The Jury Master (21 page)

Somebody had killed a cop, and this time no fucking United States attorney with an attitude was going to take the body. This time Tom Molia was going to do the job he swore to do for the people of Jefferson
fucking
County. And he didn’t give a good goddamn who he pissed off in the process.

37

A
DOZEN BLACK-AND-WHITE
police vehicles bunched together at the front entrance to U.C. San Francisco Hospital on Judah Street, lights flashing in the fading light of dusk, adding to nature’s color scheme. The sunset had turned the clouds a mixture of purples and blues. Across the street, medical school students burdened with heavy backpacks stood shoulder to shoulder with hospital staff, watching the scene in animated discussion. Rumors continued to circulate. People inside the hospital were dead, lots of them. A deranged mental patient had managed to escape from his room and kill several of the staff and now held hostages as the police SWAT team searched floor to floor, room to room.

Detective Frank Gordon marveled at the crowd through the tinted glass doors of the hospital lobby. “You turn on the lights of a police car and it’s like moths to a porch lamp,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how dangerous the situation could be, that they could get themselves killed, they just can’t help but swarm to the lights.” He turned to Tina. “Who are you, really—a girlfriend? I know you’re not his wife.” Gordon pointed to her left hand. “No ring. And I checked: Sloane isn’t married.”

“I’m his secretary, Tina Scoccolo.”

Gordon leaned forward as if having problems with his hearing. “His secretary?”

She nodded. “We’ve worked together for ten years.”

Gordon shook his head with a bemused “What next?” smile. “Twenty-four years on the force, and this is the craziest goddamn thing yet.”

“But his story checks out, right? What he said about the man at the building is true.”

Gordon sounded resigned and not very happy. “Yeah, the front desk’s description of the guy claiming to be Sloane’s brother fits the description Sloane gave you, and it fits the description we got from one of Sloane’s tenants. I took a drive out there. The tenant said he directed a telephone repairman fitting that description to this Melda . . .” Gordon looked at his notes.

“Demanjuk,” Tina said.

“Demanjuk. Right.”

“But he wasn’t with the phone company,” Tina said.

“Apparently not. Sloane was right about that, also. There’s no record of a service call to that building.”

“So David was telling the truth about a burglary,” she said.

“I don’t know about a burglary. All I can tell you is, Mr. Sloane did file a police report like he said, and according to the two uniformed officers who took a ride out there, someone did tear up his apartment, just like someone tore up Ms. . . .”

“Demanjuk.”

“Ms. Demanjuk’s apartment. Right. Anyway, yeah, that all checks out.”

Tina let out a sigh of relief.

“But the officer also said the whole thing was peculiar.”

“Peculiar?”

“As in, whoever broke into Sloane’s apartment didn’t take anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Usually burglars steal.” Gordon arched his eyebrows to make a point. “Whoever broke into Sloane’s apartment apparently didn’t take anything of value—not the stereo, not the television. They just trashed it. That would appear to rule out robbery as a motive.” Tina thought of what David had told her about the man looking for a package. She played dumb. “Does Mr. Sloane have any vices you’re aware of?”

“Vices?” she asked.

“Drugs, alcohol, gambling . . . women.”

She shook her head. “He hardly even drinks, Detec—” She stopped in midsentence, remembering Sloane’s request that she retrieve his briefcase from the office. The package from Joe Branick was in it.

“Ms. Scoccolo?”

“Huh?”

“Vices?”

“No,” she said. “No, nothing I’m aware of.” She no longer sounded confident, and the detective appeared to pick up on her hesitancy.

“Something that could get him into trouble, maybe get someone pissed off at him? Did he owe anyone any money?”

“No,” she said, sounding less sure. “Not that I’m aware of.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t know everything about his personal life, Detective, but I can tell you he isn’t addicted to anything . . . except maybe his work. I don’t know where he’d even find the time. As for money, I deposit his paychecks for him and pay quite a few of his bills. I can tell you he isn’t hurting. He rarely spends anything on himself. I order his suits and shirts from catalogues.”

“What does he do with his money?”

“Invests it, or just lets it sit in his accounts. He gives a lot to children’s charities.”

