The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  Sloane turned to her.

  “You damn well better not be looking for a story, Mr. Sloane. I handle the family business matters.” She looked up at a family photograph still mounted on the wall. Five grown men stood in mud-covered cleats and rugby uniforms with their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, Joe Branick in the middle. “Joe’s brothers handle the physical matters.”

  47

  The Zona Rosa,

  Mexico City

  The telephone call startled him from a deep sleep. Joe Branick offered no pleasantries. “Get dressed. Be in front of your building in five minutes.”

  Charles Jenkins hung up, took seconds to clear his head, threw aside the covers, and stood. He took a moment to allow his body to adjust to being suddenly vertical instead of horizontal, then stepped across the room to the cold bathroom tile, splashed lukewarm water on his face, and relieved his bladder. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt he picked from a pile on the floor, and four minutes after hanging up the telephone he walked out the door, slipping into his blue windbreaker with “Entarco” embossed in gold letters across the right breast. He waited beneath the glow of a streetlamp. At not quite three in the morning, beads of perspiration were already forming on his forehead. It would be hot and humid in Mexico City—no surprise. The smog would be bad. By the end of days like this it hurt his chest to take a deep breath.

  Jenkins rented a small apartment above a sidewalk café in the Zona Rosa, an affluent suburb of lively, colorful shops and restaurants he had come to enjoy for their vitality and for the women who frequented them. At the moment, the Zona Rosa remained asleep, the store windows dark, the streets uncluttered with the persistent flow of cars or the sound of taxis honking. He bit into a green apple and watched the headlights of a blue Ford racing toward him and pulling to the curb.

  “I’ll need directions,” Branick said as Jenkins lowered himself into the passenger seat.

  Jenkins spoke through a mouthful of apple. “Where are we going?”

  Branick pulled from the curb and drove around the back of a VW Beetle taxi, the only other car on the street, ran a red light, and headed south. Wherever they were going, they were going in a hurry.

  “The village,” he said.

  Jenkins stopped chewing. In the dark of early morning he had not noticed it, but now he saw the strain on Branick’s face. He looked troubled, his expression grim. “What’s the matter, Joe?”

  Branick spoke softly, like whispering a prayer. “I think something happened there last night.” He looked over at Jenkins. “Something bad. Something very bad.”

  Jenkins rolled down the window and tossed the apple out onto the street. In the past several weeks he, too, had sensed something happening, like a man whose body begins to ache with the first signs of a flu. Only it wasn’t his body that ached, it was something inside him, something deep within the fabric of who he was, something that the years of sitting in a pew in a Baptist church had planted—his soul troubled him.

  “Why?” he heard himself ask, though he knew he would have been more correct to ask, “What happened?” And that, too, troubled him.

  “Because of your reports, Charlie,” Branick said. “Your reports made people nervous.”

  Jenkins felt heat spreading from his gut, tension and anxiety flowing to his limbs. Branick glanced over at him, then turned back to the windshield as if speaking to a ghost on the highway. “They were so believable,” he said. “You made them so damn believable.”

  CHARLES JENKINS SAT UP, momentarily disoriented. Something was ringing—his cell phone. He reached for it on the laminated nightstand in which someone had carved, “DS sucks dick,” and flipped it open.

  “Hello? Hello . . . Damn it.”

  He flipped the phone closed, stood, and paced the tiny room. His shirt was damp, his hands clammy. The joints of his fingers and the backs of his knees ached with a cold pain, as if his body temperature had dropped, leaving him numb. Feeling suddenly claustrophobic in the squalid motel room, he stuck his head out a window he’d managed to pry open despite several coats of paint. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell of rotting garbage and urine rising from the alley below.

  After leaving Sloane’s apartment he and Alex knocked on several of the other tenants’ doors. Those willing to speak had a lot to say. What they said led them to a Detective Frank Gordon.

  They found Gordon propped in a leather chair in his den, his arm in a sling and his mood foul. On a Sunday morning, Gordon looked like it was five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Red lines made his eyes look like a road map; they seemed to be begging for sleep. His face said “fatigue.” The only things that seemed to keep him going were the pain pills he washed down with gulps of cold coffee; Alex’s legs, which he eyeballed while rocking rhythmically; and the self-satisfaction that he had been right, that there was more to Sloane’s story than Sloane was letting on. This last piece of information he inferred from the fact that the CIA was sitting in his den.

  In Jenkins’s experience, the only thing cops loved more than having a good story to tell was telling it. Gordon was no different. After an hour Jenkins had pried from him three important pieces of information: Sloane was alive, though where he was at that moment, Gordon didn’t know. Someone had died in Sloane’s apartment—the woman Sloane had named in his will, Melda Demanjuk—and apparently Sloane had found the body. When Gordon told them the woman’s throat had been slit, Jenkins had to momentarily close his eyes and regain his composure. When the police arrived, Sloane was clutching the woman, crying, and unresponsive. That had led to his being hospitalized under the care of a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Brenda Knight at UCSF Hospital. Knight apparently had experience with post-traumatic stress disorder and believed that Sloane was suffering from a similar condition. Finally, Gordon was holding a stiff in the county morgue—a man he said was likely ex-military and carrying enough firepower to keep a small platoon hunkered down for a week.

