The Last Dead Girl (14 page)

I
drove north to see Gary Pruett on Friday, a four-hour trip through the Adirondacks—pretty country, lots of lakes. I left early and by eleven-thirty I had reached my destination: the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. The main street of the town was lined with businesses on the south side: restaurants and hotels, a post office. On the north side was the prison wall, gray concrete, sixty feet high.

I found the visitor center and checked in. I had arranged the visit through Pruett's lawyer. I got a laminated badge and went through a metal detector and wound up in a crowded room with a counter running down the middle. I took a seat across from Gary Pruett, and after we introduced ourselves he said, “I like to get it out of the way up front—the main question.”

“What question?” I asked.

“Whether I murdered my wife. The answer's no.”

I nodded but didn't say anything.

“I hope you believe me,” he said.

I didn't have an opinion yet, but as I looked across the counter at Gary Pruett, one thing was clear: his appearance worked against him. His eyes were a cold, remote blue, his hair a darker blond than his brother's. He had very straight teeth and a dimple in his chin. He had the build of a former boxer—a middleweight, not a heavyweight. And though he was in his mid-forties, I could see that he would have stacked up well against the other high school math teachers. Eighteen-year-old girls might have had daydreams about him in class. And he would have liked it, you could see that too; you could read it in his face, in the corners of his mouth, in that dimple.

He looked like a man who might well have murdered his wife.

“I know it's a cliché, coming from a convict,” Pruett said, “but I don't belong here. That girl, Jana Fletcher—she believed me. My lawyer told me you knew her.”

“That's right,” I said. “When did you speak to Jana?”

He closed his eyes to remember. There were people talking on either side of us, other inmates and their visitors, but he acted as if we were alone.

“The middle of March,” he said. “She came here. She was a godsend. I'm sorry she's gone. It's a gift, when you're in a place like this: having someone who believes you.”

“Did she talk to you about Napoleon Washburn?” I said.

Pruett nodded. “She gave me hope—that he would finally tell the truth.”

“Have you thought about why he would have lied at your trial?”

“I've thought about all of it. Every minute of the trial, everything that happened beforehand at the county jail. I talked to him a few times there—Washburn. He was in the cell next to mine, and I would also see him in the rec room or the yard. The first time he spoke to me, he asked what I was in for, and I told him I'd been charged with killing my wife. That's the only time we talked about the subject. He brought it up a few times later, but it was nothing I wanted to discuss. In retrospect I should have known—”

“He was trying to draw something out of you,” I said.

“It seems obvious now,” said Pruett. “Once he found out who I was, he would've seen the potential. If he could get me to confess, he could get what he wanted—a shorter sentence for himself. When I didn't give him a confession, he invented one. That's the simplest explanation. I generally like to leave it at that.”

“‘Generally'?”

Pruett hesitated, picking at a thread on the sleeve of his gray prison uniform. “It's easy to overthink things in here. You can drive yourself mad. Sometimes I wonder if Washburn already knew who I was, the first time we met. If someone sent him to talk to me.”

“Who?”

“The police, of course.” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall again. “I know, it sounds paranoid. Even to me. But if you think about it long enough, it makes sense. They had a weak case against me. Why not try to shore it up with a confession?”

I would have liked to dismiss the possibility out of hand. I couldn't quite do it. Pruett was watching me. He must have read something in my face.

“See?” he said. “You've only been thinking about it for a few seconds. Try it for a whole day in a cell. Or a week. That's just one way I have of torturing myself.”

“There are others?”

“Sure. There's the big one, the obvious one. I didn't kill my wife. So who did?”

“And how have you done with that one?”

“I've spent more than a week on it, I'll tell you that,” said Gary Pruett, quiet and wistful in his prison gray, his palms resting on the counter between us. “I've got an answer, for all the good it's going to do me. Two answers. Luke and Eli Daw.”

The names meant nothing to me. “Who are they?” I said.

He rubbed a knuckle over the dimple in his chin, leaned closer to me. “A pair of cousins,” he said, “former students at East Rome High School, though they'd be in their twenties now. As far as I know, neither of them ever had a class with Cathy, but they would've seen her there, they would've known who she was. And they were troublemakers, bullies. They got into fights, always with kids who were weaker. They spent a lot of time in detention.”

“Does that make them killers?”

“There's more. They were strange kids. Brought up by their grandfather out in the boondocks. Lived in a trailer. You'd hear stories—about how they killed stray dogs, stuff like that. And worse. There was an incident at the school, in the boiler room in the basement. The two of them were caught down there with another student, a girl, fifteen years old. She had Down syndrome. There were never any charges, because it was never clear what happened.”

He paused, waiting to see if I would go along with him.

“What else?” I said.

