The Heavens May Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

planting evidence, is a serious thing for a police detective to do.”
    Max glared at Pruitt, wanting more than anything to shove that forged document down the man’s throat. “Mr. Pruitt, I’ve never seen this document before because this document never existed before. I’ve never received—”
    Finally the prosecutor stood up and shouted, “Objection, Your Honor. Lack of foundation. Lack of authenticity. This document has never been disclosed—”
    “Approach! Now,” the judge ordered. Both attorneys walked up to the bench. The judge pressed a button that filled the court with white noise so that the bench conference would not be heard by the jury. Despite the white noise, Max could hear occasional words or phrases as the exchange grew heated.
    “It’s cross-examination, I don’t need to disclose.”
    “This document has to be a forgery. Detective Rupert said he’s never seen it before.”
    “Detective Rupert’s a damned liar.”
    At that last one, the judge piped in and pointed a finger at Pruitt. Max couldn’t hear the words, but the redness in the judge’s face spoke volumes. After sending the two attorneys back to their respective tables, the judge instructed the jury to disregard Exhibit 42 and the statements of Mr. Pruitt. He was asking them to not remember Pruitt’s assertion that Max had been reprimanded for falsifying evidence. And by asking them to disregard that point, he was embedding Pruitt’s words in the brain of each juror.
    At the end of Max’s testimony, the Court took a short recess during which Max convinced the prosecutor to get the Court to order that Pruitt provide the State with a copy of Exhibit 42. Pruitt argued against it, saying that because it was not received into evidence, he had no obligation to share his work product. The judge was not in a mood to put up with that, and the State got a copy of the document.
    Exhibit 42 turned out to be a carefully forged letter of reprimand confirming that Detective Max Rupert had been found to have planted a syringe in the purse of a woman whose roommate died of a heroin overdose. The case never existed. The letter of reprimand had been the creation of someone’s desperate imagination. But whose?
    At Pruitt’s disciplinary hearing, Pruitt testified that his investigator produced that document as part of standard background research on Detective Rupert. Pruitt went on to suggest that his client, the roofing contractor, must have paid the investigator to forge that document.
    The investigator denied it and was facing a licensing board himself at the time. In the end, the Board of Professional Responsibility took Pruitt’s license to practice law away for sixty days and issued a public reprimand. The Board concluded that Pruitt knew or should have known that the document was a forgery. It chided his failure to use due diligence to confirm the authenticity of the document before presenting it to a court. His act, in the end, was a fraud upon the court.
    Pruitt’s reprimand was a public one and made it into the business sections of both the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch . Max smiled when he read the articles. He thought the newspaper articles would end the attorney’s career, but somehow it seemed to have the opposite effect.
    Now, Pruitt’s wife was found naked and dead in a parking lot in Kenwood, and a theory was taking shape in Max’s mind.

Chapter 6
    The Pruitt’s house may have been a mansion to some, probably not in the eyes of someone who lived in a true mansion, but it was big and square and solid, as though it had been cut from a single block of stone. It stood on a corner lot raised up from the street by a retaining wall that had the appearance of a pedestal upon which the trophy house gleamed. Pruitt had never impressed Max as being an attorney of such a stature that he would be able to afford that kind of house.
    Niki stood at the door of the house with a uniformed officer at her side.