The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  It was time to move.

  4

  Black Bear National Park,

  West Virginia

  DETECTIVE TOM MOLIA pulled back the shrubbery and fought that moment of revulsion when any normal person with a normal job would have tossed up the Italian sausage he had slapped between two slices of bread and called breakfast as he rushed out the door to his car. The body lay on its side, presumably as it had fallen—a well-built man, his white shirt and tie splattered in burgundy-red and gray brain matter. Near the curled fingers of the right hand, partially obscured by the tall grass and Scotch broom, protruded the ventilated-rib barrel of a Colt Python .357.

  Serious shit.

  Molia crouched to take a closer look. The bullet, a .357 Magnum or .38-caliber Special, had ripped through the man’s temple like a runaway freight train, taking with it a substantial portion of the top of his head.

  “I hope I never get used to this,” he said.

  He warded off a fly with the back of his hand. With the temperature quickly warming, it hadn’t taken them long to find the body. Molia pulled a wood leek from the ground and stuck the root in his mouth, spitting bits of dirt off the tip of his tongue. The sharp onion taste would temper the smell of death, but it wouldn’t keep it from clinging to the linings of his nostrils and clothes long after he’d left the scene.

  “Colt Python. Probably a three fifty-seven. Serious piece. He meant business.”

  He might as well have been talking to the dead man. West Virginia Park Police Officer John Thorpe stood above the detective on the sloped ground, whacking at the tall grass with his flashlight; he had the personality of a lamppost.

  Molia stood from his crouch and considered the terrain. “The grass will hide a lot. With an exit wound that big, the bullet could be just about anywhere around here—doubt we’ll find it. But . . .” He paused, and if Thorpe ever learned the art of communication, he just missed another golden opportunity to show it.

  Molia wiped a handkerchief across his brow and looked back up the steep bluff. Though he couldn’t see them, he knew that a horde of park police investigators and FBI agents were converging on the black Lexus like ants on candy—and just one step behind the press. Thorpe had failed to cover the car license plate, and it hadn’t taken long for the identity of the victim to be broadcast across the newswires. By the time Molia drove up the fire trail two uniformed sheriffs were already stringing a rope across the road to keep the reporters at bay.

  Molia slipped off his sport coat and draped it over his shoulder, continuing to blot his brow. Maybe it was the exertion from climbing up and down the bluff, but the morning sun, already a white beacon in a cloudless blue sky, seemed intent to beat on him especially hard. Given the weather forecast, ninety degrees with 90 percent humidity, he figured to be dripping the rest of the day.

  “It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity,” he said. Born and raised in Northern California’s comparatively mild climate, he found it one of the things about West Virginia he’d just never get used to. “Well, whoever said that never stood in ninety-degree heat sweating his ass off, did he, John? Hot is hot, humidity or not.”

  Thorpe looked out over the bluff as if stricken by gas. If Molia had twenty more like him, he could start a vegetable garden.

  He loosened his tie and lowered it three buttons; his shirt was already wrinkled. Maggie always said she could send him out the door dressed in fine linen and he’d look like a rumpled bed before he made it to the end of the driveway. It was big-man’s syndrome. At six feet he had never been what they called svelte, though as a younger man he had carried his weight like an athlete, in his shoulders, legs, and chest. But come forty, gravity had taken over, and everything seemed to be slipping to his midsection and butt, enough extra flesh for Maggie to grab and refer to as “love handles.” Love, nothing. It was a spare tire, and it was inflating. Dieting was out of the question—he loved to eat too much, which was a part of the joy of being Italian. And if getting up at the crack of dawn to jog was his alternative, well, then, he’d rather be fat. When he stepped on the scale butt naked this morning he was forty-three years old and 228 pounds.

  He stuffed the handkerchief into the back pocket of his khakis and found one of the tiny Confederate soldiers from the Gettysburg Museum that he had purchased for his son, T.J. “They’ll have to go with powder burns,” he said, assuming they’d never find a bullet for ballistics. “You sure you didn’t see one of our guys, huh?”

