Chapter 6
People Who Remember Differently
By the end of January, the State of Georgia had eleven witnesses for the case of State v. Pruitt, et al., and Detective Lonnie Beck had spoken to every one of them twice.
He kept the list in a spiral notebook in the glove box of his Buick, because the case folder at the station had a habit of being borrowed. He had written the names in blue pen, one to a line, with a dot beside the ones he trusted. On the first of December there had been seven dots.
On the thirty-first of January, he sat in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly on Route 9 with the engine off, and crossed out the fourth.
Maya Reyes. Guest. Left lake house approx. 11:30 p.m. She had been in the kitchen when Corinne Bellamy arrived. She had told him, in October, that she had seen Corinne drinking a beer and laughing. She had said that Owen Maddox had handed her a cup. She had said that she had thought, at the time, that's a lot of lime.
He had gone to see her at her mother's house, on the evening of the twenty-ninth. She was twenty-four and worked as a dental hygienist. She served him sweet tea in a glass with a lemon-slice stuck to the rim, and she sat across from him on a floral sofa with her hands between her knees.
"I just don't want to say something that isn't true," she said.
"I'm not asking you to say anything that isn't."
"I know. But I've been thinking about it." She did not look at him. "I was drinking, too. I don't know that I saw a cup. I think I might have heard about a cup. Afterwards. From other people."
"You told me you saw it."
"I told you what I thought I saw." She was on the edge of tears. "Mr. Beck, a lawyer came to see me. A very nice one. He was so respectful. He just asked me whether I was sure, and I said I thought so, and he said that was fine, that I should say exactly what I remembered, and nothing more. And then he said, And if you're not certain, then it's the honest thing to say you're not certain."
"That's a reasonable thing to say."
"It is. That's what's so, I thought, he's right." She wiped her eyes. "I'm not changing my story. I'm just saying I'm not certain."
He thanked her. He finished the tea. He drove to the Piggly Wiggly and sat in the lot for twenty minutes, looking at a shopping cart that had rolled across two spaces and stopped against a lamp post.
It's the honest thing to say you're not certain.
That was the genius of it, he thought. Nobody had told her to lie. Nobody had threatened her. They had only given her permission to doubt, and she had accepted, gratefully, as a person accepts a coat.
He crossed out her name and put a question mark.
It went like that all winter.
Harlan Peavey, who had driven the girl eleven miles to the hospital in a milk truck, received a letter from the dairy in the first week of February informing him that his route had been restructured and that his services would no longer be required. He was sixty-one. He would say, in a deposition he gave on the nineteenth, in a voice so quiet that the court reporter asked him twice to speak up, that he had been told to stay out of it. He would not say by whom. His wife would not let him.
The sheriff's office, in the person of Deputy Sergeant Dale Sutter, who had been promoted on the second of January, announced an internal review of its handling of the initial 911 calls from the Pruitt lake house on the night of the fourteenth of June. There had been one, the review concluded. It had been placed at 2:47 a.m. from a prepaid phone and had lasted nine seconds. The caller had given no name. The dispatcher had logged it as possible prank.
Beck read the review three times.
Nine seconds. No name.
He remembered a boy of twenty-six, in a brown cotton shirt, saying on the phone, in a voice that was almost inaudible: There's, there's a girl. At the Pruitts'. You need to... And then nothing. The line had gone dead. Somebody, he thought, had taken the phone out of his hand.
But that would have been a theory. And Lonnie Beck had been a police officer for twenty-six years, and he knew exactly what a theory was worth when the man who had done the internal review was named Dale Sutter.
He wrote the time, 2:47, in the margin of the notebook, and underlined it twice.
The security cameras at the Pruitt lake house had been installed in 2017. There had been four of them: two on the dock, one at the boathouse, one on the long lawn. They fed a hard drive in the basement, which overwrote itself every thirty days. Beck had asked for the footage in June. He had been told, politely, by a lawyer, that the system had been in the process of upgrade and that the original drive had been discarded.
He asked again, in February. This time the lawyer was Hollis Crane, who telephoned him personally.
"Detective Beck," he said, in his warm unhurried voice. "It's a pleasure. Hollis Crane. I'm sorry we haven't met."
"Mr. Crane."
"I understand you've asked about the drive."
"I have."
"I'd love to help. I truly would. I'm afraid, though, that my client's father is a man of a certain age, and he does not always keep abreast of the technical aspects of his property." A small, rueful laugh. "The system was replaced in July. The old drive went out with the trash, I'm told, in the second week of the month. I'm sure you'll agree that a drive overwritten every thirty days could not have retained anything of value by the time a prosecutor thought to ask."
"Who put it out with the trash?"
"I couldn't say."
"I could subpoena the contractor."
"By all means." The warmth did not waver. "I wonder, though. Is it, in your experience, the kind of thing a jury finds convincing? A cable-company technician?"
Beck said nothing.
"Please," said Hollis Crane gently, "do give my regards to Ms. Lenoir."
He hung up. Beck sat for a moment looking at the receiver. Then he took the cinnamon toothpick out of his mouth, and broke it in half, and dropped both pieces into the wastebasket.
On the ninth of March, a Monday, Marisol Vega of the Calloway Ledger stood in the lobby of the old courthouse for forty minutes, waiting to be told she could not see anyone.
She was thirty-four, small, and tireless, with a long braid down her back, and she covered courts, county commissions and high-school football for a paper that was owned by a chain in Ohio and had a staff of nine. She had a way of arriving in a room as if she had been there for an hour. She had been writing about the Bellamy case since September, and in six months had received, from the Pruitt family's spokesman, exactly two sentences, of which one was We have every confidence in the process.
"Ms. Lenoir can't see you," said the receptionist.
"I know."
"She said to say she'd call."
"She won't." Marisol smiled. "It's okay. I wasn't going to ask her anything. I was going to give her this."
She put a folded sheet of paper on the desk.
It was a copy of a one-page document, a work order, obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act from the county's Information Technology department. It was dated the twelfth of June, 2019, two days before the party. It authorized the removal and replacement of the security recording system at the Pruitt lake house, on the property of Grant Pruitt Sr., at the request of the owner. The signature on the line marked Authorizing Officer was not a county employee's. It was a deputy sheriff's.
D. Sutter.
The receptionist looked at it. She looked up.
"I don't understand," she said.
"Nobody does yet," said Marisol Vega. "That's the problem."
At 4:51 that afternoon, in the cafeteria of the Piedmont State, Corinne Bellamy sat at a table by the window with a laptop in front of her and a cup of coffee she had not touched, and read a message from the state's attorney.
Corinne. Please call me when you can. M.L.
She read it six times. She was on her way to a mock trial. She had scored ninety-one on Friday, and Ms. Fairchild had said she would be standing in a real courtroom by thirty.
She called.
"I'm so sorry," said Marcia Lenoir. "I wanted you to hear it from me first. The governor has declared a public health emergency. The Supreme Court of Georgia has suspended all jury trials for the foreseeable future. The courthouse is closing on Friday. I'm afraid that your trial has been continued indefinitely."
"For how long?"
"I don't know."
"A month?"
"I don't know, Corrie." Lenoir's voice cracked, very slightly, with a tiredness that had nothing to do with the hour. "It's a virus. Nobody knows. Everyone's been told to go home."
Corinne looked at her laptop. On the screen was a small white window, with a cursor blinking in the middle of it, like a finger tapping.
She said, very calmly, "Then what happens to the witnesses?"
There was a long pause on the line.
"I think," said the district attorney, "that they'll have a great deal of time to remember."