Gordon rubbed his chin as if examining the closeness of his shave. “What about enemies?”

She shrugged. “He
is
a lawyer.”

Gordon chuckled at that comment.

“What I meant,” she said, “is that he usually wins, so I’m sure there are a few people who probably don’t like him much, but specific enemies, no, not that I know of.”

Gordon pulled out a plastic bag from his coat pocket and held it up for Tina to see. Inside was a bullet. “One of the officers spotted it. It was just where Sloane said it would be.”

She felt another chill run through her body.

“Can you get a message to him?”

“I can try.”

“I suggest you do. Tell him he needs to turn himself in.”

“But you believe him,” she said. “You said he’s telling the truth.”

“About everything? I don’t know. No, it doesn’t appear he’s a suspect in Ms. Demanjuk’s death, but unfortunately he doesn’t know that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s on the run, and according to witnesses, he’s walking around with a loaded gun.”

“He’s not dangerous, Detective.”

“Ordinarily I’d likely agree with you, Ms. Scoccolo, but this isn’t ordinary. Desperate men can do desperate things. Sloane was desperate enough to get out of that hospital room, which I assume had something to do with the guy he popped in the elevator, though you said he was running before that guy made an appearance. That tells me Sloane knew the guy was coming or had some other burning reason to feel threatened. How and why are a couple questions I’d like to ask him at the moment, along with a few dozen others, but that’s not my immediate concern at this time.”

“What is?”

“The guy who came to the hospital. He’s still out there, and I don’t want to see a bad situation escalate.”

38

M
ETAL SHELVING UNITS
filled with Melda’s gardening tools and miscellaneous building supplies cluttered the cramped storage closet, which was no larger than a walk-in closet. Sloane sat on a five-gallon bucket of wood stain left over from the last application to the shingles. Overhead a bare lightbulb fixture he’d nailed to a wood joist and crudely wired emitted a low-wattage glow. He awoke feeling the lingering effects of the drugs in his system, fatigued and groggy, but at least he was no longer dizzy or racked by chills. He had no idea how much time had passed.

He’d directed the cabdriver to drop him in the vacant lot, watched the building to be sure there was nothing out of the ordinary, then walked along the cliff’s edge to the back of the building and the storage closet off the corridor. There he collapsed. As the adrenaline from his altercation in the hospital elevator subsided he began to feel more and more light-headed and nauseated. He needed a place to sit down and get his bearings—without his keys he would have to climb the balconies to get into his apartment. The last thing he remembered was resting his head against the concrete cinder-block wall to catch his breath.

He stood, pulled the string hanging from the bulb to turn off the light, and slowly pushed open the door into darkness. However long he’d slept, it was now night. He heard the crickets in the field and the muted crashing of the ocean. A cool breeze blew down the corridor. Ambient light from the moon filtered down the hallway. The fog had not rolled in. He let his eyes adjust before stepping out and making his way to the carport, staying below the roof of a big SUV to look through its windows into the gravel lot. The lights atop a police cruiser parked near the laurel hedge were silhouetted in the shadows.

This was not going to be easy.

He crept back to the storage closet, grabbed the five-gallon bucket of wood stain, and carried it to the back of the building. Standing on the bucket, he could reach the wrought-iron railing of Melda’s deck. He pulled himself up, slipped his legs over the railing onto Melda’s deck, then stood on her railing and reached up to grip the edge of the deck to his apartment and repeated the process. He slid open the glass door to his bedroom, listened for a moment to make sure he was alone, and stepped in, trying not to think about Melda or what had happened there. He exchanged the hospital scrubs for a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a plain gray sweatshirt, then retrieved the roll of duct tape from where he’d left it after bandaging the seat cushion. His ankle was black-and-blue, but he wasn’t going to have any time soon to treat it. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he pulled on an athletic sock, wrapped the ankle in duct tape to give it support, and swallowed the anticipated pain as he forced his foot into a hiking boot, lacing it tight. He stood and tested the ankle. Sore, but the tape and boot gave it enough support so that he could walk without a perceptible limp or too much pain.