“Two things,” he told me. “First, when Cathy went missing, three weeks passed before her body was found. During that time, the police organized searches. They were convinced I killed her, and that meant I must have disposed of the body somewhere. They called for volunteers to help search through parks and woods and fields. They kept a list of the volunteers, and my lawyer had access to it. Luke and Eli Daw were on the list. I wouldn't have thought they were the volunteering type.”

“Did anyone question them?” I asked. “Where are they now?”

“That's the second thing,” Gary Pruett said. “A few weeks after the police found Cathy's body, Eli Daw was shot dead in his trailer. Shot with a thirty-eight revolver owned by Luke Daw. Luke disappeared the same night. He hasn't been seen since.”

“You think he shot his cousin.”

No reply at first. Just Pruett tugging at the loose thread on his sleeve again. Then he said, “There's nothing but time here, time to work things out. Those two had a reputation at the high school. Luke was the dominant one. Smarter, tougher. Eli was the follower. I'm almost certain they killed Cathy. Maybe they took her somewhere first, the way they took that girl to the boiler room. Maybe Eli didn't want to kill her, but Luke made him go along. Suppose Eli felt guilty afterward. Luke might have decided he couldn't trust him to keep quiet. So he shot him.”

Pruett spread his hands on the counter between us—an invitation for me to comment on his story. I'd thought his eyes were remote, but I realized that was an illusion. He was watching me intently; he needed to know if I believed him. I recalled what his sister-in-law had told me about him. Megan Pruett.
You have to remember Gary's a liar.

He could be lying now, inventing killers to take the blame for his wife's murder. Killers who conveniently weren't around anymore.

But if he was telling the truth . . .

“Did you talk to Jana about this?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said. “It was one of the first things I told her.”

I thought about the implications. Eli was dead, but Luke was out there somewhere. And someone had killed Jana.

“Do you think she might have gone looking for him—for Luke Daw?” I said.

The question sat Pruett back in his chair. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “That would be dangerous, wouldn't it? And even if she wanted to—I don't know. Where would you start?”

I had no idea. But I had questions about Luke Daw, and Jana would have had questions too. Even if she hadn't looked for him, she would have wanted to find out more about him.

“Do you know what her plans were?” I asked Pruett. “After her visit with you, do you know who she intended to talk to?”

He thought for a moment. “She asked me if anyone ever took the Daws seriously as suspects in Cathy's murder, and I couldn't really say. I told her she should ask my lawyer—and the police.”

I knew she had talked to his lawyer.

“Do you know if she ever talked to the police?” I asked Pruett.

“I imagine she did. I know she meant to—she already had the lead detective's name.”

He said it casually, but it made me frown. It was something I should have wondered about before. Nothing changed in the room, not really, but I felt a nagging sensation, like a tickle at the back of my neck. The noise around us seemed to fall down to a hush.

“What was the detective's name?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.

“Frank Moretti,” he said.

I
t was early in the afternoon when I left Gary Pruett. The air felt crisp there up north, the second week of May. I had lunch at an Italian restaurant across the street from the prison, at a table with a view of the high gray wall.

I got back to Rome after six o'clock. I called Pruett's lawyer—a woman named Emily Beal—and asked if we could meet for a drink around eight. We agreed on a place, and I hung up and drove to Jana Fletcher's apartment.

I used my key and went in. No seal on the door now—the police had removed it. They had gathered all the evidence they needed. The apartment was mine for at least a month; I'd made a deal with Agnes Lanik.

I went to see her Thursday morning, not long after I read Sophie's note.
Maybe one of us should think about moving out.
I knew which one of us she meant. Agnes answered promptly to my knock; she seemed resigned to seeing me. I told her what I wanted and she agreed. I offered to pay whatever Jana had been paying—and to make up whatever Jana owed her as well. She scowled, as if I had offended her. “The girl owes me nothing,” she said.

I took a long shower to wash away the hours I'd spent on the road. Stood toweling off before the steamed-over mirror and thought I heard something move outside the bathroom door. I went over and opened it slow on the rusty hinges. No one out there in the living room. No one in the bedroom, or the kitchen. Just me and my nerves and my imagination.

I'd feared it might be worse. Thought I might not be able to sleep here. But the first night reassured me; the bedroom seemed like home. Agnes had paid someone to clean the apartment, but Jana's possessions remained in place.

I felt strange walking over the spot in the living room where I'd found Jana's body, but I figured that made sense. I was bound to get spooked once in a while, until I got used to being here alone.

At eight o'clock I parked downtown and walked half a block to a restaurant called The Savoy. I gave the hostess my name and she led me to a table tucked away in a far corner. Emily Beal was there with a section of the
New York Times
folded in a neat rectangle on the white linen tablecloth. She'd been filling in the crossword puzzle.

She rose from her seat to shake my hand. Her voice on the phone had led me to place her in her thirties or forties, but she looked older, fifty at least, judging by the lines on her face. She had pale blond hair that was fading into white. She was drinking a cappuccino and asked if I would have one. I said I would.