  The cellular telephone in Jenkins’s hand rang again. Only one person had the number. He flipped it open. “You’ve arrived?”

  After leaving Gordon’s home he had driven with Alex to the airport. They paid cash for one-way tickets to Washington. Even with false identifications the two of them would have been a difficult couple to miss. Besides, the conversation with Gordon had triggered one more thing that Jenkins wanted to do before he left town, and since a psychiatrist would not readily talk with him, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. Alex had called a friend in Langley who would meet her at the airport with a few of his buddies. In the interim she had asked him to look discreetly into David Sloane.

  “No problems,” she said.

  “What do you know?”

  “Sloane made eleven airline reservations to eight different destinations on six different airlines departing from the San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose airports. In each city of arrival he made reservations at car rental agencies and local hotels. He used a credit card for each transaction so the reservations could be easily traced. Then he picked up at least three boarding passes, each to a different destination but leaving at roughly the same time.”

  “It’s a shell game.”

  “Maybe, but you picked the right shell. One of the tickets was to Dulles. Are you going to tell me how you knew that?”

  “What, and spoil the surprise?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on his credit cards and bank accounts, but my guess is, he’ll use cash from here on out.”

  Jenkins was sure Sloane would, and that was a good thing. If Jenkins couldn’t find Sloane, maybe nobody else would, either. “What about the tattoo Detective Gordon described?”

  “I’m working on it, but it will take time if you want to keep it discreet.”

  “I do,” Jenkins said. He looked down at the yellow pad with the scrawled notes and the small blue dots and doodles in the margin that he’d taken from Dr. Brenda Knight’s office.

  “You okay? You sound a million miles
away,” Alex said.

  Jenkins thought of the village in the jungle and what he had seen there that morning. “You woke me. I was napping.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow when I get in. Keep your head down, Alex. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

  He hung up, picked up the notepad, and studied Dr. Knight’s scribbled handwriting detailing David Sloane’s recurring nightmare—and his own.

  48

  AILEEN BLAIR DIRECTED Sloane to the couch and handed him a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon. It was cool in his hand. Condensation clouded the outside of the glass. She took a seat in the wingback chair, shook a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, studying him as she did so, then offered him the pack. Sloane declined.

  “Good for you,” she said.

  She lit the cigarette, set the pack and lighter on the coffee table, and put a glass ashtray in her lap, blowing smoke at the ceiling as she talked. “One damn habit I’ve never been able to lick. I’ve quit more times than I can remember. My mother harangues me. My husband harangues me. My kids really harangue me. I stopped for about three weeks. Then I got the news of my brother’s death.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  She flicked ashes as if flicking away his comment. “So who are you, Mr. Sloane?”

  “Please, call me David.” He handed her a business card from his shirt pocket.

  She considered it for a moment with a bemused smile. “A lawyer.”

  “I’m not here looking for business, Ms. Blair.” He recalled from the newspaper articles that Aileen Branick Blair was an attorney in Boston. He hoped it gave him credibility, and the two of them common ground.

  “I hope not. It wouldn’t say much about your practice if you had to come three thousand miles for business.” She put the card on the table. “You said you have information that concerns my brother’s death?”

  “I believe I do.”

  She crossed her legs and smoothed her khakis. The family resemblance to her brother was strong, especially with her hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail: the prominent chin, Irish-fair skin, blue eyes. “All right, but let me be straight with you before you get started. I’m not even sure why you’re sitting here. I’ve been asking myself why I said yes ever since you called. Next thing I knew, I was giving you directions. We’ve had dozens of telephone calls and I’ve said no to every single one of them. But there was something about you on the telephone, something in your voice, a sincerity I hadn’t heard in the others, that convinced me to talk with you. I like to believe I have pretty good instincts.” She stubbed the butt of the cigarette into the ashtray, picked up the pack, and tapped out another as she continued talking. “But let me tell you something before you get started and waste both our time: I’ve been hearing a lot of crap for three days now and not getting a lot of answers. My mother and father are too old for this, my brothers have a business to run, and Joe’s wife . . . well, she’s not emotionally capable of handling this right now. We sent her home to Boston with her kids to make the arrangements. I’m the youngest, but I’m also the family bulldog. I don’t deny it. The responsibility falls to me. I’ve gone from shock to denial. According to my therapist, I’m supposed to be at reluctant acceptance by now, but I’m too goddamned pissed.”

  He smiled at her comment. “Fair enough.”

  She nodded. “So how did you know my brother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “You told me on the telephone that Joe called you.”

  “He did call me. Your brother called my office in San Francisco and left a message for me Thursday evening, six-thirty San Francisco time.” Sloane handed her the pink message slip. “Judging from what I’ve read in the newspapers, that’s after anyone reported seeing him alive.”

  “That’s his office number,” she said.

