The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  Dr. Knight closed the file and held it against her chest. “We’ll run a series of tests and talk afterward,” she said. Then, before he could further protest, “Your wife is here to see you. I’ll allow it, but only if it’s brief. Right now what you need is to rest.”

  She opened the door to his room and spoke to someone in the hall. A moment later Tina stepped in.

  “Keep it short,” Knight said, one hand holding the door open. “Ten minutes at the most.” Then she handed Tina a card from the front pocket of her smock. “When you’re finished, I’d like to talk with you. My office is upstairs.”

  Tina walked to the foot of the bed as the door swung shut. She looked uncertain, worn out. Her hair was flat, her eyes hollow and bloodshot. “They wouldn’t let me in unless I was a relative.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “You have me down as your emergency contact, David. They called me in the middle of the night. All they would tell me was that you had been brought in by ambulance. I thought you’d been in a car accident. I expected to find you breathing on a ventilator. I’ve been outside, waiting all morning to see you.”

  When he had filled out the form at work he never thought his emergency contact would be an issue. He had chosen Tina by default. He had no one else. Melda could never have handled it.

  “I’m sorry, Tina, I should have asked.”

  “I don’t mind, David, it’s just . . .”

  He knew what she was about to say. This was his other secret, one he had not revealed to anyone but Melda. “I don’t have any family. My parents died in a car accident when I was six or seven. I was raised in foster homes. There is no one else. Melda was the only family I had.” The thought saddened him. His chest heaved.

  “David, I’m sorry.”

  “The police think I killed her.”

  She sat in a chair near the bed, exhausted. “You loved Melda, David. I know that. I know you didn’t do it.” She let out a breath of air. “David, your dream. How did you know?”

  He shook his head, uncertain how to explain it to her, certain he didn’t have the time. The foreboding that the man was coming grew stronger.

  “Tina, what I’m going to tell you is going to sound strange, crazy, but you have to believe me because you’re all I have now.”

  She nodded, tentative. “Okay.”

  He told her of the man on the balcony, what had happened that night, and his theory that it was the same man who had broken into his apartment.

  “That’s why you couldn’t reach Melda.”

  “Yes, that’s why.”

  “Who is he? What does he want?”

  He thought of Joe Branick. “He wants a package, something that was mailed to me. He didn’t just break into my apartment, Tina. He tore it apart from top to bottom, looking for something. He also broke into my mailbox. I didn’t see the two as related right away. That’s the reason he went to Melda’s apartment.”

  “She collects your mail when you’re gone,” she said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but do you remember Joe Branick?”

  “The guy who left the message—the guy in the newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think he sent you a package?”

  “Call the number and confirm it’s him. I’m certain of it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. You’re going to have to trust me. I need to get out of here.”

  “David—”

  “That man is still out there, and he’s no longer content with getting the package back. That night on the balcony he could have got away. He could have just left, but he didn’t. He came down that landing, gun in hand. And he’ll come again. I know that sounds crazy, but you’re going to have to rely on everything we’ve been through for the past ten years when I tell you that I can feel it. I need to get out of here.”

  “But, David, how would he know you’re here? And there’s a guard outside the door. What could he do?”

  He pulled on the straps to show her his predicament. “He’ll kill me, Tina.”

  The door to the room pushed open. A pudgy male nurse entered. “Mrs. Sloane, I’m afraid it’s time.”

  He spoke more quickly, with a sense of urgency. “He’s short and stocky, with a crew cut. Melda said he had an eagle tattooed on his forearm. It was the same man I saw last night. There was a detective here earlier—”

  “Frank Gordon. He’s the detective I talked with.” She pulled a card from the pocket of her jeans. “He gave me his card.”

  “Dr. Knight won’t let me speak to him. I need you to give him the description of the man. Tell him about the break-in at my apartment. Tell him that I filled out a police report. And tell him to ask around the building to find out if anyone else saw this man. He drove a van. Someone might have written down the license plate.”

  “All right,” she said.

  The nurse stepped farther into the room. “Mrs. Sloane . . .”

  “Have the detective ask the tenants if any of them saw or spoke to this man. Someone had to tell him that Melda manages the building for me. It’s the only reason he would have searched her apartment. And tell him to call the telephone company. He’ll find out there were no service calls. I’m sure there weren’t.”

  “Mrs. Sloane, I’m sorry.”

  Tina turned to the nurse, then back to Sloane.

  “You know the hall at the back of my building, off the carport? Tell Gordon to look in the wall.”

  “For what?”

  “A bullet hole.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Tell him to look.”

  The pudgy nurse touched her elbow. She turned on him. “Hey, back off. I’m talking to my husband.”

  The nurse backed off.

  Sloane smiled. “I need you to do me one more favor. I need you to get me my briefcase.”

  She looked puzzled. “Your briefcase?”

  “I left it at the office under my desk, remember?”

  “You put your mail in it,” she said.

  “I need you to get it for me. Will you bring it to me here?”

