The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  Heads nodded.

  “I wish the question was whether her husband and their young son have suffered and will continue to suffer because of Carl Sandal’s indecent act.” His eyes scanned their faces. “More than any of us could imagine.” His words blended with the drone of the fans in a hypnotic cadence. “But those are not the questions you must answer, that you swore an oath to answer. And deep within, each and every one of you knows that. That’s what makes this so difficult. That’s why you feel so pained. The question before you can’t be answered by emotion. You must answer it with reason, in a case that has no reason. There is no good reason for what Carl Sandal did. There never will be.”

  Tears streamed unchecked down the blonde transit worker’s face.

  He looked to juror five, the auto mechanic from the Richmond district, and at that moment knew somehow that the man would be elected the jury foreman.

  “I wish to God there was a way to prevent senseless, violent acts by predators intent on committing them. I wish to God we could do something here today to prevent anyone from ever opening his front door again and receiving the news Brian Scott received. I wish to God we could have prevented Carl Sandal from doing what he did.” He felt them now; he felt the part of them that had once resisted his words welcoming him. “But we can’t. Short of living in fear, barring our doors and windows and living in cages like animals . . . we can’t.”

  He dropped his gaze, releasing them. They had opened their doors; they had greeted him into their homes. And at that precise moment, Sloane knew. He did not need to say another word. Abbott Security had not lost.

  And he wished to God he could have prevented that, too.

  2

  Bloomberry,

  West Virginia

  PARKED BENEATH THE cover of an aspen tree, Charles Town, West Virginia, Police Officer Bert Cooperman pinched the dial of the scanner between his thumb and index finger like a fisherman feeling a nibble. Try as he might, he couldn’t set the hook, and he sensed he was about to lose whatever played at the end of his line.

  It wasn’t dispatch. Kay was on duty, and no red-blooded American with a pecker would confuse Kay’s come-hither West Virginia drawl with the man’s voice that Cooperman’s scanner was intermittently picking up. It could be park police; the switchback road, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, bordered the edge of the Black Bear National Park, which was within the park police’s jurisdiction, but the dial wasn’t close to the park police’s frequency. It was tweaked just a hair past 37.280 MHz, which was damn near Charles Town’s frequency. And that was what puzzled him.

  Cooperman cocked his head toward the radio and continued to massage the dial, a fraction to the right, left, back again.

  “Come on. Give me something.” Hell, he’d take anything at this point. Ten hours into a twelve-hour shift, he was already working on his sixth thermos cap of black coffee, and his eyelids still felt like garage doors wanting to roll shut. The damned full moon had given him false hope. Bullshit superstition or not, the crazies usually came out with full moons. When the crazies came out twelve hours passed like twelve minutes.

  Not tonight.

  Tonight it felt like twelve days. At least he had the weekend off, and with his wife and newborn baby boy in South Carolina to visit her family, that gave him a real chance to get in some uninterrupted sleep and some long overdue hunting. That thought—and the voice teasing him on the scanner—was the only thing keeping him awake. The voice had come out of nowhere, as Cooperman sat parked on the side of the road munching on an egg salad sandwich that was now stinking up the inside of the car.

  “ . . . fire roa . . . eight miles ou . . . just about . . . iver.”

  There it was again—faint, breaking up, but still biting. Damned if he was going to let it get away.

  “. . . underneath a bush . . . emban . . . abo . . . waist.”

  Definitely a man. Sounded as if he’d found something in the bushes. Cooperman strained to listen.

  “. . . no question . . . dead.”

  “Damn.” Cooperman sat back, slapping the steering wheel. “Animal fucking control.” They were likely calling in a road kill. Wasn’t that just his luck? He dropped the Chevy into drive and pulled from the gravel turnout.

  The scanner crackled.

  “—He’s dead—”

  Cooperman hit the brakes. Coffee broke over the rim of the thermos cap, scalding his leg. He lifted himself from the seat and threw napkins and newspaper under him, then quickly regripped the dial—left, right.

