The Last Dead Girl (37 page)

He twisted to catch the kick on his shoulder, crawled knees and elbows on the gravel to escape her, rolled onto his back and brought the gun up. She kicked it away again, but the kick left her off-balance. He grabbed her ankle and pulled.

Then she was down with him, down on the ground. A bolt of lightning ripped through the western sky. Neil spotted the pistol lying on an island of wet grass amid the gravel. The girl saw it too.

She tried to roll toward it. He got there first. She kicked at him as he lifted it from the grass, and when he stood up she was still kicking at him. He aimed the gun at her head, then shifted his aim a few inches and fired once. The shot raised a spit of mist and mud from the ground.

The girl stopped kicking and let out a wail of pure despair.

The wind carried it away.

•   •   •

W
e came around a bend on Humaston Road and the storm threw a tree branch in our path. I drove over it and it caught on something under the truck, and we dragged it all the way to Luke Daw's trailer.

I slid to a stop in the gravel and felt the bull's horn along my spine again. I didn't see Neil Pruett's car. I thought I'd made the wrong call; he'd taken Sophie somewhere else.

Warren Finn was out of the truck with his flashlight. I followed him. He ducked inside the trailer and came out a moment later, shaking his head. I snapped on my own flashlight and felt the weight of the Makarov in my pocket and the beat of the rain against my neck. We went around to the back of the trailer and there was Pruett's car. A dull sedan.

No one in the car. No way to make out footprints in the gravel. But we knew where they must have gone. There was only one place.

We found the lane and followed it through the trees.

•   •   •

T
he full moon hid behind the clouds above the barn: a blurry wash of pale light.

The light guided Neil Pruett up the slope of the hill. He pulled the girl along with him. When he came to the farmhouse and the wagon wheel, he put the gun in his pocket and took out his penlight. He used it to scan the ground until he found the iron ring.

He pushed the girl down to her knees, then hauled up the heavy door. He let it stand open, resting against the wheel, and aimed his penlight into the void. Saw the familiar stairs leading down. And saw something wrong: mud on the steps. Shoe prints.

Someone had been here. The wooden room was no longer a secret.

“There's no way I'm going down there,” the girl said.

Neil clicked off the penlight.

“You'll have to shoot me,” the girl said.

He traded the light for the pistol. Touched the muzzle to the top of her head.

“Shhhh,” he said. “I'm thinking.”

Change of plans. He couldn't use the wooden room. He would go back to the car. Take the girl to Gary's house.

He pulled her to her feet and lightning struck. Close. Just the other side of the pond. The thunder made him flinch.

His eyes adjusted in the wake of the strike. He looked down at the pond—a gray pool amid the darker gray of the surrounding fields. He blinked.

There were two spots of light advancing up the slope of the hill.

•   •   •

I
saw them first as silhouettes: two figures at the top of the slope, against a sky of night and cloud. Then the lightning turned the sky to daylight and I saw them clearly: Neil Pruett holding Sophie's arm, with the Makarov pistol in his free hand.

The sky turned to night again. Warren and I raced up the hill, flashlight beams jittering over the uneven ground.

A shot rang out.

I dropped my light and drew the gun from my pocket. The rain slanted sideways through the air. I saw it in the beam of Warren's light.

“Turn it off,” I told him.

Too late.

A second shot cut through the night, and I dove to the ground.

Warren dove too.

His flashlight rolled over the drenched grass. I crawled to it and worked the switch. The light went out.

A third shot sounded from up the hill. I raised my gun and fired twice, aiming wide. I didn't want to risk hitting Sophie. The shots rang loud. My eyes closed reflexively. When I opened them again I saw the two silhouettes running—one dragging the other—heading in the direction of the barn.

I went to Warren. He was lying facedown. I shook his shoulder and heard him moan. I rolled him over onto his back.

I could see the blood on his white shirt, even in the dark.

•   •   •

N
eil Pruett took the girl to the far end of the barn. The broad door stood open. He pulled her inside. The rain still fell on them, pouring through the bare frame of the roof. But the walls kept out most of the wind.

He could still get out of this.

He only needed to reach his car. Nothing stood in his way except the two men on the slope—and he had hit one of them, he was sure.

They weren't cops. If the cops had discovered the wooden room, there'd be swarms of them, not just two.

No, the cops didn't know about the farm. But David Malone knew. Malone had been here before. So that's who he was dealing with: Malone and a friend. And one of them was already down.

The rain streamed from Neil's hair into his face. He wiped it away with a damp sleeve. The girl was talking to him. She'd been droning on in a dull and patient voice, the kind you might use to talk to a foreigner. He'd been half listening. She wanted him to let her go; that was the essence of it. She had money and her parents had money, and they would pay him if only he would let her go.

Neil brought the Makarov pistol up and aimed it at the bridge of her nose.

“Shhhh,” he said.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement at the other end of the barn. Someone stepped into the open doorway there—a dark shape against the night-gray sky.

•   •   •

S
ophie?” I called.

She answered in a wavering voice. “Dave?”

The rain faded back. I could still hear it falling; it tickled the mud of the barn floor. It sent ripples through a puddle midway between us. I could see the ripples in the light of the moon: concentric circles spreading out into one another.

“Is he there?” I asked Sophie.

“He's here,” she said. “He's got a gun in my face.”

“Yes, I'm here,” said Neil Pruett.

“I think he's crazy,” Sophie said.

“I know,” I told her.

“Put your gun down,” said Pruett.

I watched the circles in the puddle. I didn't do what he said. I didn't intend to do anything he said.

“The police are on their way, Neil.”