  She nodded, started for the door, then stopped, as if struck by a thought, and turned back to him. She walked to the side of his bed and gripped his hand. Then she bent down and kissed him on the cheek, lingering for a moment before turning to leave.

  32

  TINA STOOD AT the window, cradling a cup of herbal tea to her lips and staring at a snapshot view that tourists purchased from every sidewalk photographer at Fisherman’s Wharf. Drenched in a bright morning sun, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge sparkled as if made from the precious metal. The rest of the bridge, and the Marin Headlands to which it spanned, remained enveloped in a billowing white fog.

  It was like looking at a painting, two-dimensional and devoid of substance. Her mind was elsewhere, going over the conversations she had just had with David and with the detective in the hall.

  Frank Gordon was a big man and had a way of scowling when he looked at a person, as if he didn’t even believe she was giving him her correct name—which she wasn’t. Despite Gordon’s skepticism, she persisted in telling him everything that Sloane had asked her to say. Gordon took notes, and when she had finished he paused, his nostrils flaring and his chest inflating with a deep breath. If he remained skeptical, he didn’t say. Sloane had given him things, tangible things he could verify, and Tina knew that was what was bothering him. Gordon didn’t want to believe the story, but he had no choice but to confirm whether what Sloane was telling him was true or not. He closed his notebook and called over a uniformed hospital security officer and told him to watch the door. Then he turned and left Tina standing in the hall.

  The fatigue had burrowed into the muscles of her face and neck, making her head heavy, like a two-glasses-of-red-wine hangover, but the warmth of the tea on her face and hands, and the smell of orange spices, seemed to be helping revive her.
/>   “I’m sorry. That took longer than I expected.” Dr. Knight hung up the telephone. Tina turned from the window. Knight sat at a cluttered desk in a modest-sized office that appeared to be more of a place to put things than to actually work. There were diplomas on the wall and certificates on shelves, but no pictures of a husband or children or even a favorite pet. Manila files sat stacked on a small round table to the right. With her glasses removed, Knight’s face looked strangely smaller and foreign, like when a man removed his hat to reveal a bald pate. The yellow legal pad on her desk was filled with notes and tiny blue dots she made with the tip of her ballpoint pen—a habit when she was speaking.

  Tina took one of two seats across the desk, and they continued their conversation that had been interrupted by the telephone.

  “I’ve been a psychiatrist for twenty-five years, Mrs. Sloane, and I’ve never seen or read about anything quite like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the police brought your husband in he showed no signs of physical trauma, yet he was nonresponsive to external stimuli. Pinpricks on the bottoms of his feet and along the palms of his hands brought no response. His pupils were fully dilated with rapid eye movement, and his pulse fluctuated from a normal rate of seventy-two beats per minute to a high of a hundred, then would drop suddenly to the mid-sixties though he remained completely at rest. At other times his breathing became labored and his body temperature would drop to as low as 96 degrees, then shoot up to 101.5. His blood pressure was equally inconsistent.”

  “What does all that mean?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said, though Tina suspected that Knight had some idea and was obviously intrigued by it, which was why they were continuing their conversation. “As I said, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. If I had to come up with some sort of diagnosis I would say his state was dissociated, a defense system by the body to escape the reality of what the mind is experiencing.”

  “The reality?”

  Knight rocked back in her chair. “The symptoms your husband is experiencing are very similar to what is referred to as body memory, Mrs. Sloane.” Knight propped her elbows on the desk and held the pen between her hands as if she were trying to snap it in half. “You’ve heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?”

  “Yes, in soldiers coming back from a war.”

  “Most people associate it with that, yes, and we have an entire encyclopedia of clinical information, thanks to the Vietnam War. Body memory is not unlike post-traumatic stress disorders that I have treated. With PTSD there’s usually a delay in the onset of the disorder—‘amnesia’ might be a familiar word to describe it. The person can bury a memory for years and seem perfectly normal, completely unscarred. They lead normal lives, maintain good jobs, stable relationships, families.”

  “But then something happens?” Tina asked.

  Knight lowered the pen. “There is considerable controversy in the profession about what can trigger a repressed memory, but there is little doubt they can be triggered. It’s more common than most people realize. You do not have to have served in a war. Repressed instances of physical or sexual abuse are common.”

  “And you think this Emily Scott trial could have triggered something David has repressed?”

  “Possibly. How old was your husband when his parents died?”

  Tina thought about what David had told her. “He said he was a boy.”

  Knight gave a “Hmm,” wrote a note, and continued to make the blue dots.

  “Is that significant?”

  “Amnesia can be more complicated in children. Children are normally nurtured through their traumatic experiences by an adult—usually a parent. In many cases that can be enough for the child, and the end of the matter. Your husband’s situation is obviously complicated by the fact that he had no parents to fill that role, and from what you’ve told me, no close relative, either. It’s fascinating from a clinical standpoint. I’ve never seen it before. Do you know what happened to him after his parents died, who raised him?”

  “He was raised in foster homes.”

  Knight made a face. “After a traumatic event like that, without someone to nurture him . . . well, there’s no opportunity for the child to understand why it happened. Children often feel that what happens is because of them, that they are somehow to blame.”

