The Jury Master (17 page)
He shook his head, and her image bounced like a television picture that had lost its vertical hold.
“You’re in the hospital,” she said.
His mind connected the room’s sparse furnishings, but things remained disproportionate, off-kilter, like a bad
Alice in Wonderland
movie. “How . . .” His throat felt as if it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. Dr. Knight picked up a plastic cup from a side table and lifted the straw to his mouth. Tepid water burned the back of his throat. He winced, and she pulled the straw from his lips. His head fell back against the pillows.
“What happened to me? How did I get here?” he asked. The words pulsed in his forehead.
“An ambulance brought you in last night.”
“Last night?”
“It’s morning, Mr. Sloane.”
He looked again to the mauve drape and realized that the muted light was daylight. Morning. The last thing he remembered was standing on the sidewalk with Tina, waiting for a cab to take her home.
“Was I in some sort of accident? What happened to me? Why am I strapped down?”
The doctor pulled an ophthalmoscope from her coat, clicked it on, and pulled back one of his eyelids, talking to him as she did. The light shot daggers of pain across the top of his skull. He grimaced and shook free.
She clicked off the light, snapped it to the front pocket of her coat, and folded her arms, studying him.
“Do you remember anything about last night, Mr. Sloane?”
“Not really.”
“Try. Tell me what you can remember.”
He focused on the wall across the room, his mind blank. He started to say, “Nothing,” when the images began to flip like cards in a deck, slowly at first, then more quickly. He saw the mug shot in the newspaper. Joe Branick. Tina handed him the pink message slip, the name scrawled in ink. Joe Branick. His mailbox, the metal door swinging open. The mess in his apartment. The man walking on the landing, turning to him. The gun in his hand. Running. Stumbling across the ice plants, slipping at the edge of the cliff. Dirt cascading over him.
Melda. He remembered, something had happened to Melda. His apartment. Melda’s skillet. Her shoe on the floor near . . . the bathroom door.
Melda.
“Oh, no.” He closed his eyes.
“Mr. Sloane?”
The man held the woman upright by a tuft of hair, blood oozing from her nose and mouth.
“Mr. Sloane?”
The light flickered. The blade arced.
“Mr. Sloane . . . Mr. Sloane!”
A heavy weight dropped onto his chest, driving the breath from his lungs. He sank into the darkness. The voice above him grew distant. The light faded. “Mr. Sloane . . . Mr. . . .”
He descended into darkness, to the woman now lying in a pool of blood. She was young. Her hair, a rich dark brown, covered a portion of her face. He knelt down and pushed the strands from her cheeks. It was not Melda. It was not Emily Scott. A sharp pain pierced his chest, a wound that radiated throughout his being.
Breathe. Please breathe.
Her legs were bent at the knees and tucked beneath her. Her head, twisted awkwardly over her shoulder, revealed a gaping wound. He pulled her to him. Tears flooded his eyes and flowed down his cheeks. His fault. It was his fault.
He sensed that he was no longer alone, and looked up to find two men towering over him: a black man, as tall and big as anyone he’d ever seen, stood beside a white man, hair dripping water down his face, breathing heavily, though not like one might after running a long distance. It was labored, choking back emotion, anger. Sloane looked into the man’s face, and though it was a contorted mask of grief, it was somehow familiar.
He felt himself slipping away again, looking down at the two men and at himself as he floated above them, rising to the surface like a diver who has slipped from his weight belt, struggling against the buoyancy, unable to stay down. The dark depths gave way to flickering light. The voice returned.
“Mr. Sloane?”
He breached the surface, gasping for air, unable to catch his breath, heart thumping.
“Mr. Sloane? Can you hear me?”
He closed his eyes, wanting to go back down, to see the two men again, unable to descend.
“Mr. Sloane?”
Then, just as suddenly as Sloane had sunk to a place he did not know, the man who had been at the bottom, the one somehow familiar to him, breached the surface of Sloane’s reality, bringing a startling revelation.
