The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  “You think someone killed him, that it wasn’t an accident,” Sloane said.

  “Let’s just say it wasn’t sitting well with me, and that’s before I get back to the station and get a call from a pompous ass named Rivers Jones who’s using words like ‘investigation’ to describe what we’re being told is an open-and-shut suicide. Well, I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack, David, but a light goes on in my dim cranium, and as you might have gathered by now, I’m subtle—like polyester at a country club—so I ask Jones why he’s investigating an open-and-shut suicide. Next thing I know, he gets pissy on me and goes over my head. I get my ass chewed out by my boss. I get pulled from a case I never touched, and the case gets shut down before it gets started. All for a suicide.” He sat back from the table and arched his eyebrows. “I got this thing, likely hereditary because my old man was the same way. Except for my wife—and God knows she’s earned it—I don’t like people telling me what to do and how to do it. Still, I might have let it go.”

  “Until the officer turned up in the river.”

  Molia nodded. “Until the officer turned up in the river. They made it look like an accident. Did a real good job of it.” He spoke the words as if his jaw hurt just talking about it. “He had a wife and brand-new baby, and a whole life in front of him. Somebody took that away. I can’t live with that. Understand?”

  Sloane thought of Melda. “Yes, Detective. I understand.”

  62

  PARKER MADSEN SCRIBBLED another note in the margin of the document and considered how the sentence read. The muscles of his face cut deep shadows along his jawbone, his eyes black pins of concentration. He told his secretary to hold his calls and cancel his afternoon appointments, then holed up in his office, working to meet a 6:00 p.m. deadline. That was when Robert Peak, against Parker Madsen’s advice, would go on national television and address the nation with his plan to drastically reduce U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil. The term was “nonreligious oil,” though it could not be found anywhere in the speech, so as not to offend Muslims. The draft of the speech, hastily pulled together by a team of the president’s speechwriters, was bold and confident. Tonight Robert Peak would politely tell the Arabs to go to hell and take their oil with them. He would tell the American public that U.S. policy in the Middle East would no longer be influenced by threats of nationalization or increases in the price of a barrel of oil. America would no longer prostrate itself before military regimes that held out one hand for foreign aid and stabbed the United States in the back with the other. America would not be dictated to by sheikhs and kings with billion- dollar bank accounts. American families would not send their sons to die in the desert. Their tax dollars would go to increase homeland security.

  And Robert Peak dared Congress to deny him the votes he needed to approve the pact.

  It was all well and good. In fact, Madsen would have liked nothing better than to be the first in line to tell the Arabs to drown in their oil, but for one nagging fact: Peak and the Mexicans had yet to actually ink a deal. Castañeda was pushing for it. He wanted a summit in Washington, sooner rather than later, but Madsen was uncomfortable with the pace of things.

  In between considering the speech, Madsen continued to receive reports on the man who had come to the White House, and was only mildly surprised to learn that it was David Sloane. The car had dropped Sloane off at the Charles Town Police Station, and Sloane had driven off with someone in the passenger seat. They both now sat in a booth in a diner, engaged in what looked to be an interesting conversation. Sloane was an anomaly, his involvement in the matter a complete mystery, as was his background. He seemed to have materialized from thin air. He had no wife, no children, no relatives. Madsen wondered if he was a spook. A man without attachments was a tough man to negotiate with. And that had been the problem. Without a family, Sloane had no readily accessible weakness, nothing he was unwilling to sacrifice.

  That was about to change.

  Madsen’s men had found Sloane’s Achilles’ heel. Every man had one.

  Exeter looked up from his beanbag a second before the knock on the door. Madsen didn’t bother to put down the red pen in his hand. He knew who it was. “Enter.”

  Rivers Jones walked in as though dragging a ball and chain. “I’m sorry to disturb—”

  “I don’t have time for apologies, Mr. Jones.”

  “I think you’ll find this important.”

  Jones’s Hugo Boss appearance looked beaten: the collar on his shirt unbuttoned, the tie missing. His face sagged like dough left in the sun. Jones looked at Madsen with bloodshot eyes, and Madsen detected the lingering odor of alcohol. Stress weighed on some men like wet clothes, leaving them weighed down and drained. Madsen was not one of them. He relished it, fed off it—like drinking pure adrenaline. It was not something that could be taught or learned. It was genetic. He saw tough men cower and fold at the sound of a car backfiring, while others, equally well trained, could be pinned down in the middle of a firefight, wearing a shit-eating grin.

  “I know who came to the office, and I know how we might find them,” Jones said.

  Madsen set the pen down and leaned back in his chair.

  Jones took a breath, gathering himself like a condemned man making his final speech for clemency to the governor. “I spoke to the security guard at the desk in the Old Executive Office Building. He said one man signed in as Jon Blair. He had a license, which means he was there with the family’s knowledge.”

  “You said you knew his identity,” Madsen said, his patience dwindling.

  “Not that man. The man he came with. Security said he had a badge. He’s a Charles Town police detective named Tom Molia. I had a run-in with him when I pulled the file. He’s an arrogant son of a bitch. I’m not sure who Jon Blair is, but he’s apparently working with this detective. I will call his superiors and haul his ass in here tomorrow and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Madsen said nothing.

