The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  “David Sloane? Yes, he’s my patient.”

  At the mention of David’s name, Tina looked from the view back to Brenda Knight. Knight made a face as if pained and gave her a gesture as if to say, “Sorry,” then went back to tapping the point of her pen on the pad of paper. “Correct, he should have no visitors. I thought I made that very clear on his chart.” Her voice rose with irritation. “Was it a Detective Gordon? Well, who was it?” Her brow furrowed. “Hang on a minute.”

  Knight covered the phone with the palm of her hand.

  “Is there a problem?” Tina asked.

  “It’s the front desk. They say a visitor came to see your husband and they inadvertently gave him the room number before seeing my notation in his chart that he was to have no visitors.”

  “Who is it?” Tina asked.

  “Well, that’s the confusing part. Didn’t you tell me your husband has no relatives?”

  She felt a pang in her stomach, suddenly anxious. “That’s what he said.”

  “Well, the front desk says a man just showed up and said he’s your husband’s brother.”

  Tina stood. “His what?”

  “His brother from Indiana. He said he flew in—”

  “He’s not from Indiana. He grew up in Southern California.” The tension exploded across her neck and shoulders. Sloane’s voice echoed in her head.

  Melda described a man. She said he was short and stocky, with a crew cut. She said he had an eagle tattooed on his forearm. I saw the same man at the apartment building last night. He was there when I got back from the office.

  She pulled open the door to the office. “Call security!” she shouted, and ran into the hall.

  35

  SLOANE ANGLED HIS body to prevent the guard from getting a clear view of his face. The door to the room swung open.

  “Everything okay in here?” the officer asked.

  Sloane scribbled notes on the clipboard with the pen, sneaking a glance at the nurse and doing his best to imitate the man’s singsong cadence. “Uh-huh. Everything is okey-doke. Sleeping like a baby.”

  He sensed the officer lingering.

  Then the door swung shut.

  Sloane exhaled but knew that his relief would be brief. Getting past the guard, down the hallway, and out of the building would be difficult. He sensed that the exits would be limited on a psychiatric ward, and because he had been unconscious when they brought him in, he had no perception of the floor layout. To avoid suspicion he couldn’t stand in the hall turning in circles; he had to walk with a purpose. Where, exactly, that would take him he had no way of knowing.

  He stepped to the door and looked through the window but did not see the guard. Opening the door a crack, he peered down the hall. The images were blurred from the sedative, but he could make out the guard leaning on the counter of a nurses’ station, where two hallways intersected. That was also presumably where the elevators were located. He looked in the opposite direction. It was a dead end.

  The nurse moaned louder. Sloane was out of time and options. He raised the clipboard, pulled open the door, and stepped out.

  The pain shot from his ankle with each step, but he willed himself not to limp as he approached the nurses’ station, where the guard talked with the reason he was off schedule: a blonde nurse.

  “Just keep talking,” Sloane whispered as he neared. “Don’t look up. Don’t look down.”

  The guard turned his head, but it was to look past Sloane down the hall. Then he resumed his flirtation. Sloane raised the clipboard as he walked past the station and approached the intersection.

  Tina slid around the corner, head down, regained her balance, and ran past him down the hall. Steps behind her, white coat billowing, a winded and flushed Brenda Knight tried to keep pace. Knight stopped at the counter and spoke to the guard while pointing down the hall.

  “You. Go with her; hurry.”

  The officer straightened. “Everything’s fine; I just checked on him. He’s sleeping. A nurse is with him.”

  Sloane turned the corner, found the bank of elevators, and pressed the call button as he searched the hall for a stairwell, not seeing one.

  Knight spoke to the nurse as she and the officer started down the hall. “Has anyone else been in there?”

  “No,” the young woman said, flustered. “Michael was in there.”

  Sloane continued to search for an exit, no longer content to wait for the elevator. When he looked back at the counter the blonde nurse was staring at him with a confused “you don’t belong” look in her eyes. Anxious voices echoed down the hallway. At the same moment the lightbulb clicked on, and the nurse at the counter started pointing and shouting.

