The Jury Master (2 page)

The light flashed—a blinding white that sent a lightning bolt of pain shooting from the base of his skull to a dagger point behind his eyes. He gripped the edge of the table as the now familiar image pulsed in and out of clarity: a woman lying on a dirt floor, her broken body surrounded by a blood-red lake, tributaries forging crimson paths. Struggling not to grimace, Sloane forced the image back into the darkness and pried open his eyes.

Judge Brown rocked in her chair with a rhythmic creaking, as if ticking off the seconds. Steiner, too, remained indifferent. In the front row of the gallery, Patricia Hansen, Emily Scott’s mother, sat between her two surviving daughters, arms interlocked and hands clasped, like protesters at the front of a picket line. For the moment her steel-blue eyes ignored Sloane, locking instead on the jurors.

Sloane willed his six-foot-two frame erect. At a muscled 185 pounds, he was ten pounds lighter than when he’d stood to give his opening statement, but his attire revealed no sign of the mental and physical deterioration inevitable after five weeks of fast-food dinners, insufficient sleep, and persistent stress. He kept a closet full of suits sized for the weight fluctuations. The jurors would not detect it. He buttoned his jacket and approached the jury, but they now refused to acknowledge him and left him standing at the railing like an unwelcome relative—hoping that if they ignored him long enough he would just go away.

Sloane waited. Around him the courtroom ticked and creaked, the air ripe with body odor.

Juror four, the accountant from Noe Valley, a copious note taker throughout the trial, was first. Juror five, the blonde transit worker, followed. Juror nine, the African-American construction worker, was next to raise his eyes, though his arms remained folded defiantly across his chest. Juror ten followed juror nine, who followed juror three, then juror seven. They fell like dominoes, curiosity forcing their chins from their chests until the last of the twelve had raised her head. Sloane’s hands opened in front of him and swept slowly to his side, palms raised like a priest greeting his congregation. Foreign at first, the gesture then made sense—he stood before them empty-handed, without props or theatrics.

His mouth opened, and he trusted that words would follow, as they always did, stringing themselves together like beads on a necklace, one after another, seamless.

“This,” he said, “is everyone’s nightmare.” His hands folded at his midsection. “You’re at home, washing the dishes in the kitchen, giving your child a bath, sitting in the den watching the ball game on television—routine, ordinary tasks you do every day.” He paced to his left. Their heads turned.

“There’s a knock at your door.” He paused. “You dry your hands on a dish towel, tell your son not to turn on the hot water, walk to the front door with your eyes on the television.”

He paced to his right, stopped, and made a connection with juror seven, the middle school teacher from the Sunset District, who, he knew, would be his client’s harshest critic.

“You open the door.”

Her Adam’s apple bobbed.

“Two men stand on your porch in drab gray suits, a uniformed officer behind them. They ask for you by your full name. You’ve seen it too many times on television not to know.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

He moved down the row. The tip of the accountant’s pen rested motionless on the pad. The construction worker uncrossed his arms.

“You assume there’s been an accident, a car crash. You plead with them to tell you she’s all right, but the expressions on their faces, the fact that they are standing on your porch, tell you she is not all right.”

The white sheets of paper stilled. Steiner uncrossed his legs and sat forward with a confused, bewildered expression. Patricia Hansen unclasped her daughters’ arms and put a hand on the railing like someone at a wedding who is about to stand and object.

“Their words are harsh, matter-of-fact. Direct. ‘Your wife’s been murdered.’ Your shock turns to disbelief and confusion. You feel a moment of absurd relief. It’s a mistake. They’re at the wrong house.

“‘There’s been a mistake,’ you say.

“They lower their eyes. ‘We’re sorry. There’s been no mistake.’

“You step onto your porch. ‘No. Not my wife. Look at my house. Look at my car in the driveway.’ You point up and down the block at your middle-class neighborhood. ‘Look at my neighbors. Look at my neighborhood. People don’t get murdered here. It’s why we live here. It’s safe. Our children ride their bikes in the street. We sleep with the windows open. No!’ you plead. ‘There’s been a mistake!’”