  “And there’s something else. The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Joe Branick called and said there appeared to have been some work done on the body.” Jones put a finger in his mouth, pointing to his palate and obstructing his speech. “A hole in the roof of the mouth. He said it was as if someone was trying to conceal a biopsy. It must have been the county coroner. I shut him down, too.”

  “Apparently not,” Madsen said.

  Jones cleared his throat. “I’ve already called and spoken to him, General. I’ll have his license. Tomorrow I will personally call Detective Molia’s superiors and get to the bottom of this. If he is working on this case, it will be the last case he ever works on. I’ll have his badge.”

  Madsen stood, out of time and patience. “Thank you, Mr. Jones. However, you have been dismissed from further work on this matter.”

  “General, I assure you I will handle this—”

  “You made a mistake, Mr. Jones. I do not tolerate or excuse mistakes. I advised you of that fact up front. In my profession there is no room for error. You’re dismissed. If you make any further calls, this will be the last file you ever work on.”

  Jones gathered himself. “This is my investigation. I started it. I would like to complete it.”

  “That’s not going to happen. If I find you are involved in this investigation, you will be out of a job.”

  “General, I don’t want to say this, but I don’t work for you. I work for the Justice Department. If I have to, I will go to my superiors, and I think they would be very interested to know that the White House has misrepresented the results of an autopsy and concealed relevant evidence. So I think we both need to cooperate with each other, or we both might find ourselves out of a job.”

  Madsen knew enough about men to know that Jones’s bravado was born not of courage but of desperation and fear. Still, he had to give the man some credit. Maybe he did have a backbone. Good for him. He’d need it.

  “I’ll call the detective in the morning and get him in here,” Jones stammer
ed through Madsen’s silence. “Once I do, I’ll find out the identity of . . .”

  Madsen opened the top drawer of his desk, removed a manila envelope, and unclasped the prongs.

  “. . . his companion. If I need to issue a subpoena, I . . .”

  Madsen turned the envelope upside down, photographs spilling. Jones stood in stunned silence, mouth open, his naked image spread across the desk in various positions of submission, Terri Lane hovering over him dressed in black leather, a riding crop in her hand.

  63

  Sunset District,

  San Francisco

  TINA PULLED THE clear packing tape across the top of the box and pressed it down with the palm of her hand, sealing the two flaps together. She was about to rip the strip of tape against the serrated teeth when the last of it came off the spool. End of the roll.

  She picked up the black marker and neatly wrote “Jake’s Room.” Then she stacked the box with the other two near his bedroom door. The room looked so empty, and still so full. She hoped the landlord didn’t have a problem with the wallpaper. She couldn’t resist it when she saw it in the store, a three-dimensional version of the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. She’d painted the wall black where the cockpit windows looked out into space, and affixed plastic stars that glowed in the dark. The first time Jake saw it he’d been struck dumb. Then he broke into a wide grin. “This is the best!” he told her.

  She’d packed up his stuffed animals and cleaned out most of his closet. The Lego airplanes they had built together still hung by fishing wire from the four arms of the old-fashioned ceiling light. They flew when the fan was turned on. How was she going to pack those without breaking them? On his other walls were posters of his favorite athletes—Barry Bonds, of course, and ones she’d picked out for him: Joe Montana because he was gorgeous, and Muhammad Ali because she could tell Jake how Ali pursued his dreams.

  She pushed strands of hair from her face and took a moment to pull it tight into a ponytail. She could get so much more accomplished with Jake and her mother out of the house than when he was underfoot, wanting her to play. And she needed to get a lot done. During the ten years that she’d rented the two-bedroom flat on the top floor of the converted Victorian, she and Jake had managed to accumulate enough possessions for a family of five. She’d have to get a lot more accomplished and a lot faster if she was going to be ready for the moving van Friday.

  She sat on the edge of Jake’s bed and felt the floor shake as the N-Judah streetcar rumbled past the front of the house. David’s telephone call had been unexpected, but a sure sign, at least, that he was thinking of her, that perhaps they had a future together. The emotion welled in her eyes as she thought of him telling her to wait for him in Seattle, that he would find himself and be there. She only wished she could help him, even if only to comfort him. But he had never been that way. He had never been the comfort-seeking type.

  He had no family. That thought continued to amaze her. It made what he had accomplished on his own all the more remarkable. It was startling that he would develop such a work ethic, become so driven—and yet that was what made him such a tragic figure. He had no one else. He had nothing else. Work was all he had. Being good at what he did was his only sense of accomplishment, the only reassurance that his life had purpose and meaning.

  She stood from the bed and walked to the window, looking out from beneath the peaked roof. Parked at the curb in front of the walk was the police cruiser that Detective Gordon had insisted on. It was like leaving on a security light at night.

  “Enough,” she said, needing to get back to the task at hand. “Tape.”

