The Jury Master (20 page)

No guard.

He stood and felt the cold burn in his ankle: another problem he’d have to deal with. He crossed the room, careful to duck below the window in the door, and pulled open the small closet near the bathroom. His wallet and college ring sat on a shelf, but his clothes were not there—another problem he hadn’t counted on. He wouldn’t get far in a hospital gown with his ass hanging out the back. He turned and reconsidered the nurse.

Working quickly, he switched his gown for the nurse’s blue hospital shirt and pants. Both were tight, the pants too short. There was no hope for the man’s shoes. Sloane threw them under the bed. Hopefully the guard would not look down. He slipped the nurse’s hands and legs into the restraints and tightened them enough to keep the man in the bed. The nurse moaned. Sloane stuffed an end of the gown into the man’s mouth and pulled the sheet up so it was just underneath his nose. Then he picked up the clipboard from the chair and turned for the door, catching sight of the guard’s reflection peering through the wire-mesh window.

34

K
NIGHT’S TELEPHONE INTERRUPTED
them again. Frustrated, she reached to answer it. “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I thought I had forwarded my calls. This will just be a second.” She picked up the phone. “This is Dr. Knight.”

Tina sat back in her chair, watching a black speck, a bird, drifting and hovering on the wind currents above the snow-white billowing fog that showed no sign of receding back out to sea.

“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

S
LOANE 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 the IV stand to drag.

A
T 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

I
T 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.”