  Nothing.

  “No . . . no . . . no. Come back! Come back!”

  He dumped the remnants of coffee out the window and sat back, the moon taunting him. The thought hit him like his father’s hand slapping him in the back of the head when he’d done something stupid.

  What if the guy isn’t dead, Coop? What if he’s still alive?

  Anxiety and caffeine surged through him. He sat up. “Shit.”

  What if he’s out there dying?

  He hit the gas, but another thought caused him to hit the brake again. “Hell, he could be anywhere out there.” Finding a man dying of a gunshot wound would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

  That’s not good enough.

  “I know, goddamn it. I know.”

  What the hell did the man say? Think! What did your tired-ass mind hear, Coop?

  “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” But he wasn’t. He couldn’t. His mind was going over all the ways he’d screwed up, and the inevitable confrontation with J. Rayburn Franklin, Charles Town’s chief of police. He’d be on graveyard forever, doomed to roam the night like a damned vampire.

  Fire road.

  Cooperman sat up. “Fire road. Right. He definitely said ‘fire road.’”

  Which could be nearly anywhere in the mountains, idiot.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “What else? What else!”

  Eight miles.

  “That’s right, he said ‘eight miles.’” The conversation filtered back.

  Where the rivers meet.

  “Where the rivers meet.”

  The Shenandoah and Potomac.

  Cooperman grabbed the shift, stopped.

  No. Not the Shenandoah and Potomac. Too far.

  “Has to be closer. What’s closer?”

  Evitt’s Run.

  The thought burst like an overfilled balloon.

  “The fire trail. Shit, he’s on the fire trail. Got to be. Bingo.”

  He tossed the remnants of the egg salad out the window and hit the switch, sending strobes of blue and white light pulsating against the trunks and branches of the trees. He pulled a U-turn from the gravel shoulder onto the pavement and punched the accelerator.

  FOUR MINUTES LATER, Cooperman maneuvered the switchbacks with one hand on the wheel and returned the speaker to its clip. He’d given his position as north on County Road 27. Procedure required that he call for backup, but he knew it would take time for Operations to contact the park police, and more time for them to get an officer out to the scene.

  This was his call—possibly his first dead body.

  The cobwebs and burning eyes had been replaced by a burst of energy as if he’d just completed a set of ten on the bench press. Damn, he liked the rush! He looked up at the sky and howled.

  “Full moons, baby!”

  He punched the accelerator some more, leaning into a horseshoe turn, unafraid of overshooting the fire trail, which he could find with his eyes closed. Evitt’s Run meandered in a somewhat perpendicular line until it merged with the Shenandoah. In February and October, when Fish and Game stocked the river with trout and bass, the fire trail became a regular thoroughfare. The rest of the year it was mostly deserted, with a rare hiker or hunter seeking access to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every year one or two of them blew off a toe or hit a buddy in the back with buckshot. This was likely one of those occasions, though it sounded serious. Cooperman figured the voice must have been calling 911,
which was how his scanner picked it up. It was just like Tom Molia said. The Charles Town detective had the department in a lather with a story about his scanner picking up a man and woman screwing over the telephone, telling each other to do all kinds of crazy shit. It sounded like pure Mole bullshit—the Mole liked to stir the pot—but damned if he didn’t bring in an article from the Post talking about a glitch in the wireless technology that was causing scanners to pick up telephone calls like antennas picking up radio signals.

  Cooperman grinned. “Well, it may not be two people humping, Mole, but wait till the boys hear my story.”

  He might even save a life, be a hero. J. Rayburn Franklin would call it “Damn fine police work,” the kind of attentiveness he liked to see in a young officer. They’d probably write Cooperman up in the Spirit of Jefferson, the local weekly. Hell, he could get a mention in the Post, for that matter.