He paused, sensing it now, seeing it in their hollow eyes, pleading for him to continue, yearning to hear the soothing comfort of his voice, taking in his words like drugs from a syringe.

“But there hasn’t been a mistake. There hasn’t been an accident. No. It was a deliberate, calculated act by a sick and depraved sociopath who, on that particular night, at that particular moment, was intent on killing. And there was absolutely nothing anyone could have done to prevent him from doing that.”

He spread his arms, offering to shelter them from their pain, acknowledging the difficult task that awaited them.

“I wish the question before you was whether Emily Scott’s death was a horrific, senseless killing.” It was a subtle reference to Steiner’s closing argument. “On that we would certainly all agree.”

Heads nodded.

“I wish the question
was
whether her husband and their young son have suffered and will continue to suffer because of Carl Sandal’s indecent act.” His eyes scanned their faces. “More than any of us could imagine.” His words blended with the drone of the fans in a hypnotic cadence. “But those are not the questions you must answer, that you swore an oath to answer. And deep within, each and every one of you knows that. That’s what makes this so difficult. That’s why you feel so pained. The question before you can’t be answered by emotion. You must answer it with reason, in a case that has no reason. There is no good reason for what Carl Sandal did. There never will be.”

Tears streamed unchecked down the blonde transit worker’s face.

He looked to juror five, the auto mechanic from the Richmond district, and at that moment knew somehow that the man would be elected the jury foreman.

“I wish to God there was a way to prevent senseless, violent acts by predators intent on committing them. I wish to God we could do something here today to prevent anyone from ever opening his front door again and receiving the news Brian Scott received. I wish to God we could have prevented Carl Sandal from doing what he did.” He felt them now; he felt the part of them that had once resisted his words welcoming him. “But we can’t. Short of living in fear, barring our doors and windows and living in cages like animals . . . we can’t.”

He dropped his gaze, releasing them. They had opened their doors; they had greeted him into their homes. And at that precise moment, Sloane knew. He did not need to say another word. Abbott Security had not lost.

And he wished to God he could have prevented that, too.

2

Bloomberry,

West Virginia

P
ARKED BENEATH THE
cover of an aspen tree, Charles Town, West Virginia, Police Officer Bert Cooperman pinched the dial of the scanner between his thumb and index finger like a fisherman feeling a nibble. Try as he might, he couldn’t set the hook, and he sensed he was about to lose whatever played at the end of his line.

It wasn’t dispatch. Kay was on duty, and no red-blooded American with a pecker would confuse Kay’s come-hither West Virginia drawl with the man’s voice that Cooperman’s scanner was intermittently picking up. It could be park police; the switchback road, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, bordered the edge of the Black Bear National Park, which was within the park police’s jurisdiction, but the dial wasn’t close to the park police’s frequency. It was tweaked just a hair past 37.280 MHz, which was damn near Charles Town’s frequency. And that was what puzzled him.

Cooperman cocked his head toward the radio and continued to massage the dial, a fraction to the right, left, back again.

“Come on. Give me something.” Hell, he’d take anything at this point. Ten hours into a twelve-hour shift, he was already working on his sixth thermos cap of black coffee, and his eyelids still felt like garage doors wanting to roll shut. The damned full moon had given him false hope. Bullshit superstition or not, the crazies usually came out with full moons. When the crazies came out twelve hours passed like twelve minutes.

Not tonight.

Tonight it felt like twelve days. At least he had the weekend off, and with his wife and newborn baby boy in South Carolina to visit her family, that gave him a real chance to get in some uninterrupted sleep and some long overdue hunting. That thought—and the voice teasing him on the scanner—was the only thing keeping him awake. The voice had come out of nowhere, as Cooperman sat parked on the side of the road munching on an egg salad sandwich that was now stinking up the inside of the car.

“ . . . fire roa . . . eight miles ou . . . just about . . . iver.”

There it was again—faint, breaking up, but still biting. Damned if he was going to let it get away.

“. . . underneath a bush . . . emban . . . abo . . . waist.”

Definitely a man. Sounded as if he’d found something in the bushes. Cooperman strained to listen.

“. . . no question . . . dead.”

