The Jury Master

by Robert Dugoni

  “Where?”

  “That information will be given to you at a later time. You are to come alone, Mr. Sloane. Do not bring the detective. Do not bring the police. If you are listening, Detective Molia—and I assume you are—then know this: I will kill the woman if I smell you within five miles. Mr. Sloane, I will contact you on this phone. Trying to contact me or to trace this number will be quite futile, I assure you. Your calls are also being monitored. If you call anyone while you are en route, I will know it. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Now, I’d suggest you get moving. You have two minutes before I call back with your next set of instructions. One hundred twenty seconds. If you are not moving, alone, the woman will die.”

  “Madsen . . .”

  “Time is running. Precisely two minutes starting . . . now.”

  Sloane shouted, “Madsen!”

  79

  TOM MOLIA PACED the hardwood floor near the front door, the keys to Banto’s Jeep firmly in his grip. “No way. I can’t let you do it, David.”

  Sloane looked at his watch. He had a minute and forty-five seconds to be on the move. “You heard him. He’ll kill her.”

  “He’ll kill her anyway, and he’ll kill you. Madsen is a trained killer, David. You don’t stand a chance, and there is no guarantee he will go alone.”

  “He’ll go alone. His ego won’t permit him to think he needs anyone else to get the job done. I’ve become a challenge for him. He wants the challenge.”

  “Which is exactly why you’re not going alone, macho bullshit aside.”

  Sloane looked at his watch. He was under a minute and a half. “This isn’t about Macho bullshit.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “You don’t understand, Tom, and I don’t have time to explain it to you, but I cannot let her die. I can’t sit by and watch another woman I love die. I’ve had to do that twice. If this is the only way to keep her alive, then I have to try. I have to do it.”

  “We can—”

  “We don’t have time,” Sloane growled, adamant. “We don’t have time to make plans. We don’t have time to call in backup. Give me the keys.”

  “I’ll follow you at a safe—”

  He held out his hand. “Give me the keys to the car.”

  “I’ll hide in the trunk.”

  “Jeeps have no trunks.”

  “Then I’ll hide in the fucking backseat.”

  “You don’t think he’s thought of that? You don’t think there’s somebody outside right now, watching?” Sloane looked at his watch. Under a minute. “We’re running out of time.”

  “I have a stake in this, too, David; they killed Cooperman and Peter Ho. This is not just your battle.”

  “Then give me the chance to do this for both of us. If you don’t, Tina will die and we both will have lost. You have a family to think of. You have two small children who need their father, and a wife who needs her husband. I don’t have anything in this world but Tina. She’s it. If he kills her, I don’t care whether I live or die.”

  Molia shook his head. “I’m sorry, David. I’m not going to let you commit suicide.”

  The detective turned his back and started for the door. Sloane grabbed the lamp off the side table and swung it like a bat, hitting Molia in the back of the head, knocking him to the floor. He dropped to one knee, put a hand just to the right of Molia’s chin, and felt a steady pulse.

  “And I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I left your wife a widow and your children without a father.” He took the keys to the Jeep from Molia’s hand, quickly gathered what he needed, and pushed open the screen door as the cellular phone rang in his hand.

  80

  FORTY MINUTES LATER, Tom Molia sat on the couch in his living room, holding an ice pack against the back of his head. Standing over him was a contingent of people, but his focus was on the large African-American man who looked as if he’d just gone twelve rounds with George Foreman in his prime and lost. Next to him was an equally tall, attractive woman.

  “How did you get my name, Detective?” Charles Jenkins asked.

  “Sloane said he was looking for you. He said you used to work with Joe Branick and you might be the key to telling us what the hell is going on.”

  Jenkins spoke to the woman. “He remembered me.”

  “He said he saw you in a dream,” Molia said. “And don’t ask me any more than that. Given the pounding in my head at the moment, I’m amazed I remembered your name.”