  “And I have to assume from the fact that he left that number and a message requesting that I call him back that your brother intended to go back to his office.” The implication hung between them like the cigarette smoke. “So, cutting to the chase, it appears your brother expected to be alive. Not exactly the act of a man contemplating killing himself.”

  Blair studied him. “But you never talked to him?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you say you didn’t know my brother?”

  “I said I don’t think I knew him, Aileen. It gets more complicated after the phone call.”

  She nodded. “I thought it might. I didn’t figure you flew three thousand miles to tell me your voice mail, either. I think you better start from the beginning, David.”

  He had considered where to begin on the drive to the house. “The night after your brother left his message, someone broke into my mailbox and my apartment. The strange thing about it was, they didn’t take anything. They just tore it apart. I dismissed it as vandals.”

  “But not anymore.”

  “Whoever broke in was looking for something, something in particular. Something sent to me in the mail—by your brother.” He reached into the briefcase, took out the envelope, and handed it to her.

  She considered the envelope. “That’s Joe’s handwriting,” she confirmed. She opened the tab, pulled out the papers, and studied them for several minutes. Then she looked up at Sloane, her brow furrowed. “Adoption papers?”

  “Your brother sent me the paperwork for the release of those papers. He found them. I didn’t. Before I received that package I had no idea I was adopted. I understood that my parents died in a car accident when I was a young boy.”

  “You had no idea?”

  It had been an astonishing revelation, except that Sloane, on contemplating thoughts he had never before stopped to analyze, for fear of the answers, realized he did not feel pain or anger when he opened the package. He felt relief. He could not recall ever crying over the death of his parents or remember longing for a gentle touch, a guiding hand, or a consoling voice, and that had brought guilt. Why did he feel so little for two people he was supposed to love instinctively? The revelation in the package had lifted that burden from his shoulders, though in its place it had left an even heavier weight, one that made him feel even more like a rudderless boat in a storm.

  He pointed to the papers in Blair’s hands. “Edith and Ernest Sloane, the people I believed to be my parents, died in a car accident when I was six years old.”

  Aileen Blair shuffled through the file. “These are the papers to adopt you?”

  “I thought so.”

  She stopped fingering through the pages and looked up at him. “Joe was wrong?”

  “You’ll see records in there from St. Andrews Hospital in Glendale, California. I had my law firm in Los Angeles obtain them for me. The woman on those forms, the one who supposedly gave me up for adoption, was named Dianna O’Leary. Eighteen years old, unmarried, living with a staunchly religious aunt and uncle.”

  “Jesus!” Blair said. She had come to the articles that Foster & Bane’s Los Angeles office had obtained from the Los Angeles Times archives. Dianna O’Leary did not leave the hospital with a baby boy, and she had not given him up for adoption.

  “She suffocated her own son,” Blair said, startled.

  “The district attorney didn’t have any compassion for her. She did fifteen years for second-degree murder. When she got out she killed herself with an overdose of prescription painkillers.”

  Blair gave him a quizzical look. “But if that woman didn’t give up her child for adoption, then these papers make no sense.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  She looked up at him.

  “Someone forged them to make it look like Edith and Ernest Sloane adopted that child and named him David.”

  “Who?”

  “The only logical assumption is that it was your brother.”

  She lowered the papers. “Joe? Why would Joe forge these papers?”

  “Again, I don’t know for certain, but the only rational explanat
ion I can think of, Aileen, was to hide me, my identity.”

  Now she leaned closer. “Why would you assume that?”

  He took the papers from her hands, shuffling through them before handing one back to her. “Because Edith and Ernest Sloane did adopt a young boy, Aileen.” He handed her a death certificate. “But David Allen Sloane, seven years old, died in that car accident with them.”

  49

  EXETER ROSE FROM his beanbag to greet Parker Madsen as Madsen stepped into his office. He rubbed the crown of the dog’s head, buzzed his secretary, and instructed her to admit his visitor.

  “I apologize for disturbing you,” Rivers Jones said on opening the door and entering the office. His gait was noticeably quicker. “You said you wanted to be completely briefed on the Branick investigation. We have a problem.”

  Madsen arched an eyebrow as he fed Exeter a dog treat and continued to rub his head.

  “We’ve reviewed Joe Branick’s telephone records for the past six months. There’s a number that comes up repeatedly.” Jones circled behind a chair, as if distance would soften the blow of the information he was about to impart. “The number is to a home in McLean. The calls were made at all hours of the day and night, sometimes one right after the other. Several the final day.”

  “A woman,” Madsen said, still scratching the dog’s head.

  Jones leaned forward. “She’s an escort, sir.”

  Madsen looked up. “A prostitute.”

  Jones cleared his throat. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “She gets paid to have sex with men?”

  “Yes.”

  “A prostitute. A whore.”

  Jones propped his briefcase on the chair, took out a single sheet of paper encased in plastic, and handed it to Madsen. “And we found this.”

  Madsen snapped his fingers and pointed Exeter back to his beanbag before stepping forward and taking the document. He put on a pair of bifocal reading glasses. “Where?” he asked, lowering the page.