Highway 5,
Brownsville, Oregon
A
SHARP PAIN
radiated a trail of fire down his spine from his neck to a searing point between his shoulder blades. After six hours of driving, Jenkins felt like a pretzel. His lower back ached. His left knee cracked when he bent it—arthritis from an injury he couldn’t even recall. With his mother’s youthful looks and a body that showed no outward sign of deserting him, Jenkins sometimes forgot that he was fifty-two years old. When he looked in the mirror the face surprised him; he still felt thirty—except at moments like this.
For the first two hours he had watched the rear and side mirrors, but there were few cars on the highway; he would have detected anyone following them. No one was. Alex remained asleep, her leather jacket serving as a pillow against the passenger seat window, her body twitching from an over-the-counter painkiller—two Motrin washed down with two beers, picked up at a convenience store. Her arm would be sore.
Jenkins drove through Oregon on a barren desert stretch of Highway 5. The horizon burned in the distance with the approach of dawn like a windswept fire. It colored the brick-red dirt a rust orange and caused the glacier-carved mountains to glow like huge bonfires. It made him think of his home, and of Lou and Arnold.
He and Alex had waited until the flames died. Someone on the island had seen the fire and called the fire department. It took them better than three hours to put out the blaze. Alex had urged him not to go back to the farm, but he would not leave the dogs to rot in the woods, food for the coyotes and other animals. He buried them near the creek. It felt like the right place—they liked to run through the water—but he had not had enough time to pick out all the twigs and rocks cluttering their graves, and that continued to bother him. He’d also had no time to mourn them. He grabbed a handful of dirt, doing his best to remember a prayer he had learned by sheer osmosis sitting for hours in a Baptist church Sunday mornings.
“From ashes you came. To ashes you shall return,” he said, letting the soil sift through his fingers and scatter in the wind. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”
They deserved that much. They deserved more. Someday, if he ever returned, he’d stack stones there, plant a tree or a rhododendron, something to grow from their memories. The finality of the thought caused the sadness to well inside him. He pictured them bounding to their deaths, tails wagging, never suspecting the inhumanity that men could inflict. Charles Jenkins knew. He’d seen inhumanity firsthand, and thirty years wasn’t going to erase that memory, either.
H
IS BLUE NYLON
windbreaker captured the heat steaming off his body. His shirt clung to his skin like cellophane wrap. He wiped the sweat and moisture pouring from his hair into his eyes. Dawn brought broken slits of sunlight filtering through gaps in the thick canopy of trees and vines, along with an almost serene quiet.
Too quiet.
He sensed an uneasiness in the jungle, an unnatural silence that comes when a predator has scared away or killed every living thing capable of movement.
He pushed through the thick foliage into a clearing—and a horror he had witnessed just once before, in Vietnam.
Smoke and ash hung thick in the stagnant air, rising from the embers, burning his throat and nostrils with the smell of charcoal and a sweet odor he had hoped never to smell again. Small fires smoldered where shacks once stood, an occasional flame bursting from the destruction, crackling and hissing at him like an angry snake disturbed from its rest. It was the only sound beneath the deafening canopy. Even the animals mourned in silence.
Jenkins dropped to one knee from exhaustion and grief, sick with anger. Behind him he heard the rustle of the plants, the fall of footsteps, and the heavy breathing of a man struggling to catch up. Joe Branick came through the foliage and stopped as if approaching the edge of a cliff. Whatever words formed in his mind stopped just as suddenly. Mouth agape, Branick stared at the carnage of bodies—in the doorways where the structures no longer existed, and along the roads and hillsides to which the villagers had fled in a desperate and futile attempt to escape. They had been hunted and shot like animals. Slaughtered. Men and women.
Children.
Jenkins bent over and threw up, a yellowish spew that became violent dry heaves. He sat up, wiping the spittle from the corners of his mouth, spitting, the acidic burn lingering in his throat.
“They killed the men first,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Center-mass and head shots. Kill shots. They let them run and used them like targets.”
“Jesus,” Branick whispered. Then he made the sign of the cross.
Jenkins stood and walked forward into the carnage. “They bound the women, tortured some, certainly raped others. Some they killed still holding on to their children.”