  Molia had awoken on the floor with the keys to the Jeep missing, Maggie’s favorite lamp broken, and a headache that four Tylenol had not touched. He put out an all-points bulletin on Marty Banto’s Jeep, giving strict instructions that anyone seeing it was to call in its location but otherwise to stand down. Then he took his only option: He dialed the number for Langley, provided his credentials, and said he had information on the death of Joe Branick. That got him to the first gatekeeper. Once there, he mentioned the name Charles Jenkins. That set off alarm bells that kept pushing him up the chain of command and did not stop until he was talking with William Brewer, the director of the CIA. Half an hour after hanging up the telephone with Brewer, Molia’s neighbors got the second thrill of their evening when a helicopter touched down in the cul-de-sac and delivered the two people standing in his living room.

  Jenkins filled in Molia about the village in the mountains of Oaxaca, and a massacre that had taken place there thirty years earlier.

  “And you saved him?” he asked, referring to Sloane.

  “I didn’t save him, Detective. Fate saved him that day.”

  “Well, that’s all well and good, Mr. Jenkins, but right now we’re fate. If we don’t find Sloane, he’s dead. Madsen will kill him.”

  The telephone rang. Tom Molia snatched it from its cradle and spoke into the receiver, listened for a beat, then handed the phone to Jenkins.

  Jenkins listened intently. When he hung up he told Alex Hart that Brewer reported that they had been unsuccessful in locating Parker Madsen.

  The phone rang again. This time the call was for Tom Molia. “You’re sure?” Molia asked the caller. “No. Nobody is to do anything,” he said, hanging up. “We don’t have much time.”

  “What is it?” Jenkins asked.

  “They just spotted the Jeep. I know where they’re going,” Molia said, grabbing the Sig. “It seems our Mr. Madsen has a flair for the theatrical. He’s bringing this full circle.”

  “Full circle?”

  “Where we found Joe Branick’s body.”

  “How far are we?” Jenkins asked.

  “Too far, I’m afraid,” Molia said.

  81

  Black Bear National Park,

  West Virginia

  SLOANE STOOD LOOKING up at a crescent moon streaked by the contrail of a jet. Stars pierced the night sky like pinholes in a children’s theater canvas backdrop, but offered little in the way of usable light. The hushed sounds of a river flowing resonated with the symphony of insects, and the air was heavy from the humidity of the day. Thick brush and tall, slender trees, standing like attentive soldiers waiting for the events they were about to witness, surrounded the clearing. Sloane knew from the newspaper articles that Black Bear National Park was where they had found Joe Branick’s body, but he didn’t imagine that Parker Madsen chose their meeting place for sentimental reasons. No, the general had chosen it for the same reason it was chosen as the place to end Joe Branick’s life: It was remote, dark, and heavily wooded, which allowed for the element of surprise, and a loud noise such as a gunshot would echo on the still air in every direction, making its precise location impossible to detect with any degree of accuracy.

  Madsen’s second call came as Sloane rushed down the front porch steps of Tom Molia’s house, exactly two minutes after the first. The general provided directions to a public gas station, where a man emerged from the shadows, casually opened the passenger door, and searched the inside of the car, confirming that Sloane w
as alone and had the package. The fact that the man did not simply take the package indicated what Sloane had already figured out: It had become personal. Sloane had likely embarrassed the general. He wanted to handle the matter personally. He wanted the challenge of bringing matters to an end, and he didn’t want to share his victory with anyone else. Sloane had sensed Madsen’s character during their abrupt meeting in the Oval Office. A short pit bull of a man, Madsen exuded a wall of omnipotent arrogance that had prevented Sloane from getting behind the pinpoint eyes of hollow darkness but had not prevented Sloane from knowing exactly the type of man Madsen was. Men like Parker Madsen did not consider failure a possibility. Their egos were of such immensity, it was inconceivable that the outcome of any engagement would be anything but what they expected. Their arrogance put them in positions of power, but more often than not it also led to their demise. Sloane had met similar men in the military, and the nation had received a very public display of that arrogance in the White House. Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton came immediately to mind.