  The car fishtailed, its back tires catching loose gravel at the edge of the road and sending it close to the embankment. Cooperman accelerated, then braked and corrected the wheel into the next turn. “Just like at the academy, Coop.” He maneuvered another switchback, saw the familiar triangular sign reflecting yellow in the car’s headlights, braked hard into a right turn, and corrected the wheel to bring the rear end in line. The car bounced and pitched on the unpaved road, dirt and gravel pinging beneath it. Its tires caught air cresting the bluff, and the car landed with a bump, headlights shimmering on the white ash and maple. Cooperman swung it to the right and stopped when the headlights illuminated a bearded red-haired man standing outside the cab of a beat-up white pickup truck.

  He looked like a deer caught in headlights. “That’s right, Red, the cavalry has arrived.”

  Cooperman threw the car into park and jumped from behind the wheel slapping his billy club into his utility belt while pulling the flashlight from its clip in two quick, rehearsed motions. The adrenaline pushed him forward, though somewhere in the recesses of his mind his instructors at the academy were yelling for him to slow down and think it through. His feet weren’t listening.

  He called out as he approached. “You the one who made the call?” The man raised a hand to deflect the light. Cooperman lowered the beam. “You call about a body?”

  Red turned to the truck. Cooperman followed his gaze with the flashlight, illuminating the back of a head framed by a gun rack holding two high-powered rifles. The short hairs on the back of his neck twitched, enough for him to instinctively unsnap the Smith & Wesson on his hip, though he resisted the urge to draw.

  Think it through. Use your head. Always.

  Red wore jeans, boots, and a denim jacket—appropriate hunting attire. Check. The two men wouldn’t have much luck without rifles. Two men. Two rifles. Check. The license plate on the truck was the rolling West Virginia hills at dusk below the familiar words “Wild, Wonderful.” Check again. Just a couple of good old boys sneaking off into the mountains to do a little hunting.

  The passenger door of the truck swung open, and a stocky dark-haired man stepped down from the cab. Cooperman directed the beam of light toward him.

  “I’m Officer Bert Cooperman, Charles Town Police. You call nine-one-one about a dead body?”

  The man nodded, approaching with a cell phone in hand. It was just as the Mole said.

  “Yes, Officer, I just made the call. Damn, you gave us a start getting here so quick and all. Surprised the hell out of us.” The man spoke with a distinct West Virginia accent. He sounded winded.

  “I picked up the call on the scanner. I was patrolling nearby.”

  The man pointed toward a thicket of Scotch broom that looked to have partly swallowed a black Lexus. “Thought it odd, the way it was parked and all,” he said as he walked toward the car. “Thought maybe it rolled. Nobody in it. Just a suit jacket. Thought that weird, too, so we took a look around, just out of curiosity, you know?” The man pointed to the edge of the embankment, changing direction as he spoke. “The body’s just down the bluff. We didn’t hear nothin’, but it looks to me like he just done it.”

  Cooperman followed at a quick pace. “Just done it?”

  The man stopped at the edge of a steep slope. At the bottom the Shenandoah flowed as dark as a tarred road at night. “Shot hisself in the head. Looks that way, anyway.”

  “Dead?” Cooperman asked.

  “Body’s still warm. I mean, we ain’t doctors or nothin’, but . . .”

  Cooperman looked over the edge. “You think he could still be alive?”

  The man pointed. “You can just see the legs right there, just to the left of that big bush—about twenty yards there. You see ’em?”

  Cooperman swept the beam of light over bubby brush and red buckeye, then brought it back quickly and settled on something grotesquely out of place: a pant leg protruding from the shrubbery. A body. Goddamn, it was an honest-to-God body. Of course that was what he expected, but seeing it . . . his first one . . .

  Things started moving fast again, thoughts rushing at him like objects in a kid’s video game. Cooperman started down the bluff, stopped.

  Call it in. He could still be alive. The body’s still warm.

  He started, stopped again.

  Even if he’s alive, he’ll need more than you can give him. Call for an ambulance.

  He climbed to the top of the bluff, started for the car, then turned to let the two men know what was going to happen. “I’m going to—”

  Cooperman dropped the flashlight, the beam rolling across the ground and coming to a stop on the black toe of the hunter’s boot. The veterans said it looked big as a sewer pipe and was something you hoped never to see.