  Tina sat forward. “That’s what he said. He said he felt like what was happening to her, to the woman in his dreams, was his ‘fault.’”

  Knight nodded. “A lot of children blame themselves for things in life they can’t understand—parents divorcing, for instance. The only other option is not to deal with it, to bury it. The brain gets stuck in denial, and the event is pushed farther and farther below the surface—sometimes, as I said, for years.” Knight sat staring, as if uncertain whether to continue.

  “What is it?” Tina asked.

  “We can’t divorce the similarity of your husband’s dream with the manner in which this woman died, Mrs. Sloane.”

  Tina shook her head. “He didn’t kill her, Doctor, no matter the similarity. He loved Melda. She was like a mother to him.”

  “Well, there is another possibility, but I’m hesitant to mention it.”

  Tina waited.

  Knight scratched a spot on her head. “This is entirely speculative at the moment.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll admit, I’m intrigued. Despite the rather obvious similarities, you said your husband does not believe the woman in his dreams is the same woman who was killed in her office . . .” She checked her notes. “Emily Scott.”

  “He didn’t equate the two when we talked about it, no.”

  “And it wasn’t this woman, Melda.”

  “It couldn’t have been. He’s been having the nightmare for weeks. What does it mean?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Knight said, though in a tone indicating she thought it wasn’t. “But nightmares are not the problem, Mrs. Sloane; they’re the red flag that there is a problem. From what you’ve told me, it doesn’t appear that your husband is repressing the car accident that killed his parents.”

  “I don’t really know,” Tina said.

  “He recalls it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which could mean that your husband’s nightmare is not about the car accident or the death of his parents.”

  “It might be something else,” Tina said.

  Knight nodded. “Something in his past. Something so horrible his mind has chosen to forget it completely. Until now.”

  33

  SLOANE LEANED FORWARD to see the mirror on the inside of the bathroom door. It had been left open and angled so that it reflected the rectangular wire-mesh window of the outer door to his room. Every fifteen minutes, give or take half a minute, a uniformed guard looked through the exterior window into the room. That was a problem, but so was waiting for the telephone repairman to show up.

  Sloane had counted twelve minutes since the guard last peered through the window. Counting was, at the moment, a complex function that kept him semialert. The guard would return in three minutes. The pudgy male nurse would follow seven minutes after the guard.

  Five minutes passed.

  The door to the room swung open with a burst, the nurse behind it. The guard was off schedule.

  Sloane quickly contemplated his options. It was impossible to know if the guard had just gone to the bathroom, to return at any moment, or had left for good. That was something that would reveal itself down the road, if he got that far. One move at a time, he told himself. Think ahead, but make just one move. Rock climbing had conditioned his body and mind not to rush, to concentrate on the minutiae. He relied on that training now.

  The nurse bounced to the side of Sloane’s bed and grabbed his wrist. When he did, Sloane gripped the man’s left wrist and held it to the side of the bed. At about the same moment the nurse saw the steady drip of the IV tube on the hospital floor, the needle pulled from Sloane’s right arm, w
hich was free of the restraint.

  When she had leaned down to kiss him, Tina had positioned her body between the nurse and the bed and unsnapped the restraint.

  The look in the nurse’s eyes changed from confusion to fear. His mouth opened in alarm.

  “I’m sorry,” Sloane said. He hit the nurse flush with his right hand, buckling the man’s legs and feeling his body drop like a weighted sack. He managed to keep the man from crashing to the floor and pulled him across the bed, keeping watch in the reflection in the mirror. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The room spun like a merry-go-round. He gripped the edge of the bed, fighting centrifugal force with one foot dragging on the floor. When the room stopped spinning he rechecked the door.

  No guard.

  He stood and felt the cold burn in his ankle: another problem he’d have to deal with. He crossed the room, careful to duck below the window in the door, and pulled open the small closet near the bathroom. His wallet and college ring sat on a shelf, but his clothes were not there—another problem he hadn’t counted on. He wouldn’t get far in a hospital gown with his ass hanging out the back. He turned and reconsidered the nurse.

  Working quickly, he switched his gown for the nurse’s blue hospital shirt and pants. Both were tight, the pants too short. There was no hope for the man’s shoes. Sloane threw them under the bed. Hopefully the guard would not look down. He slipped the nurse’s hands and legs into the restraints and tightened them enough to keep the man in the bed. The nurse moaned. Sloane stuffed an end of the gown into the man’s mouth and pulled the sheet up so it was just underneath his nose. Then he picked up the clipboard from the chair and turned for the door, catching sight of the guard’s reflection peering through the wire-mesh window.

  34

  KNIGHT’S TELEPHONE INTERRUPTED them again. Frustrated, she reached to answer it. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I thought I had forwarded my calls. This will just be a second.” She picked up the phone. “This is Dr. Knight.”

  Tina sat back in her chair, watching a black speck, a bird, drifting and hovering on the wind currents above the snow-white billowing fog that showed no sign of receding back out to sea.