  Thorpe shrugged. “Look around.”

  Molia had. According to Operations, Bert Cooperman called in just after 3:30 a.m. to say he was rolling on a report of a dead body. That had been Cooperman’s last transmission. Operations contacted the park police, and Kay got Molia’s ass out of bed with that Southern twang that gave him butterflies in places that could get a married man hit over the head. But Kay wasn’t calling out of love. Molia was the detective on call. It was all standard procedure, except that when Molia reached the site he found Thorpe, not Coop, claiming to be the responding officer and walking around like Alexander Haig at the White House. Thorpe directed Molia to the black Lexus, which was where he had found the blue and white laminated card that set off all the bells and whistles and was responsible for the federal agents in dark blue windbreakers with bright yellow lettering buzzing around the bluff like bumblebees from a disturbed hive. The dead man was Joe Branick, personal friend and White House confidant of United States President Robert M. Peak.

  Thorpe shrugged. “Well, he was out of his jurisdiction; this is a federal park, Detective.”

  Molia bit his tongue. He hated the territorial bullshit between law enforcement agencies. J. Rayburn Franklin, Charles Town’s chief of police, had told him more than once to play nice with the other boys, that they were all on the same team and all that other law enforcement bullshit. But Molia just wasn’t the tongue-biting type, and at the moment he had that acidic fire burning in his gut that had nothing to do with the Italian sausage and everything to do with twenty years of experience. Something wasn’t right.

  “No doubt, John, except we also have a possible homicide.”

  “Homicide?” Thorpe smirked. “This doesn’t look like a homicide to me, Detective. This looks like an old-fashioned suicide.”

  The smirk was not a good idea. Along with his love of food, Molia had inherited an Italian temper, which was like mercury in a thermometer—hard to keep down once it started rising. Molia took the smirk as the “big boys” taking a shot at the country bumpkin detective.

  “Maybe, John, but Cooperman wouldn’t have known that until he got here, now, would he?”

  “Well . . .”

  “And if it is a homicide, it’s the jurisdiction of both park police and local, and local beat you boys hands down.”

  “Hands down?”

  “Makes Cooperman the responding officer.”

  Thorpe whacked at the tall grass with continued disinterest, but Molia could see the look already forming in his eye. Thorpe hadn’t climbed back down the bluff and stood in the sun because he wanted to strike up a friendship. He was worried he was about to lose the big buck he’d bagged, and was standing over it like a proud hunter not about to give it up.

  “I don’t know what he responded to, but he ain’t here, Detective. We are,” he said, referring to the park police. “At least you can take the rest of the morning off.” Thorpe rubbed the palm of his hand over the top of his head. “Lucky you. You won’t be standing around here baking your brains.”

  “Afraid not,” Molia said, rejecting the olive branch. He was about to drop his bomb, and when he did, no one was going to like him much, particularly not the bumblebees at the top of the hill. It wouldn’t be the first time, not that Tom Molia cared. What he cared about was his gut, which the roll of Tums in the Chevy glove compartment wasn’t going to soothe.

  “I’m going to have to take jurisdiction of the body.”

  Thorpe stopped whacking the grass. “You’re going
to what?”

  “Take jurisdiction of the body. Responding officer takes jurisdiction, John.”

  “You’re looking at the responding officer.”

  “Nope. Bert Cooperman was the responding officer. Charles Town Police. Body goes to the county coroner.”

  Thorpe’s face rounded to a dulled expression. “Cooperman isn’t here. You’re looking at the responding officer, Detective.”

  “Who called you, John?”

  “Who?”

  “Park dispatch called you, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah—”

  “And how did they get the call?” He let the question sink in.

  “Well . . .” Thorpe stuttered, seeing his buck being dragged deeper into the underbrush.

  “Well, the body goes to the county coroner. It’s procedure.”

  “Procedure?” Thorpe pointed up the hill, smirking again. “You going to tell them that?”

  “No,” Molia said, shaking his head.