  Beyond that, Sloane felt something else: fear. There was something about the impending confrontation with Parker Madsen that made his legs go weak and his stomach churn. It had nothing to do with the thought of dying. It was something beyond that, something that told him Madsen was the predator that had stalked him, and that this would be the confrontation from which he had been running, and which he could no longer avoid. He and Madsen were like two lines running toward each other from a great distance, with their intersection at this very spot, the spot where Joe Branick had spent the final moments of his life.

  After the initial checkpoint, Sloane was given a series of directions, likely designed to ensure that he was not being tailed, that ultimately ended on the flattop. That was twenty minutes ago. Madsen was now content to make him wait, to gain some psychological advantage while he observed Sloane from somewhere in the dark.

  “Your training has served you well.”

  Sloane had not heard a sound before the staccato voice disrupted the beauty of nature. He turned, panning the darkness left, right, and back to dead center. He saw no one. Then, slowly, his eyes made out the imprecise outline against the darkened tree trunks and shrubbery. Parker Madsen appeared from the underbrush like a Bengal tiger emerging from thick jungle. He stood at the edge of the clearing, perhaps fifteen feet away, dressed in jungle camouflage fatigues that seemed to float a foot off the ground, presumably where they had been tucked into black infantry-style boots. His face was a streaked mixture of light and dark greasepaint.

  The bulb in Sloane’s mind flashed, followed by the percussive blast. He heard the heavy boots stampeding into the room, felt the vibrations running through his body. He fought to stay in the present; Tina’s survival depended on his staying in the present.

  “You were a marine, were you not?”

  Sloane opened his eyes. He had avoided falling into the black hole, but unlike in the past, this time he felt a compelling urgency to go there. “Why do you ask questions you already know the answers to, General?” He was counting on Madsen knowing much more than the branch of the military in which he had served. “I didn’t come here to discuss my past. Where is she?”

  Madsen stepped forward, stopping at a point perhaps ten feet from Sloane. With the dark of night, it was not possible for Madsen to see much of anything, but the general seemed unconcerned whether Sloane was carrying a weapon—part of whatever mind game Madsen was intent on playing, like a gunfighter on the dusty streets of an Old West town, daring the other to make the first move. “You enlisted at seventeen without parental consent, yet did not lie about your age.”

  “I got caught up in the commercials. You know: ‘the few, the proud’? Let’s cut the bullshit, General. Where is she? We had a deal.”

  “You managed to talk your way past the marine recruiter. By the time your age was determined you had already obtained the highest score that year on the Marine Corps aptitude test, not surprising given your IQ. Your commanding officers elevated you to platoon leader, First Marine Division, Second Battalion, Echo Company. You earned citations for marksmanship, saw action in Grenada, received the Silver Star for gallantry, and took a Cuban bullet in the shoulder for reasons far more puzzling to me.”

  Sloane knew that the reason he had given for taking off his flak jacket would intrigue a military man like Madsen, as would the reason postulated by the military psychiatrist they had required him to see. “I was young and stupid,” he said, still struggling to stay in the present. His mind and body felt as if someone had tied a weighted rope around him and dropped it down a hole. It tugged at him, urging him to descend to that place where he had found Joe Branick and Charles Jenkins, and the woman he now knew had been his mother. Unlike in the past, however, it was an urging fraught not with peril but with the instinct for self-preservation.

  “You’re being modest, Mr. Sloane. But I am always curious when a soldier disregards his military training, and particularly so in this instance. You took off your flak jacket during a hostile engagement. Why would you do that?”

  “I suspect you already know that answer as well, General.” Sloane braced his legs, feeling as though, if he did not, he would be dragged backward across the ground and into the depths. He could not go. He needed to get Tina. He could not let her die.

  “I am aware of what you told the military doctor who examined you, as well as the conclusions he drew from it—the act being indicative of someone with suicidal tendencies. It certainly fits the profile: a man without family in search of a place, and frustrated because he has not been able to find it. Was that not how he put it?”

  “You’d know better than I, General.”

  “And yet you have evaded some of the finest-trained soldiers this country has ever produced. I know; I trained them.” Madsen sounded almost impressed. “Why would a man seemingly without a burning desire to live do that? What are you fighting so hard for, soldier?”