  “Hey! He’s at the elevator. He’s at the elevator!”

  The elevator bell rang.

  Footsteps. People running.

  The elevator door slid open. Tina reached the nurses’ station, the security guard behind her. She turned to the elevator. “David!”

  A man stepped from the elevator as Sloane stepped on.

  He is shorter than you. Thick muscles. Short hair. Flat on top.

  Recognition came simultaneously. The man grabbed Sloane by his shirt, and Sloane shoved the man backward into the elevator. The doors closed as they hit the back wall. The elevator shuddered. They wrestled from one side of the car to the other, Sloane gripping the arm holding the gun. The man’s other hand seized Sloane’s throat, his thumb digging into Sloane’s larynx, cutting off his air supply. The drugs in his system had left him weak despite his anger and adrenaline rush, and he felt the man overpowering him, the arm holding the gun bending toward him. He felt like an arm wrestler losing strength, the barrel inching closer to his head.

  Sloane whipped his head forward and heard the bridge of the man’s nose shatter with a crack. Blood sprayed. At the same moment he planted on his good leg, pivoted, and bull-rushed the man into the railing on the opposite wall. The elevator jerked violently, knocking them off balance, then came to an abrupt stop.

  Sloane repeatedly slammed the hand holding the gun against the wall until the gun fell. He turned to retrieve it, but the elevator dropped again, then caught with a snag, throwing him off balance again. The elevator doors opened. Sloane grabbed the gun as a woman stepped onto the elevator. The man shoved her at him, then shoved others who also had stood waiting for the elevator. They fell into Sloane like bowling pins. The elevator doors rhythmically closed and opened, a loud buzz indicating an obstruction. Sloane scrambled over the bodies and rushed into the hallway. Hospital employees ducked for cover and fell to the floor. At the end of the hall he watched the man pull open a door and disappear into a stairwell. Limping after him, ankle burning, Sloane pulled open the door and leaned over the railing to see the gunman quickly descending. Even on two good legs Sloane would never catch him. Voices and footsteps echoed from above. More voices came from below. Sloane’s own choice of exits was being rapidly reduced. He descended a single flight, put the gun in the waistband of his pants beneath the nurse’s shirt, and exited onto a lower floor where a female nurse struggled with a patient bed and an IV stand on rollers. Sloane limped up behind her, grabbed the metal frame of the bed for support, and pushed.

  “Let me give you a hand,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She had her head down. “The wheels keep getting . . . my God, what happened to you?”

  Sloane’s shirt was splattered with blood. “Bloody nose,” he said. “Just going to change my shirt. Where are you taking him?”

  Twenty feet in front of him two young security guards exited from the stairwell running. Sloane turned his head and adjusted the sheet, timing his steps so that he would be obscured by the nurse on the other side of the bed, who now looked at him with greater suspicion.

  “I haven’t seen you before.”

  She looked down at his bare feet.

  End of the ride.

  Sloane spotted an exit sign, hit the door midstride, and disappeared into the stairwell, leaving th
e IV stand to drag.

  AT THE BOTTOM of the stairs Sloane threw open a door to an empty service corridor and two swinging doors. He pushed through the doors and felt the rush of cool air as he stepped out onto a loading dock of large canvas laundry baskets. The dock, however, was empty of cars or vans. He pulled out a light blue top and matching pants and quickly slipped them over the nurse’s uniform, stretched a blue cotton hat over his hair, and pulled hospital booties over his bare feet. Gravel dug into the bottoms of his feet as he crossed an asphalt drive. Halfway to the street he spotted a cab parked at the entrance to the hospital. It was a risk, but he would not get far without shoes, limping on a bad ankle. He turned and made his way to the cab and pulled open the back door.

  “Dr. Ingman?” the driver asked.

  “I’m in a hurry,” Sloane said.

