,” he said, “and I’ve never seen anyone so afraid.”

  No thunder above us. No lightning. Just the sorry sound of the rain falling on the stairs. I flicked off the safety of the Makarov, then pulled back the slide and released it. The unfired round dropped onto the mattress and a new one entered the chamber.

  There were eight bullets in the clip to start. I’d fired two and Warren had fired two. And one on the mattress, which left three.

  Pruett’s arms trembled. I pointed the gun at his head and squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  “I told you,” I said. “Junk.”

  He closed his eyes. “Try it again.”

  I worked the slide. Squeezed the trigger.

  Click.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Again.”

  One last try. Slide. Trigger.

  Click.

  “That has to be fate,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I tucked the gun in my pocket. Collected the bullets and the flashlight from the floor. And I left him there.

  • • •

  When they found his body the story made national headlines. UNDERGROUND DUNGEON IN UPSTATE NEW YORK. The cable news shows covered it for days. It gave them a lot to work with: the Pruett brothers, Gary and Neil, and their two murdered wives. Luke and Eli Daw, the pot-dealing cousins who came to a bad end. Wendy Daw refused to be interviewed, but plenty of others were eager to talk—people who had grown up around the Pruetts or had a story to share about the Daws. Gary Pruett himself sat for an interview in a prison rec room up in Dannemora, proclaiming his own innocence and his brother’s too.

  The coverage started to lag at the end of July, until a reporter tracked down Luke Daw’s mother in a small town in Nebraska. Maggie Daw had spent the last nineteen years moving around the Midwest, waiting tables in diners. She was a haunted woman, a picture of wasted beauty, with streaks of gray in her hair and dark faraway eyes. She broke down on camera, crying for her dead son and describing the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father.

  In August there was a school shooting out west, and a pretty young blonde went missing on her honeymoon. The cable channels lost interest in the Pruetts and the Daws and Rome, New York.

  • • •

  The Rome police pursued the investigation through the summer and into the fall. The lead detective was not Frank Moretti; it was a gruff cop named O’Keefe, a balding man who wore suspenders and smoked cigars. O’Keefe theorized that Neil Pruett had been killed by drug dealers, unidentified associates of the Daws—the same unidentified associates who had killed Luke and Eli. On this theory, Megan Pruett was collateral damage, murdered by her husband when she found out about his involvement in the drug trade.

  In September, traces of blood recovered from the underground room were tested and matched by DNA analysis to Cathy Pruett, and people began to wonder whether Cathy might also have been a collateral victim of violence among drug dealers. The Rome Sentinel ran an editorial arguing that the new evidence justified another look at Gary Pruett’s conviction in the murder of his wife. Roger Tolliver announced that he would take up Pruett’s cause and work toward getting him a new trial.

  I spoke to Tolliver a few days after his announcement. He sounded determined and optimistic. He believed he was doing something Jana would have wanted. I wasn’t so sure. If Gary Pruett was anything like his brother, maybe pr
ison was the place for him. He hadn’t killed his wife, but maybe that was because he never got around to it, because someone else did it first.

  I could understand the value of helping him—in the abstract. Because everyone deserves a fair trial and the whole system suffers when justice is denied. But I couldn’t say if it was what Jana would have wanted.

  In September I was still living in Jana’s apartment. The nights were growing cool, and for the first time since she died I wanted to build a fire. Her fireplace had gone untended for months, and when I swept out the ashes I found something I’d been looking for: a few fragments of paper, charred around the edges. On one of them I could make out part of a heading: Oneida County Coroner.

  It was from a copy of the autopsy report on Cathy Pruett.

  I was looking at what remained of the green file: Jana’s notes on the Pruett case.

  Ashes.

  There’d been a time when I thought that Frank Moretti had taken the contents of the file—and later I decided that Jana’s killer must have carried the papers away with him. But now I believe that Jana disposed of them herself, that she burned them at some point in the days before she died.

  I think she did it because she realized she wasn’t responsible for Gary Pruett’s fate, because she was ready to let the case go and move on. Ready to live her own life.

  I’d like to think she did it because she was happy.

  I’d like to believe I had something to do with that.

  • • •

  In July and August, after the police discovered the underground room, people were drawn to the farm on Humaston Road—people curious to see a place touched by death.

  But when the police had collected their evidence, the county sent workers to dismantle Luke Daw’s creation. They took it out board by board. They filled in the root cellar and hauled away the wreckage of the farmhouse. They bulldozed the barn and hauled that away too. They towed Luke’s trailer to a junkyard.

  By September hardly anyone went to the farm anymore. There was nothing to see.

  I drove out there several times, especially after the weather turned mild. I saw Angela Reese there once, with a stool and an easel set up on the hill. She was branching out from acrylics to oils, from abstracts to landscapes. She had rendered the pond in blue and green, and the forest of cattails on the far shore. She told me she had an exhibition scheduled for the spring, at a gallery in Syracuse. I told her I would come.

  A week later I pulled onto the gravel lot that once held Luke’s trailer and was surprised to see Frank Moretti’s black Chevrolet. Surprised and not surprised. I walked back through the trees and up the hill and found Moretti sitting on a blanket on the ground. He wore a gray suit and had his shirt collar unbuttoned. His tie lay coiled in the grass.

  “I’ve been expecting to see you,” he said as I sat beside him.

  “Have you?”

  “I like coming here. Maybe because it’s quiet.” He paused, to demonstrate how quiet it could be. “But I knew I’d see you eventually.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people don’t learn. No matter how smart they are. They always return to the scene of the crime.”

  Moretti pulled a clump of grass from the ground at the edge of the blanket. He kept the longest blade and tossed the others away. He wound the blade around his finger.