  “I’m not a soldier, General, and I have no desire to be one again. I didn’t come here to engage in a philosophical exchange about the idiosyncrasies of men.”

  “Then answer a more basic question: How is it that you knew Joe Branick? I will admit that I have found no possible connection between the two of you that would justify his sending you a package about which you could have no knowledge.”

  “You should have asked him that question yourself before you had him killed.”

  “Oh, I did, but he was equally recalcitrant.” Madsen sighed. “No matter. I assume we will get to the root of that problem imminently. You have the package?”

  “Where is she?”

  “If I am satisfied with its contents—”

  “No. I’ll show you the package when you show me Tina. Then we discuss the details of an exchange. I don’t trust you any more than you trust me.”

  Madsen smiled. “A hardened negotiator. Fair enough.”

  Madsen stepped back, the darkness swallowing him. He emerged with one arm extended, his hand gripping Tina by the shoulder. Her mouth was taped shut, her hands bound in front, hair disheveled. Though it was difficult to see in the dark, she appeared to have sustained cuts and bruises on her face. At the sight of her, Sloane’s legs came out from under him and he dropped, no longer able to fight gravity or the heavy weight pulling him into the depths. He landed at the bottom of the hole and found himself beneath the bed, wedged against the wall, unable to move. His mother sat on the floor, and now it pained him even more to see her battered, bruised, and violated. The man stood over her, shouting the words Sloane had, until that moment, refused to hear.

  “¿Dónde está el niño? ¿Dónde está el niño?” (Where is the boy?)

  They had come for him. Outside they were killing—killing everyone . . . because of him.

  The words rang in his ears and struck a chord deep within him, a place as dark and desolate as the hole into which he had fallen. From beneath the bed he looked up at the face, a streaked reflection of light and dark�
��nondescript features concealed beneath the dark of night and the smear of greasepaint. The eyes, however, could not be concealed: white, shimmering pearls rimmed by red fires of hell, and in the center a black abyss of nothingness—the eyes of a predator intent on killing, and feeling no remorse for its act. Sloane saw them in his dreams, in the Oval Office, standing before him now. Unmistakable. Unforgettable.

  Parker Madsen’s eyes.

  He would kill Tina.

  He sprang to the surface, the need to be there breaking whatever barrier had confined him to the past or trapped him in the present, free to go between both worlds now, able to remember without pain, able to see. It had been Madsen.

  “You killed her.”

  The eyes narrowed.

  “You came that night. You came into the mountains, to the village. It was you and your men. You killed them. You killed them all.”

  Madsen studied him in silence.

  “You beat and raped her. You slit her throat. I saw you do it that morning. I saw the darkness come. It was you.”

  “How could . . . ?” Madsen stopped, his voice a whisper of disbelief and devoid of bravado. He tilted his head and craned forward, as if intrigued but leery of what he might see. At that moment Parker Madsen’s past and present collided, just as Sloane’s had, and his mind solved his burning questions: why Sloane had no living relatives, why he seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, why Joe Branick would send him a package about events in which he could have had no involvement.

  Because he had been involved.

  Because he had been there.

  Madsen laughed, but it was nervous, hesitant, and devoid of humor. “You’re the boy,” he said. “He saved you. Joe Branick saved you.”

  “Joe Branick may have taken me out of that village, but he didn’t save me from what I saw that morning. I watched you do it. I watched you beat and rape her. I watched you hold her by her hair and slit her throat. I watched you kill my mother.”

  He remembered it now vividly, clearly, as if a tarp had been lifted. He remembered lying beneath the bed in the stillness of early morning, the light of day breaking into the room and bringing with it the horror. He told himself it was not real, that it was just a dream, that when he opened his eyes it would all be gone. He remembered hearing the men come into the room and felt the terror that surged through him all over again. He remembered holding his breath, trying not to make a sound, until he could no longer do so, and it escaped in a whimpered cry. He remembered the rush of air, the pressure against his chest suddenly relieved, and the blanket that had concealed him being pulled away. Charles Jenkins and Joe Branick stood over him in stunned silence.