Sloane picked up the gun from the bed. He knew enough from his stint in the marines to know it was a Ruger MK2, a .22-caliber automatic. What the hell was going on? He felt as if he’d been suddenly thrust into a virtual-reality game, with forces he could not see or hear controlling and manipulating him. He stood, shaking off the thought, and chided himself to think linearly. Then he shoved the pistol in a gym bag from his closet and stuffed the bag with random clothes from his dresser and toiletries from the bathroom. Back in the bedroom, he knelt in the closet, tossed aside shoes and dirty clothes, and pulled back the carpet to reveal the small floor safe he had installed when he purchased the building. He used it as fireproof storage for important papers and rent payments—his older tenants still paid in cash. He pulled open the safe and counted $2,420.

He wanted to avoid using his credit cards or ATM as long as possible. He grabbed the Rolex from the nightstand, figuring he could pawn it. As he slipped the watch onto his wrist, he noticed a red number “1” flashing on the answering machine beside his bed. Feeling a strange compulsion, he pressed the button. The beep sounded like a car alarm. Sloane quickly lowered the volume.

“David? It’s Tina.” She sounded anxious. “If you get this message, please call me. I spoke to Detective Gordon. He said he talked to one of your tenants. You were right. The man who came to the hospital was at your building posing as a telephone repairman, and your tenant directed him to Melda. Detective Gordon checked. The telephone company has no record of a service call. The police also found a bullet in the siding of your building, David. Gordon wanted me to tell you that the man, whoever he is, is still out there . . .” Her voice paused. “I hope you get this message, David.”

He felt a sense of relief. At the very least he had not been hallucinating everything that was happening to him. He was about to shut off the machine when, as if struck by an afterthought, Tina continued.

“I’m going to get your briefcase from the office tonight. Call me at home.”

As the machine clicked off, the foreboding feeling washed over him again like a sudden rogue wave. His briefcase. He’d forgotten that he asked her to get it, and now realized it had been a horrible mistake. Sloane’s office was the next logical choice to look for the package, and Sloane knew, as certainly as he had known that the man would come for him in the hospital, that he would go there. At that same moment another domino fell—something his mind had continued to work on subconsciously but had been unable to solve. If the man was skilled at picking locks, why bother to come as a telephone repairman, except perhaps to avoid attention?

Sloane hurried through the living room to the kitchen, pulled the telephone from its cradle on the counter, and snapped off the back. The tiny microphone, no larger than a watch battery, was wedged behind the battery pack.

He looked at his Rolex. He was at least thirty minutes away.

J
ACK CONNALLY LOOKED
up at the sound of heels on the marble floor and folded the corner of the page in his novel to mark his spot. He pressed his palms flat on the counter, pushed back his chair, and stood. Tina smiled as she approached, one hand rummaging through her purse in search of her computerized access card to the building. With the Emily Scott episode and a less recent rampage by a client armed with military weaponry through his attorney’s offices, most buildings had put in security systems that shut off the elevators in the lobby without computerized access, and had doors installed on each floor that locked the suite of offices from the exterior hallway. A computerized card was needed to gain after-hours access through both.

“Tina, what’s a pretty young girl like you doing working this late on a weekend?” said Connally, who was a recent grandfather and old enough to be her father.

“Oh, you know, Jack, another trial.”

“Well, I hope you won’t be here too late again.”

“Not tonight,” she said, continuing to dig through her purse. “Just need to pick up some things.”

“You should be out enjoying yourself on a Saturday night. You work too hard. You sure put in the hours.”

“Have to pay the bills, Jack.” She found her card. “Besides,” she said, giving him a wink as she ran the card over the electronic sensor, “all the good guys like you are taken.”

Connally smiled like an embarrassed schoolboy. The computer registered her checking into the building at 9:22 p.m.

“Nineteen is unlocked.” Connally picked up his novel. “Janitor just went up.”

Tina stepped into a waiting elevator, leaning back against the wall as the doors closed, and watched the floor numbers tick off as the car ascended. She had left messages for David at his home, office, and cell phone and hoped he’d get at least one of them. The elevator slowed and came to a stop, the doors separating. She stepped off, startled, and quickly jumped back, her hand to her chest.