“What do you think of Gary Pruett?” she asked after I settled in.

“It's hard to say. A lot depends on whether he's telling the truth.”

“It always does. He told you his theory, I suppose. About the cousins.”

I nodded. “Luke and Eli Daw.”

“The real killers,” Emily Beal said. “His own version of the one-armed man.”

“You don't think they killed his wife?”

She sipped her cappuccino. “I think you'd have a hard time arguing it in court,” she said. “That's what Gary wanted me to do, of course.”

“But you didn't.”

“There was no way to connect them to the crime. They went to the high school where Cathy Pruett taught, but that doesn't mean anything. They took part in the search for her body, but so did a lot of other people. If they'd been the ones to
find
the body, then maybe you could make an argument. You could claim they knew where she was all along, because they put her there. But they didn't find her.”

“Who did?”

“A woman from Schenectady, driving into town to visit her family. She had her dog with her and she pulled over by the side of the road to let him out—to keep him from peeing in the car. He ran into a field and started barking, wouldn't come back. She went to get him and found him standing vigil over Cathy Pruett.”

Emily Beal let a few seconds pass. Then a wan smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “If I could've pinned the murder on the woman with the dog, I would've. But the police checked her out. She had no connection to the Pruetts and no criminal record.”

“Did the police ever question Luke and Eli Daw about Cathy Pruett?” I asked.

“No. Gary only began to suspect the Daws after Eli Daw turned up dead. He shared his suspicions with me, and I shared them with the detective assigned to Cathy's case—”

“Frank Moretti.”

“Right. Moretti couldn't talk to Luke Daw, because Luke ran off the night Eli died. As far as I know, they're still looking for him. By that point Cathy's body had been found and Gary had been charged with her murder. So I didn't expect Moretti to switch gears and try to prove that the Daws killed her. But I expected him to consider the possibility, the way any honest cop would.”

“Did he?”

Emily Beal looked for the answer in her coffee cup. “Who knows? The case against Gary went forward, that's the bottom line. But I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in Gary's theory: that the Daws killed Cathy and then Luke Daw killed Eli to keep him from talking. I did some checking on my own. The Daws both had criminal records. Minor drug offenses. Possession. That probably means they were involved in something bigger but the prosecutor wasn't sure he could make a case, so he offered them a plea bargain.”

“You think they were drug dealers.”

“Right. And if they were in business together—that kind of business—then it doesn't take much imagination to explain why Luke Daw might have shot his cousin. Criminals kill each other over money all the time. You don't need to look for other reasons.”

She drank from her cappuccino. By then the waitress had delivered one for me, so I did the same. I tried to decide which was more likely: that Eli Daw died because of Cathy Pruett or that he died because of drug money. I didn't reach any conclusion.

“Let's talk about Moretti,” I said.

Emily Beal nodded. “Sure.”

“You said you expected him to act like an honest cop. Is that what he is?”

She pushed her coffee cup aside. “As far as I know.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Within reason. As much as I trust any detective.”

“Do you believe he could've tried to frame Gary Pruett? Do you believe he could've used Napoleon Washburn—encouraged him to make up a story about a confession?”

“I considered that,” she said with a shrug. “But I had a hard time finding anything to back up the idea. I looked for a pattern—other cases of Moretti's that relied on jailhouse informants. I didn't find any.”

“That just means he didn't do it before,” I said. “Maybe this was the first time.”

“All right. Suppose that's true. Then you have to ask how Moretti convinced Washburn to help him. Did he pay him a visit at the jail?”

“Why not?” I said.

“It never happened. The county jail keeps records of visitors. There's no record of Washburn being visited by Moretti—or by any other police officer. I checked.”

“Maybe someone altered the records.”

Emily Beal kept her expression neutral. “In that case, you're into conspiracy territory,” she said. “Good luck. But if you ask me, it's not likely. Gary Pruett isn't worth conspiring over.”

I traced a circle with my finger on the linen tablecloth. “I get the sense you don't like him very much.”

“I try not to think in those terms,” she said. “When you defend these people, it's best not to make personal judgments about them. You don't want to ask yourself if they deserve defending. But to be honest, no, I don't like him. Never mind whether he killed his wife. Think about Angela Reese, the girl he had an affair with. She was only eighteen. He was her teacher. You can say it wasn't illegal. Fine. But it was out-of-bounds. I have a daughter her age. I pray to God she stays away from men like Gary Pruett.”

Her neutral expression had gone away, replaced by contempt. It occurred to me that a lot of people would feel that way about Pruett. Especially parents.

“Does Frank Moretti have a daughter?” I asked.