“Damn.” Cooperman sat back, slapping the steering wheel. “Animal fucking control.” They were likely calling in a road kill. Wasn’t that just his luck? He dropped the Chevy into drive and pulled from the gravel turnout.

The scanner crackled.

“—He’s dead—”

Cooperman hit the brakes. Coffee broke over the rim of the thermos cap, scalding his leg. He lifted himself from the seat and threw napkins and newspaper under him, then quickly regripped the dial—left, right.

Nothing.

“No . . . no . . . no. Come back! Come back!”

He dumped the remnants of coffee out the window and sat back, the moon taunting him. The thought hit him like his father’s hand slapping him in the back of the head when he’d done something stupid.

What if the guy isn’t dead, Coop? What if he’s still alive?

Anxiety and caffeine surged through him. He sat up. “Shit.”

What if he’s out there dying?

He hit the gas, but another thought caused him to hit the brake again. “Hell, he could be anywhere out there.” Finding a man dying of a gunshot wound would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

That’s not good enough.

“I know, goddamn it. I know.”

What the hell did the man say? Think! What did your tired-ass mind hear, Coop?

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” But he wasn’t. He couldn’t. His mind was going over all the ways he’d screwed up, and the inevitable confrontation with J. Rayburn Franklin, Charles Town’s chief of police. He’d be on graveyard forever, doomed to roam the night like a damned vampire.

Fire road.

Cooperman sat up. “Fire road. Right. He definitely said ‘fire road.’”

Which could be nearly anywhere in the mountains, idiot.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “What else? What else!”

Eight miles.

“That’s right, he said ‘eight miles.’” The conversation filtered back.

Where the rivers meet.

“Where the rivers meet.”

The Shenandoah and Potomac.

Cooperman grabbed the shift, stopped.

No. Not the Shenandoah and Potomac. Too far.

“Has to be closer. What’s closer?”

Evitt’s Run.

The thought burst like an overfilled balloon.

“The fire trail. Shit, he’s on the fire trail. Got to be. Bingo.”

He tossed the remnants of the egg salad out the window and hit the switch, sending strobes of blue and white light pulsating against the trunks and branches of the trees. He pulled a U-turn from the gravel shoulder onto the pavement and punched the accelerator.

F
OUR MINUTES LATER,
Cooperman maneuvered the switchbacks with one hand on the wheel and returned the speaker to its clip. He’d given his position as north on County Road 27. Procedure required that he call for backup, but he knew it would take time for Operations to contact the park police, and more time for them to get an officer out to the scene.

This was his call—possibly his first dead body.

The cobwebs and burning eyes had been replaced by a burst of energy as if he’d just completed a set of ten on the bench press. Damn, he liked the rush! He looked up at the sky and howled.

“Full moons, baby!”

He punched the accelerator some more, leaning into a horseshoe turn, unafraid of overshooting the fire trail, which he could find with his eyes closed. Evitt’s Run meandered in a somewhat perpendicular line until it merged with the Shenandoah. In February and October, when Fish and Game stocked the river with trout and bass, the fire trail became a regular thoroughfare. The rest of the year it was mostly deserted, with a rare hiker or hunter seeking access to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every year one or two of them blew off a toe or hit a buddy in the back with buckshot. This was likely one of those occasions, though it sounded serious. Cooperman figured the voice must have been calling 911, which was how his scanner picked it up. It was just like Tom Molia said. The Charles Town detective had the department in a lather with a story about his scanner picking up a man and woman screwing over the telephone, telling each other to do all kinds of crazy shit. It sounded like pure Mole bullshit—the Mole liked to stir the pot—but damned if he didn’t bring in an article from the
Post
talking about a glitch in the wireless technology that was causing scanners to pick up telephone calls like antennas picking up radio signals.

Cooperman grinned. “Well, it may not be two people humping, Mole, but wait till the boys hear my story.”

He might even save a life, be a hero. J. Rayburn Franklin would call it “Damn fine police work,” the kind of attentiveness he liked to see in a young officer. They’d probably write Cooperman up in the
Spirit of Jefferson,
the local weekly. Hell, he could get a mention in the
Post,
for that matter.