No reply. Not at first. I heard movement at the other end of the barn, and a gasp from Sophie. I could imagine what Pruett was doing: moving her in front of him so he could use her as a shield.

“You're lying,” he said.

“You're right. I'm lying. But Warren Finn—he's the one you shot—he's not dead. You winged him. I sent him to get the police. So they're not on their way yet, but they will be.”

“You're lying,” Pruett said again.

I thought I could see him, down at the other end. He was just inside the doorway. Seventy feet away from me, maybe a little more.

I stood sideways with my head turned toward him, trying to present as small a target as possible. I had my gun arm extended in front of me.

“Warren must've reached my truck by now,” I said. “He'll go to the police and bring them back. There's nothing you can do.”

“They won't get here in time to save you,” Pruett said.

I tossed my shoulders. “It won't matter. Not to you. He'll tell them all about you. They'll track you down. I'm giving you a chance to get away. A head start. Let Sophie go.”

Quiet in the barn. Just the patter of the rain in the puddle.

“What if I want to keep her?” Pruett said.

“That's not the deal I'm offering.”

Pruett stepped into the square frame of the doorway, pulling Sophie with him. She cried out softly. I could make out the shape of them. He had his gun against her temple.

“Here's the deal
I'm
offering,” he said. “Put your gun down or I'll kill her right now.”

•   •   •

N
eil Pruett pushed the muzzle of the Makarov into the side of the girl's head.

“Right now,” he repeated.

Malone didn't move. “You're making a mistake, Neil,” he said.

“I'll kill her.”

Nothing. Then Malone lowered his arm. His gun dropped into the mud.

“Now kick it this way.”

Malone kicked it. It landed in the puddle.

“Now turn around and put your hands on your head.”

•   •   •

I
didn't turn. I didn't put my hands on my head.

If Pruett wanted to shoot me, he could shoot me in the front, not the back.

Seventy feet between us. He was a schoolteacher, not a soldier. Not a marksman. He'd managed to hit Warren, but that was a wild shot. Dumb luck. I didn't think he could hit me.

He seemed to have the same idea. He moved a few steps closer, pushing Sophie in front of him. He took the gun away from her temple and aimed it at me.

She butted the back of her head against his chin and tore away from him.

I reached my hand behind my back, fast, and brought it out again.

Neil Pruett fired his Makarov at me. Four times. I felt the first one like a bee buzzing by my sleeve. The other three I felt not at all.

I didn't shoot him. My gun hand was empty. I didn't even have my cell phone. I'd dropped it in the mud and kicked it into the puddle.

Pruett lowered his spent Makarov and turned to run. Warren Finn met him in the doorway of the barn and shot him in the gut with the second Makarov.

W
eeks went by before they found Neil Pruett's body.

The storm passed before dawn on Saturday, and by Sunday night most of the city had power again. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do. Roofs that needed repairing. I managed to keep busy.

When Megan Pruett missed school on Monday and didn't call in, some of her fellow teachers worried about her. Two of them drove to her house on Tuesday and found it empty. They tried to call her husband and got no answer. Finally they drove to the house on Bloomfield Street and found her car parked in front. They went onto the porch and in through the damaged door and saw the letter K on the wall. They called the police.

The police discovered Megan's body in the trunk of her car. Killed with a bow and arrow.

That's when they started looking for her husband.

The manhunt for Neil Pruett began with a statewide bulletin and soon expanded through the northeast. There were sightings as far afield as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Bangor, Maine. One woman swore she had seen him in Niagara Falls, crossing over into Canada.

People see what they want to see, and there are plenty of forty-year-old men in the world with plain faces and sandy hair.

The police caught a break in July, when a retired state trooper and his wife pulled off on the side of Humaston Road to hunt for wild blackberries. The trooper had been following the case, and he recognized Pruett's car when he spotted it behind Luke Daw's abandoned trailer.

The Rome P.D. found Pruett three days later, with the help of a cadaver dog on loan from the county sheriff. They found him in Luke's underground room. Right where I put him.

•   •   •

T
he night of the storm. Warren in his blood-soaked shirt, standing over Neil Pruett with the Makarov pistol. Sophie running toward me. I sloshed through the puddle and caught her up, spun her around, asked her if she was hurt, told her I was sorry.

I used my pocketknife to cut the tape that bound her wrists.

We turned to see Warren firing another round into Pruett's stomach. Thunder drowned out Pruett's scream. Warren pointed the gun at Pruett's head and pulled the trigger again.

Nothing happened.

Warren didn't let it faze him. He stepped around to Pruett's right side and stomped his heel down hard on Pruett's hand. He did the same on Pruett's left side. He brought his flashlight out of his back pocket and used it to break Pruett's nose. There was no thunder to mask the screams.

We went to him. I took the pistol away—gently—and flicked on the safety. He kicked the side of Pruett's neck.

“It's enough,” I said.

Warren drew his foot back for another kick, but all the exertion had left him unsteady. He swayed. I caught him and helped him down to the ground.

“I'm fine,” he said.

I opened his shirt. The bullet had struck his shoulder. We looked at the wound in the beam of his flashlight. Sophie leaned close, squinting. I remembered her glasses; Warren had them in his pocket. I gave them to her.

“He needs to go to the hospital,” she said.

“No hospitals,” said Warren.

Neil Pruett tried to sit up. I pushed him back down into the mud.

“I'm good,” Warren said.

He looked better than he had a right to.

“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.

•   •   •

W
hen they found his body the story made national headlines. U
NDERGROUND
D
UNGEON IN
U
PSTATE
N
EW
Y
ORK
. 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.

•   •   •

T
he 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 prison 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.

•   •   •

I
n 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.