  “I didn’t think so.” Thorpe turned.

  “You are.”

  Thorpe wheeled. “What!”

  “You’re going to tell them.”

  “The hell I am!”

  “The hell you aren’t. You got the call from dispatch. Dispatch got the call from a Charles Town police officer. The body goes to the county coroner. If the feds want to go through the proper channels to have it released, so be it. Until then, we follow procedure. You’re obligated to enforce it. This is your site. You secured it.” Molia smiled.

  “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  Thorpe had a habit of shutting his eyes, like a child who thought it would make everything bad go away. When he did his eyelids fluttered. At the moment they looked like two big monarch butterflies.

  “Come on, John. It’s not that big a deal. With a buck this big you want to make a mistake? The press will pick this thing apart like my brothers on a Thanksgiving turkey. And don’t get me started on the feds. You break procedure, they’re going to want to know why. They’ll load you up with about two dozen questions and a stack of paperwork that’ll keep you buried from here to Tuesday.”

  Thorpe’s mouth pinched as if swallowing a hundred different things he wanted to say, none of which was “you’re wrong.” Without uttering a word, he turned abruptly and started up the bluff. Molia followed. He might go back to the station and find Bert Cooperman in the locker room lifting weights, which Coop liked to do after his shift. The rookie officer might even tell him he spooked when he realized he was out of his jurisdiction—a rookie mistake. Sure, those were possible explanations. And the autopsy might also reveal that Joe Branick, special assistant and personal friend of the president of the United States, decided to put a gun to his head and blow away half his skull. At the moment, however, Molia’s gut was telling him that the likelihood of either scenario was less than that of his mother admitting that the Pope was fallible.

  At the top of the bluff, out of breath, he looked up at the sky to curse the sun and noticed the trace outline still visible in the pale morning sky.

  A full moon.

  5

  Pacifica,

  California

  A MOIST FOG had rolled off the Pacific Ocean in thorough disregard for summer and hung over the coastal town like a wet wool blanket, shading the streetlamps to a dull orange glow, the only color in an otherwise gunmetal-gray world that spread to the horizon—a monochrome that revealed no hint of the time of day. If the coldest winter Mark Twain ever spent was a summer in San Francisco, it was only because Twain had not had the courage to venture thirty miles south along the coast to the town of Pacifica. The fog in summer could chill so deep it made your bones hurt.

  The windshield wipers hummed a steady beat across the glass. Wisps of the fog blew thick and thin, shrouding the two-story apartment building like something in a horror film. Like most things in Sloane’s life, the building had been neglected and was in need of repair. The relentless moisture and salt air stained the cedar shingles with a white residue. Rust pitted the aluminum windows, which needed to be replaced. The exterior deck coatings were peeling, and there was evidence of dry rot in the carport overhang. Eight years earlier, Sloane had taken a real estate agent’s advice and used his growing wealth to purchase the eight-unit apartment building and the adjacent vacant lot. Developers were paying handsome prices to turn the apartments along the coast into condominiums, but then the economy crashed with the precipitous drop in interest rates, leaving Sloane holding a white elephant. When an apartment became vacant he moved in to save money, not expecting to be happy about it. But in the intervening years he had grown fond of the building, like a mangy old dog that he couldn’t consider getting rid of. He slept with the sliding glass door to his bedroom open, drifting off to the sound of waves crashing on the shore, finding comfort in the rhythmic roll and thumping beat of nature’s eternal clock, a reminder of time passing.

  Sloane turned off the ignition and sat back, numb.

  “That is some gift you have . . . what you did to those jurors.”

  Patricia Hansen’s words in the courtroom continued to haunt him. With practice, he had developed the fine art of stalling following a jury verdict, methodically packing his notebooks and exhibits, determined to be the last person out of the courtroom. He refrained from any backslapping and handshakes. For the family of the deceased, a defense verdict was like reliving their loved one’s death, and right or wrong, that made Sloane the Grim Reaper. He preferred to leave quietly, alone. Emily Scott’s mother had not been about to allow him that comfort.

