Free The Heavens May Fall by Allen Eskens Page B

gawkers expected to find on the street where James J. Hill once ran his Great Northern Railway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise .
    It was Diana who put Boady’s mind at ease when he needed to quit practicing law. It was she who convinced him that they had set aside enough money that he could walk away from his law practice and move to a tiny faculty office on the second floor of Hamline University School of Law. She had watched him struggle under the weight of a client’s death for two years before, finally convincing him to give up his law practice. In those two years, she watched him drop twenty pounds. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. The practice of law had become more deadly to Boady than a malignant cancer, and Diana feared every day that his drive to work might end in a car crash that only she would know had not been an accident. She’d told him this when she begged him to apply for the law-school opening.
    She had saved his life, and he loved her for that, as well.
    Boady liked the city of St. Paul. Being the older of the twins, St. Paul bore the deep scars and hunched shoulders of experience. The city was thoughtful and somber and had nothing to prove. It may move a bit slower than its brother to the west, but there was no city on Earth more sure-footed.
    Boady had once been a man of Minneapolis. He moved through its halls with a naïve confidence completely undeserved. There had been a time when it seemed as though every decision Boady made, no matter how reckless, ended well for him and for his clients. He felt like one of those action heroes who could run through a warehouse full of flying bullets and never get hit. He was untouchable—until the day he wasn’t. Now he understood. Now he was a man of St. Paul.
    Boady had let his mind drift away from his syllabus and onto a couple squirrels chasing each other across his yard. They scurried up a tree when the black car pulled up and parked in front of the house. Boady looked up to see Ben Pruitt heading up the walkway.
    Boady smiled and waved. “Well, shut my mouth. If it isn’t the great Benjamin Lee Pruitt himself.”
    Ben waved back with no smile. He walked like a man at the end of a long journey even though he had just stepped out of his car. The sadness behind Ben’s eyes caused Boady to stand to greet him, a serious greeting for what suddenly had the feel of a serious meeting.
    Ben embraced Boady in a hug. “Jennavieve’s dead,” he said, his voice tripping across the words. He pulled back from the embrace, his eyes thick with tears ready to fall.
    “What?”
    “She’s dead. They found her body this morning. She was murdered.”
    Boady motioned to a second rocking chair, Diana’s chair, and the two sat down. “Are you sure?”
    “I just came from the morgue. I identified her.”
    “What happened?”
    “I don’t know. I was in Chicago. I flew down yesterday morning for a conference. I got a call today from your buddy, Max Rupert, saying that Jennavieve was dead and Emma was missing.”
    “Emma’s missing?”
    “They found her. She spent the night at a neighbor’s house. She’s alright. I haven’t seen her yet, but I’m going there after I talk to you. They tell me she doesn’t know her mom’s dead yet. I . . . I don’t know what to say to her. Her mother was everything to her.”
    “I’m so terribly sorry . . . Jennavieve . . . I can’t believe it. Have they told you anything about how it happened?”
    “Not much. I managed to get the ME to tell me that Jennavieve was stabbed. When I viewed her body, she had stitches along the right side of her neck. I’ve seen autopsy photos before, and I knew that wasn’t part of the normal procedure. I pushed until the ME gave in and said that’s where the knife . . .” Ben’s eyes glazed over and tears began rolling down his cheeks. He wiped them on the sleeves of his white button-down shirt.
    “Where was she killed?”
    “I don’t know. They won’t tell me