  “It could’ve been my case,” he said wearily. “When we found the wife with a broken arrow in her heart, the chief offered to let me take the lead. I didn’t want it. So he gave it to O’Keefe. And when we found the husband, that one went to O’Keefe too.”

  I looked off at the distant birch trees. Their leaves had just started to turn.

  Moretti said, “I went down in that room, though. Just about every detective in the department went down there. Whoever killed Neil Pruett did an amateurish job. They got some things right. No shell casings left behind—that was good. But other things they screwed up. If you’re going to kill a man, you kill him. You don’t leave him to die.”

  He played with the blade of grass, winding it and unwinding it.

  “The M.E. couldn’t say how long Pruett lasted, down there alone in the dark,” Moretti said. “Maybe a few hours, maybe a day. But before he died, he tried to scratch a message in the floor. He used a key. That was another rookie move, leaving him his keys. He didn’t get very far, just one letter, an M. O’Keefe thinks he was trying to name his killer.”

  “M could mean anything,” I said. “M for Megan. Maybe it was a message for his wife.”

  “Maybe he was crying for his mother. But I thought you’d want to know: O’Keefe has his eye out for an M. He’s curious about the keys too. So am I. There were a lot of them. Some of them—O’Keefe doesn’t know what they open. But he’d like to know.”

  I wasn’t worried about the keys. I’d changed the locks at Sophie’s apartment. At Jana’s too.

  “There’s nothing I can tell you about keys,” I said.

  Moretti held up the blade of grass and let the wind take it. He draped his tie around his neck.

  “Do you have time for a walk?” he asked.

  We strolled down the hill, Moretti with his blanket folded under his arm. As we approached the pond he said, “Warren Finn’s wife had her baby.”

  I knew. I’d already been for a visit. They had a boy, seven pounds. I noticed that Warren tended to cradle the kid with his right arm. His left was still a little stiff around the shoulder.

  “I drove there the weekend before last,” Moretti said. “They seem happy. Lydia too. She loves the boy like he’s her own grandson. I think that’s good.”

  We came to the pond and Moretti picked his way through some tall weeds and led me to a dock I hadn’t seen before—the wood weathered and bleached by the sun. We walked out almost to the end.

  “Lydia has questions, about Jana,” he said. “She asked me about these new murders, if I thought they were connected in any way with Jana’s death. I told her no, I didn’t see how they could be.”

  Warren and I had told her the same thing when she asked us.

  “I don’t like lying to her,” Moretti said. “But I don’t want her to know the truth. I wish I didn’t know. When I went down in that room, I saw the gap in the wall, the missing board. I know what it means. I’ve got that piece of two-by-four sitting in evidence—the candleholder from Jana’s apartment. O’Keefe hasn’t made the connection. Maybe he never will. He’s about as dense as you could hope for. But there are other things that might give it away.”

  We watched a heron flying low over the pond.

  “I’ve spent some time with Lydia,” Moretti said. “I’ve listened to her stories. Jana’s trip to New York City, and how she came back on the bus because she had to sell her grandmother’s car.” He rubbed the nape of his neck. “What do you think happened to that car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s here,” he said, looking out at the water. “It never turned up anywhere else. It’s somewhere under the surface, maybe under the lily pads out there. But if we have a dry spell and the water goes down far enough, somebody might find it. And then everything comes out in the open. I won’t be able to keep it from Lydia,” he said, turning to face me. “So should I tell her now? That’s the question that’s been troubling me. I want to do the right thing.”

  He was looking for an answer and I didn’t have one. I had something else, something that had been building inside me for a long time: a pressure, white-hot. I was thinking of the chain of events that began with one bad decision by Frank Moretti: if he hadn’t framed Gary Pruett and sent him to prison, then Jana wouldn’t have needed to save him, and she never would’ve gone to see Neil Pruett, and she would still be alive.

  I thought the desire to do the right thing had come to Frank Moretti a bit too late.

  The pressure had been building. It neede
d to go somewhere.

  I made a fist and punched him in the jaw.

  • • •

  The night of the storm, after I gathered all the shell casings and retrieved my cell phone from the puddle in the barn, I waited for Sophie in the shelter of Luke Daw’s trailer. She came for me around four in the morning and brought me back to her apartment, where Warren Finn, stitched up and bandaged, was recovering on the sofa.

  Sophie checked on him, and then she and I went into the bedroom. We lay together in the darkness and she told me about waking up with Neil Pruett in the room. She asked me what I’d done to him and I told her.

  “I would’ve put the bullets in the other gun,” she said.

  At dawn she fell asleep. I stayed with her.

  • • •

  I spent a lot of time with her that summer and fall. I didn’t move back into the apartment—she never asked me to—but she called me when she needed me. She didn’t feel safe alone at night, especially in those first few weeks after the storm.

  Our engagement was called off by unspoken agreement. The wedding invitations never went out. We’d once scheduled the ceremony for a day in late September. I didn’t hear from Sophie that day, but she called me the day after—the day I punched Frank Moretti.

  We watched a movie on TV that night, something with Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks or both. I kept an ice pack on my hand; the knuckles were scraped and swollen. The punch had caught Moretti off-guard. It knocked him down. If the dock had been narrower, he might have gone into the water.

  He sat rubbing his jaw and his expression showed me everything: shock and betrayal and regret. I wanted to help him up. He got up on his own.

  “I wish I hadn’t done that,” I said.

  Moretti turned away and walked back along the dock. I watched him go. His feet shuffled and he looked tired. He had always looked tired.

  I never talked to him again.

  When Sophie asked about my hand, I told her the truth. She said I should keep icing it and it would be fine. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to tease me about it. I wanted to go back. I wanted her to say, “Dave, promise me you’ll stop punching policemen.”

  Later in the fall she started seeing someone—another intern at the hospital. Not Brad Gavin. A different one.