  36

  IT LOOKED AS IF a carnival were in town. Tom Molia parked behind a string of police cruisers and orange highway vehicles lining the edge of Highway 9, their lights marking the dusk in strobes of color. A news truck had arrived, and reporters were hurrying to set up, dragging portable cameras and lugging cable. Molia badged two uniformed officers on crowd and traffic control, ducked underneath the police tape, and walked toward a large crane taking up the half of the road closer to the edge of the cliff. Thick cables extended from its boom down the steep terrain to a portable winch at the water’s edge.

  Despite the pang in his stomach, Molia still held out hope it was a mistake, that Clay Baldwin was wrong. God, let him be wrong, he thought.

  Baldwin had called Molia at home, as he played catch in the front yard with T.J. Maggie had come down the porch steps and handed him the telephone. “It’s Clay. Are you on call again?”

  He wasn’t, and just hearing Baldwin’s name caused his gut to flare; he knew that Clay Baldwin wasn’t making a social call. By the time Molia hung up, his stomach was burning like a furnace, but his body was chilled to the bone.

  The captain of a charter fishing boat had picked up the detail on the boat’s sonar—something he referred to with great pride as a Garmin Fishfinder 240. He’d been returning from a late afternoon charter, and professed to know every inch of the Shenandoah, which was why the dark image that filled his screen had given him momentary pause. He thought it might be the mother of all fish. A finer resolution confirmed that he was wrong.

  “They think they found him. They think they found Cooperman,” Baldwin said.

  From that simple statement Molia knew they hadn’t found Bert Cooperman at the local pub drinking a beer and shooting pool.

  “Looks like he lost control on a turn,” Baldwin said. “They found tire marks, like his tires spun on the loose gravel and he couldn’t correct it in time. There’s no guardrail, Mole. That’s why nobody noticed it. He was there one moment and gone the next.”

  Molia looked down the steep embankment and felt the backs of his knees go weak and a cold sweat break out on his forehead. He stepped back from the edge. He was not good with heights—never had been. They gave him the willies. Though the ground sloped, at that moment his mind made it out to be a sheer cliff, with the final step a bottomless pit. He walked to the cab of the crane, where the operator sat talking on a handheld radio, presumably to the winch operator at the water’s edge.

  Molia held up his badge as he spoke. “What do you got?”

  “Three divers in the water.” The operator spoke over the hum of the machine, manipulating levers. “They’re working to fix chains so we can lift it up the hillside.” The man pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at a flatbed truck.

  “What kind of car?” Molia asked.

  “Tough to see down there. One person trapped inside behind the wheel, though.”

  Molia was horrified. “They didn’t pull him out yet?”

  “Couldn’t.” The man pushed another lever. “Apparently the car was banged up pretty bad.” A call came over the man’s handheld. “You’re going to have to excuse me.” The operator adjusted in his seat and got serious with the machinery. Several minutes later, after further instructions on the handheld, the cable line went taut. “Here she comes now!” he yelled down at Molia.

  Molia walked forward, staying back from the edge, listening to the hum of the cable and the engine straining. When the car breached the surface, water poured from its battered body. A police cruiser. Bert Cooperman.

  Molia spit over the edge; the pain in his gut had become a bitter taste in his mouth.

  The operator shouted down to him. “He one of yours?”

  “Yeah,” Molia said, not turning around. “He’s one of ours.”

  Somebody had killed a cop, and this time no fucking United States attorney with an attitude was going to take the body. This time Tom Molia was going to do the job he swore to do for the people of Jefferson fucking County. And he didn’t give a good goddamn who he pissed off in the process.

  37

  A DOZEN BLACK-AND-WHITE police vehicles bunched together at the front entrance to U.C. San Francisco Hospital on Judah Street, lights flashing in the fading light of dusk, adding to nature’s color scheme. The sunset had turned the clouds a mixture of purples and blues. Across the street, medical school students burdened with heavy backpacks stood shoulder to shoulder with hospital staff, watching the scene in animated discussion. Rumors continued to circulate. People inside the hospital were dead, lots of them. A deranged mental patient had managed to escape from his room and kill several of the staff and now held hostages as the police SWAT team searched floor to floor, room to room.