The pattern became clear to him. Those children still clutching their parents in a fierce embrace were young girls. “They separated the boys,” he said, and turned and hurried through the village, Branick following.
The one-room building near the large, flat stone had been badly charred but somehow remained standing, saved perhaps by the heavy rain and sodden air, or by other forces he did not want to consider. The door had been blown from its hinges, an act designed not to gain entry—a decent kick would have splintered the cheap wood—but to cause confusion and panic.
Jenkins ducked below the threshold into the room. A single body lay in the dirt, and despite the slaughter outside, seeing the woman on the floor, hideously battered and disfigured, alone, separated from the others, made the horror more personal and inconceivable.
The confirmation of what Jenkins had suspected forced his hands into fists of rage. The anger lodged in his throat, choking him with fury, agony, and a guilt that beat him to his knees with the force of sledgehammer blows.
“Charlie. Come on. Come on.” Joe Branick stood above him, urging him toward the door.
“Goddamn them, Joe!” he said. “Goddamn them.”
A
LEX STIRRED AND
winced in pain, but she did not wake.
Jenkins studied her in the pale light of the dashboard, wondering again whether Joe would have endangered the daughter of Robert Hart. She said they had been tracking right-wing guerrilla organizations that could impede an agreement requiring Mexico to reopen its oil market to foreign interests. That was likely true, but that wasn’t why Joe was dead. Joe had left the answer to that question in Charles Jenkins’s file.
He was dead because of David Allen Sloane.
D
R. BRENDA KNIGHT
had removed the straps that bound Sloane’s chest and ankles but not the ones that kept his wrists six inches from the side of the bed. Hospital protocol would not allow it, she said, unless he was put into the locked ward, which he did not want. Sloane knew there was more to Knight’s decision than protocol. She thought he was either nuts or dangerous. With the police continuing to hold a vigil outside his door, waiting to talk with him, it was a logical conclusion. He could think only of Melda, of holding her tiny frame, lifeless in his arms. Sadness overwhelmed him. Then he would grow angry.
Who would do such a thing? Who would kill a sweet old woman?
And what of his dream? Had it been a dream or had it been something more, some type of premonition? Had he seen Melda’s death? Had he somehow predicted it? Was it like the power he felt in the courtroom?
Alone in his hospital room, he felt the same guilt, that he was somehow responsible. The thought made him numb, lethargic. Then he would think of the man who killed her, and the anger burned.
Despite her unwillingness to allow him to speak to the police, Dr. Knight had been extremely interested in Sloane’s vital signs, and he sensed from her questioning that something there was unique and fascinated her. She told him the police had found him in his apartment, clinging to Melda’s lifeless body, moaning in agony. When they approached, Sloane had ignored their commands. When they tried to separate him from Melda he resisted. Then, just as suddenly, in the midst of the ensuing struggle, he had collapsed, his limbs flaccid. When he did not respond the police had brought him to the emergency room. The doctor on call examined him, could find nothing physically wrong with him, but could not wake him. He called Knight at home, and she admitted him. He now sat in a private room.
Knight had given him a two-milliliter injection of Ativan in the arm, telling him it would help him to relax. The drug was beginning to make everything dull. His head felt heavy against the pillows. His arms and legs tingled, as if he were sinking into a too-hot bath. He closed his eyes and saw the face of the man he had pulled from the depths of his memory. The features were younger, more distinct, not yet softened by age, but it was the same face as the one in the newspaper.
Joe Branick.
Somehow, somewhere, they had met, and that meant that the woman whose death he suffered through every morning was neither a premonition nor a dream. She was real, and Joe Branick, a White House confidant, had been there, too. Branick had also left Sloane a telephone message just a day before someone broke into Sloane’s mailbox and trashed his apartment and, according to the newspaper article, just hours before police found Branick dead in a national park in West Virginia, an apparent suicide. If there was any doubt these events were related, it was erased when the telephone repairman came back. There was no other reason to search Melda’s apartment except to look for Sloane’s mail. In his mind’s eye Sloane saw the rust-orange envelope, his name handwritten on the front. Joe Branick had tried to call him. Was it any more absurd to conclude that he had also sent Sloane a package?