Emily Beal reached for the pen she'd been using on the crossword. “I believe he has an ex-wife, and a son in college somewhere down south. But no daughter.” She tapped the pen idly on her newspaper. “You shouldn't get too hung up on Moretti,” she said. “His reputation's solid. I looked for dirt on him and couldn't find any: no drug addiction, no gambling problem, no violent temper. The worst I heard is that perhaps he gets too close to certain crime victims.”

“What does that mean? Which victims?”

“The female ones, especially if they're attractive,” she said. “If a man gets killed and leaves a pretty widow behind, Moretti might take it on himself to comfort her. And by ‘comfort her' I mean exactly what you think I mean.”

“I see.”

“So there's that,” she said, waving the hand that held the pen. “Detective Moretti has his faults, but they don't seem to involve framing people or suborning perjury.”

•   •   •

T
hat night I fell asleep in Jana Fletcher's bed with the window open. I woke in the cold, with the clock reading 3:58. The numbers green in the dark.

I got up to close the window and remembered the green folder. Jana's folder, her notes on the Cathy Pruett case. I went to her desk and turned on the lamp. Opened the file drawer and found the folder—right where I'd seen it last. It had been thick with papers then; now it was empty.

I sat at the desk with a pencil and a legal pad and wrote a list of possibilities:

Moretti took Jana's notes because he thought they might help him discover who killed her. Or Moretti took the notes to cover up what Jana knew.

Gary Pruett killed his wife, Cathy. Or Luke and Eli Daw killed her. Or someone else.

Napoleon Washburn told the truth about Pruett's confession. Or he lied.

He lied on his own initiative. Or Frank Moretti put him up to it.

Moretti knew Pruett was innocent. Or knew he was guilty. Or wasn't sure.

Moretti framed an innocent man. Or he framed a guilty man, to ensure he'd go to prison.

Moretti's intentions were bad. Or they were good.

Too many possibilities. I dropped the pencil on the desk and drifted over to the fireplace. The mantel looked barren without the wooden board that Jana had used as a candleholder. The police had taken it away as evidence. Nothing on the mantel now but the clay bowl and the coin. Jana's quarter. I picked it up, touched my thumb to the edge where it was worn down to a point. I had never asked her how it got that way.

One more thing I didn't know.

I returned the coin to the bowl, switched off the lamp, and went back to bed.

•   •   •

O
n Saturday I could have gone to see Frank Moretti. I could have confronted him with wild accusations, just to see how he'd respond.

I paid a visit to Angela Reese instead.

She lived in an apartment on the margins of Bellamy University, a third-floor walk-up she shared with two other women—a place with character, if character meant cramped rooms with low ceilings, floors of scarred linoleum, appliances from the 1960s.

Her roommates were enrolled at the university, but Angela didn't believe in formal education. “Too much structure,” she told me. “Sometimes I sit in on classes, but I don't need the rest of it. Assignments and grades. That's not the way I learn.”

She was an artist, a painter. She showed me where she worked, in the apartment's largest bedroom, which wasn't saying much. It had good light, though, from two north-facing windows. She had a narrow bed pushed up against one wall and an easel set up where it would catch the light.

There were samples of her work here and there around the room, small canvases, eleven by fourteen. They were done in acrylics and they followed a pattern: a black line running vertically down the center, with a solid block of color on either side. Yellow and blue. Red and orange. Violet and gray.

“They're about duality,” Angela told me.

“I can see that,” I said.

“Because we're all more than one thing. None of us are just one way.”

She went on for a while about duality, about how we start as one thing and turn into another, about how we carry the seeds of change within us. It got to be a little New Agey, which was not what I'd expected. I thought I'd find someone less self-possessed, someone damaged by her time with Gary Pruett. But Angela Reese seemed whole.

I could guess why Pruett might have pursued her. She had a kind of wholesome beauty, fair-skinned and brown-haired. She reminded me of girls I'd grown up with. She would never be a fashion model, but if you saw her on the street you wouldn't look away.

I wasn't so sure about her future as a painter. She was, after all, basically filling in rectangles. I might have let my skepticism show in my face.

“You think they're all the same,” she said.

“No, no,” I said.

“It's okay. Everybody says that. Sandy and Ginny make fun of me. I don't care. I'm doing what I want, and the paintings sell.”

“They do?”

She laughed. “Don't look so surprised. There's a place downtown that sells them. I don't make a fortune, but I get by.” She found a business card and gave it to me:
THE WOODMERE GALLERY
.

“But you didn't come to look at paintings,” she said. “You want to talk about Gary.”

That was true, as far as it went. I was also here because Jana had been here once—something I'd learned earlier, when I called Angela to ask if she would meet with me.

“I saw Gary yesterday at Dannemora,” I said. “Have you ever been there?”

“No. I made a break with him. I was naïve when we were together, but not blind. When he got arrested for killing his wife, I figured the universe was sending me a message. Time to try something else.”