  “My backup will be here any minute,” Cooperman said.

  The dark-haired man smiled. “Thank you for that important bit of information, Officer.” The accent was gone. So was the cell phone. In his hand the man held a large-caliber handgun.

  Cooperman stood staring down the barrel.

  3

  Yosemite National Park,

  California

  THE CRY ECHOED off the granite walls like ghosts wailing. Sloane struggled to sit up, the sleeping bag cocooned tightly around him. He freed a hand from the twisted fabric, swept the ground for the rubberized handle, and unsheathed the serrated steel blade as he kicked free of the bag and jumped to his feet, crouching, eyes wide. His pulse rushed in his ears. His chest heaved for each breath.

  The echo faded, retreating across the Sierras, leaving the sound of the mountains at night—crickets chirping, a symphony of insects, and the hushed din of a distant waterfall. A chill washed over him, bringing a trail of goose bumps and a numbing, harsh reality.

  He was alone. The echoing cry was his own.

  Sloane dropped the knife and ran his fingers through his hair. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the threatening shadows became the trees and rocks by which he had made his camp.

  Following the jurors’ verdict, he had been determined to get far away from the courthouse, to forget, to let the mountains comfort him as they always had. He had left Paul Abbott in the courthouse and his cell phone on the counter in his apartment along with his laptop computer and trial bag. He had driven through the San Joaquin Valley with the windows down, Springsteen’s “Born to Run” blasting from the speakers, the hundred-degree-plus heat whipping the smell of onions and cow manure from the pastures through the car. With each mile he put between himself and Emily Scott, his optimism had grown that he was moving forward and, in doing so, leaving the nightmare behind.

  But he was wrong. The nightmare had followed him.

  He should have known. His optimism had not been born of fact or reason, but of desperation. So encumbered by his need to forget, he had chosen to ignore the flaws in his reasoning, to invent facts that did not exist—a dangerous mistake for a trial lawyer. Now, like the dying embers of his campfire, his optimism had been suffocated, leaving only irrepressible frustration.

  The pain spiked like an abrupt fever and spiderwebbed across his
forehead and scalp. The headache always followed the nightmare, the way thunder followed lightning. Sloane grabbed his headlamp and stumbled across the blanket of pine needles and pebbles gouging the bottoms of his feet. His backpack was suspended from a tree branch, beyond the reach of animals. The daggers of pain spread like tentacles; a black-and-white discotheque of shimmering light blurred his vision. He bent to retrieve the stick he’d used to push the backpack high out of reach, and felt his stomach cramp, the pain driving him to one knee and forcing up his freeze-dried meal in a series of violent convulsions. The migraine would get worse, even temporarily blind him. That thought pushed him to his feet. He retrieved his backpack, pulled the small plastic container from the front pouch, and swallowed two of the light blue tablets with a squirt of water. The Fiorinal would dull the pain; it would not dull his frustration.

  “Enough,” he said, looking up at a full moon in a star-pocked sky. “Enough, goddamn it.”

  SLOANE CROUCHED ON his haunches in the rim of light emanating from the rebuilt fire and poked a stick at the flames, adding dry twigs. Pine needles crackled in a burst of yellow. He had broken camp, and his need to leave was now waging a battle with the voice of reason, telling him to wait for daylight. At the moment, his rational side wasn’t listening. Though he had never ventured far from the catacomb of developments that sprawled cookie-cutter homes across the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California, Sloane had come to find the Sierra Nevada an unlikely escape from work and the problems that plagued him.

  Not anymore.

  Whatever haunted his sleep would not be cloaked like furniture in an abandoned home. It existed independent of the Emily Scott trial, fluid and unpredictable, alive. He looked out into the darkness and felt it, something, a presence. Whatever it was, it was not going away, and he could not hide from it. It was coming for him, relentless and determined.

  He stood and kicked dirt over the fire, smothering it.