  She walked down the narrow staircase to the tiny kitchen at the back of the apartment. Her new place had a kitchen twice the size, and granite instead of those tiny mosaic tiles, which were so hard to clean. She grabbed another roll of packing tape from the bag of supplies she had picked up from U-Haul, then opened the fridge for a Diet Coke. That was when it dawned on her. She turned her head to the right, looking over the top of the refrigerator door. The lock on the door to the back porch was vertical—unlocked. Living alone with a small child, she had become attuned to such things. She never left the door unlocked. Ever.

  The hardwood floor in the hallway creaked. She felt the rush of adrenaline but fought the urge to panic. She bent over and reached into the fridge. The man came around the corner quickly. Just as fast, Tina straightened and fired the soda can as hard and straight as she’d ever thrown a baseball to Jake. Slow to react, the man took it flush in the face, momentarily halting his progress—enough time for her to get out the back door. She flew down the back porch multiple steps at a time. In an instant she was around the corner, racing down the alley between the clapboard siding and the neighbor’s privacy fence.

  “Help me!” she yelled, reaching the street and banging on the driver’s-side window of the police cruiser. “Help me!”

  The officer never moved.

  She pulled open the car door. “Help me!” she started. The officer’s body leaned to the left and tumbled out the door onto the street. Blood spattered the side of his face and the shoulder of his blue uniform.

  She stumbled backward, unaware of the car that had stopped behind her, door open, or the man with the cloth. He cupped it tightly over her nose and mouth as he pulled her into the backseat.

  64

  TELL ME ABOUT the officer,” Sloane said, saddened by the thought that another innocent person had died, and feeling some responsibility for it.

  “Coop?” Molia took a deep breath and picked out a spot on the table, playing with a package of sugar as he spoke. “He was a good kid. Needed a break, but a decent kid. He was beat pretty bad—what would be expected in a high-impact crash.” Molia looked up at Sloane.

  “But you don’t think so, do you?”

  “No. Though I’m not at liberty to tell you why. What I will say is that the evidence is also inconclusive with regard to your brother-in . . . to Joe Branick.” He picked up his mug in one hand and put his other arm across the back of the booth. “Now, tell me, why is a San Francisco attorney so interested in a homicide in West Virginia?”

  “It’s a long story, Detective.”

  Molia looked over his shoulder at the counter. “Merle? Two pieces of your apple pie. I’ll take mine à la mode.” He turned back to Sloane. “We got time, David, but give me the Reader’s Digest version. I have a short attention span.”

  For the next thirty minutes Sloane ate pie, drank a second cup of tea, and explained what he could, trying to sound rational. The detective nearly spit out his tea when Sloane told him he had just spent the afternoon with Robert Peak.

  “Holy Christ!” he said, then blessed himself as an afterthought.

  Sloane took the page of telephone numbers from his jacket and handed it across the table. “The number that keeps repeating is hers, if the story is true.”

  Molia considered the page of numbers. “What do you think? You think Branick was banging her?”

  Sloane put an arm along the back of the booth. “I suppose anything is possible, Detective, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something his sister said—that her brother always did the right thing. I didn’t know the man, but from what I do know, he doesn’t seem to be the type to do that to his family.”

  “According to Dr. Phil, we’re all that type, David.” Molia pressed a finger on the plate to get the last crumbs of pie. “But if you’re right, then it’s just an attempt to keep the family from pursuing this.”

  “I think so. His sister said her brother was a man of integrity. That was one of the reasons he decided to go home to Boston, to leave the CIA. He was tired of the politics; he thought they were dirty.”

  “I hope that didn’t come as a revelation to him.” Molia rubbed a hand over his bottom lip. “You think it’s Madsen? You really think he’s orchestrating this?”

  “I’m not sure of anything, Detective. But he’s the one who’s bee
n involved in this from the beginning, and with his background, he would have access to the men and the resources. And . . .” In his mind Sloane saw Madsen’s eyes, as dark and threatening as storm clouds.

  “And what?”

  “Well, it’s like your gut, you know? I have the same kind of innate ability, and I have this feeling that Madsen is involved in this, somehow.”

  Molia puffed out his cheeks before letting out a burst of air. “We’ll need a hell of a lot more than what we have to storm the front door of the White House and accuse the chief of staff of conducting a military exercise on civilians.”

  “Which is why I think it’s important we find this man, Charles Jenkins.”

  “You think he’s friendly?”

  “I wasn’t sure, but yeah, I think so, and I think we need to find him sooner rather than later. I don’t think we have a lot of time.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Robert Peak said Charles Jenkins was dead. I know that isn’t true, but he might not be alive much longer.”

  Molia picked up the sheet of paper with the telephone numbers, then picked up his cell phone. “Did I say these things have a way of coming back like a bad lunch? I hate being right all the time.” He flipped open his phone. “Wish me luck; I’m about to really piss someone off.”

  65

  JENKINS STOOD ON the deck of Robert Hart’s home, watching the storm clouds spot the sky black with pools of blood red.

  “Have you seen the afternoon paper?” Alex continued to inch her way through traffic, her cell phone breaking up with static from the storm. “Big news from the White House. There’s a story coming out of Mexico City that Alberto Castañeda made a statement at a press conference this afternoon and blew the lid on the negotiations. Peak is apparently going to address the nation this evening.”