  Detective Frank Gordon marveled at the crowd through the tinted glass doors of the hospital lobby. “You turn on the lights of a police car and it’s like moths to a porch lamp,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how dangerous the situation could be, that they could get themselves killed, they just can’t help but swarm to the lights.” He turned to Tina. “Who are you, really—a girlfriend? I know you’re not his wife.” Gordon pointed to her left hand. “No ring. And I checked: Sloane isn’t married.”

  “I’m his secretary, Tina Scoccolo.”

  Gordon leaned forward as if having problems with his hearing. “His secretary?”

  She nodded. “We’ve worked together for ten years.”

  Gordon shook his head with a bemused “What next?” smile. “Twenty-four years on the force, and this is the craziest goddamn thing yet.”

  “But his story checks out, right? What he said about the man at the building is true.”

  Gordon sounded resigned and not very happy. “Yeah, the front desk’s description of the guy claiming to be Sloane’s brother fits the description Sloane gave you, and it fits the description we got from one of Sloane’s tenants. I took a drive out there. The tenant said he directed a telephone repairman fitting that description to this Melda . . .” Gordon looked at his notes.

  “Demanjuk,” Tina said.

  “Demanjuk. Right.”

  “But he wasn’t with the phone company,” Tina said.

  “Apparently not. Sloane was right about that, also. There’s no record of a service call to that building.”

  “So David was telling the truth about a burglary,” she said.

  “I don’t know about a burglary. All I can tell you is, Mr. Sloane did file a police report like he said, and according to the two uniformed officers who took a ride out there, someone did tear up his apartment, just like someone tore up Ms. . . .”

  “Demanjuk.”

  “Ms. Demanjuk’s apartment. Right. Anyway, yeah, that all checks out.”

  Tina let out a sigh of relief.

  “But the officer also said the whole thing was peculiar.”

  “Peculiar?”

  “As in, whoever broke into Sloane’s apartment didn’t take anything.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. Usually burglars steal.” Gordon arched his eyebrows to make a point. “Whoever broke into Sloane’s apartment apparently didn’t take anything of value—not the stereo
, not the television. They just trashed it. That would appear to rule out robbery as a motive.” Tina thought of what David had told her about the man looking for a package. She played dumb. “Does Mr. Sloane have any vices you’re aware of?”

  “Vices?” she asked.

  “Drugs, alcohol, gambling . . . women.”

  She shook her head. “He hardly even drinks, Detec—” She stopped in midsentence, remembering Sloane’s request that she retrieve his briefcase from the office. The package from Joe Branick was in it.

  “Ms. Scoccolo?”

  “Huh?”

  “Vices?”

  “No,” she said. “No, nothing I’m aware of.” She no longer sounded confident, and the detective appeared to pick up on her hesitancy.

  “Something that could get him into trouble, maybe get someone pissed off at him? Did he owe anyone any money?”

  “No,” she said, sounding less sure. “Not that I’m aware of.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t know everything about his personal life, Detective, but I can tell you he isn’t addicted to anything . . . except maybe his work. I don’t know where he’d even find the time. As for money, I deposit his paychecks for him and pay quite a few of his bills. I can tell you he isn’t hurting. He rarely spends anything on himself. I order his suits and shirts from catalogues.”

  “What does he do with his money?”

  “Invests it, or just lets it sit in his accounts. He gives a lot to children’s charities.”

  Gordon rubbed his chin as if examining the closeness of his shave. “What about enemies?”

  She shrugged. “He is a lawyer.”

  Gordon chuckled at that comment.

  “What I meant,” she said, “is that he usually wins, so I’m sure there are a few people who probably don’t like him much, but specific enemies, no, not that I know of.”

  Gordon pulled out a plastic bag from his coat pocket and held it up for Tina to see. Inside was a bullet. “One of the officers spotted it. It was just where Sloane said it would be.”