  When he turned to leave the courtroom Patricia Hansen remained seated in the gallery, a newspaper clutched to her chest. When Sloane stepped through the swinging gate she stood and stepped into the aisle.

  “Mrs. Hansen—”

  She raised a hand. “Don’t. Don’t you dare tell me how sorry you are for my loss.” She spoke barely above a whisper, more tired than confrontational. “You don’t know my loss. If you did, you would never have done what you just did.” She paused, but she was clearly not finished. “What Carl Sandal did? I can almost . . .” She swallowed tears, fighting not to let Sloane see the depth of her pain. “What he did I can almost understand. A sociopath. A crazed lunatic. Isn’t that what you called him? But what he did pales in comparison to what you did to my Emily in this courtroom . . . to our family, to the word ‘justice.’ You knew better, Mr. Sloane. You know better.”

  “I only did my job, Mrs. Hansen.”

  Patricia Hansen snatched the words like an actor given the perfect cue. “Your job?” She scoffed, looking around the courtroom with disdain before fixing him again with her steel-blue eyes. “You just keep telling yourself that, Mr. Sloane, and maybe, if you hear it often enough, someday you might actually start to believe that makes it all right.” She unfolded the newspaper and compared the man who stood before her with the photograph. “That is some gift you have, Mr. Sloane . . . what you did to those jurors. I don’t know how you did it, how you convinced them. They didn’t want to believe you. I saw it when they came back. They had their minds made up.” A tear rolled down her cheek; she disregarded it. “Well, consider this, Mr. Sloane. My Emily is dead, and my grandson will never have his mother. That is something you can’t change with your words.”

  She slapped the newspaper against his chest. With both hands holding trial bags, Sloane watched it fall to the ground, his photograph staring up at him from the tile floor.

  During Sloane’s run of victories, all on behalf of defendants in wrongful-death civil trials, what began as a simple premonition that the jurors would find for his client, sometimes against his own judgment, had become unmistakable knowledge. Sloane knew before he stood to give his closing argument that he had lost. He knew that the jury considered Abbott Security culpable. He knew they believed the guard was negligent. He knew they hated his client. He knew, as did all good trial lawyers, that you did not win cases in closing argument—a televis
ion gimmick for the dramatic. He knew that there should have been nothing he could say to change their minds.

  And yet he had.

  They had returned a verdict for Abbott Security in less than two hours. He had convinced them all, every single juror, of something even he did not believe. What was more troubling was that when he had stood to give his closing he had no idea what he would say to convince them, and yet he had said the very words they needed to hear to assuage their doubts and erase their concerns. Only they weren’t his words. It was his voice, but it was as if the words were being spoken through him by someone else.

  Not wanting to linger on that thought, he pushed open the car door into a strong wind that carried a distant, whistling howl and the briny smell of the ocean. As he stepped from the Jeep he felt a shock of pain in his right ankle. He’d rolled it during his descent down the mountain trail in the dark, and it had swollen and stiffened on the drive home. He retrieved his backpack, slung the strap over his shoulder, and limped toward the building. The familiar light in the first-floor apartment window farthest to the right glowed like a beacon welcoming a ship, but he did not see the top of Melda’s head. Melda rose at 4:30 every morning of the week, a disciplined habit from working in the fields growing up in the Ukraine. She’d be concerned to hear someone in the apartment above her. Sloane was not supposed to be home for two more days. He’d dump his backpack in his apartment and visit for a cup of tea. Drinking tea with Melda was like sitting in a soothing bath, and he could use one at the moment.

  He fumbled with a cluster of keys that would have made a high school janitor blanch, found the key to his mailbox, and reached to insert it where the lock should have been but where now existed a small hole. He put the key in the hole and pulled open the metal door, finding the lock at the bottom. The doors to the seven other mailboxes mounted to the building remained closed, locks in place. Sloane picked up the lock and considered it. It had likely worked its way loose and fallen when Melda collected his mail—one more project on his growing checklist.