Garrett Pruitt

Garrett Pruitt is 41 and jumped out of planes for twelve years before trading the army for nursing shifts. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the son of a sergeant and a mess hall cook, he learned to fend for himself in barracks in several cities. He talks like a soldier, calls his employer boss and describes himself as the only one in the house who would know how to defend him. In six weeks he earned the best daily rate of his life and doesn't hide his fear of losing it.

Since arriving in the principality he has lived in a monthly-rental boarding house room, in a corner building where the elevator only goes up and the bathroom is shared down the hall. An iron bed made with barracks precision, a canvas duffel always closed, an iron bar fixed in the doorframe for pull-ups and a small frying pan in which he cooks eggs at three in the afternoon. He calls his mother on Sundays, collect, and says homesickness is a kind of weight you learn to carry.

He is tall and broad-shouldered, with brown hair in a buzz cut, a trimmed mustache and a square jaw with stubble. He swaps the white nurse's shirt for a gray army T-shirt as soon as he can, and walks with the posture of someone who still marches in his head. He gestures a lot, speaks loudly and punctuates everything with a you know what I mean at the end of a sentence, like someone still giving orders inside an airplane.

About the night at the penthouse, his account is that of a man proud of his work: six weeks with the boss, the best daily rate he has ever seen, and the certainty that if anyone had to protect that man, it would be him. When asked about the fire, he brushes the subject aside in a firm voice. With the whole penthouse sealed and no cameras up there by the employer's order, nobody can say for certain where each person was during the small hours.

Garrett knows the new nurse, a foreigner on the night shift, is the kind of person the police think of first and believe last. When the detective suggests he made up the story, the soldier's tone rises, he glances down at his leg and says he won't accept suspicion from someone who has never seen a gunshot. It could be the indignation of a man who risked himself for another. It could be someone who talks loudly so no one notices something else. The detective will have to decide which.