The Jury Master (3 page)
The car fishtailed, its back tires catching loose gravel at the edge of the road and sending it close to the embankment. Cooperman accelerated, then braked and corrected the wheel into the next turn. “Just like at the academy, Coop.” He maneuvered another switchback, saw the familiar triangular sign reflecting yellow in the car’s headlights, braked hard into a right turn, and corrected the wheel to bring the rear end in line. The car bounced and pitched on the unpaved road, dirt and gravel pinging beneath it. Its tires caught air cresting the bluff, and the car landed with a bump, headlights shimmering on the white ash and maple. Cooperman swung it to the right and stopped when the headlights illuminated a bearded red-haired man standing outside the cab of a beat-up white pickup truck.
He looked like a deer caught in headlights. “That’s right, Red, the cavalry has arrived.”
Cooperman threw the car into park and jumped from behind the wheel slapping his billy club into his utility belt while pulling the flashlight from its clip in two quick, rehearsed motions. The adrenaline pushed him forward, though somewhere in the recesses of his mind his instructors at the academy were yelling for him to slow down and think it through. His feet weren’t listening.
He called out as he approached. “You the one who made the call?” The man raised a hand to deflect the light. Cooperman lowered the beam. “You call about a body?”
Red turned to the truck. Cooperman followed his gaze with the flashlight, illuminating the back of a head framed by a gun rack holding two high-powered rifles. The short hairs on the back of his neck twitched, enough for him to instinctively unsnap the Smith & Wesson on his hip, though he resisted the urge to draw.
Think it through. Use your head. Always.
Red wore jeans, boots, and a denim jacket—appropriate hunting attire. Check. The two men wouldn’t have much luck without rifles. Two men. Two rifles. Check. The license plate on the truck was the rolling West Virginia hills at dusk below the familiar words “Wild, Wonderful.” Check again. Just a couple of good old boys sneaking off into the mountains to do a little hunting.
The passenger door of the truck swung open, and a stocky dark-haired man stepped down from the cab. Cooperman directed the beam of light toward him.
“I’m Officer Bert Cooperman, Charles Town Police. You call nine-one-one about a dead body?”
The man nodded, approaching with a cell phone in hand. It was just as the Mole said.
“Yes, Officer, I just made the call. Damn, you gave us a start getting here so quick and all. Surprised the hell out of us.” The man spoke with a distinct West Virginia accent. He sounded winded.
“I picked up the call on the scanner. I was patrolling nearby.”
The man pointed toward a thicket of Scotch broom that looked to have partly swallowed a black Lexus. “Thought it odd, the way it was parked and all,” he said as he walked toward the car. “Thought maybe it rolled. Nobody in it. Just a suit jacket. Thought that weird, too, so we took a look around, just out of curiosity, you know?” The man pointed to the edge of the embankment, changing direction as he spoke. “The body’s just down the bluff. We didn’t hear nothin’, but it looks to me like he just done it.”
Cooperman followed at a quick pace. “Just done it?”
The man stopped at the edge of a steep slope. At the bottom the Shenandoah flowed as dark as a tarred road at night. “Shot hisself in the head. Looks that way, anyway.”
“Dead?” Cooperman asked.
“Body’s still warm. I mean, we ain’t doctors or nothin’, but . . .”
Cooperman looked over the edge. “You think he could still be alive?”
The man pointed. “You can just see the legs right there, just to the left of that big bush—about twenty yards there. You see ’em?”
Cooperman swept the beam of light over bubby brush and red buckeye, then brought it back quickly and settled on something grotesquely out of place: a pant leg protruding from the shrubbery. A body. Goddamn, it
was
an honest-to-God body. Of course that was what he expected, but seeing it . . . his first one . . .
Things started moving fast again, thoughts rushing at him like objects in a kid’s video game. Cooperman started down the bluff, stopped.
Call it in. He could still be alive. The body’s still warm.
He started, stopped again.
Even if he’s alive, he’ll need more than you can give him. Call for an ambulance.
He climbed to the top of the bluff, started for the car, then turned to let the two men know what was going to happen. “I’m going to—”
Cooperman dropped the flashlight, the beam rolling across the ground and coming to a stop on the black toe of the hunter’s boot. The veterans said it looked big as a sewer pipe and was something you hoped never to see.
“My backup will be here any minute,” Cooperman said.
The dark-haired man smiled. “Thank you for that important bit of information, Officer.” The accent was gone. So was the cell phone. In his hand the man held a large-caliber handgun.
Cooperman stood staring down the barrel.
Yosemite National Park,
California
T
HE CRY ECHOED
off the granite walls like ghosts wailing. Sloane struggled to sit up, the sleeping bag cocooned tightly around him. He freed a hand from the twisted fabric, swept the ground for the rubberized handle, and unsheathed the serrated steel blade as he kicked free of the bag and jumped to his feet, crouching, eyes wide. His pulse rushed in his ears. His chest heaved for each breath.
The echo faded, retreating across the Sierras, leaving the sound of the mountains at night—crickets chirping, a symphony of insects, and the hushed din of a distant waterfall. A chill washed over him, bringing a trail of goose bumps and a numbing, harsh reality.
He was alone. The echoing cry was his own.
Sloane dropped the knife and ran his fingers through his hair. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, the threatening shadows became the trees and rocks by which he had made his camp.
Following the jurors’ verdict, he had been determined to get far away from the courthouse, to forget, to let the mountains comfort him as they always had. He had left Paul Abbott in the courthouse and his cell phone on the counter in his apartment along with his laptop computer and trial bag. He had driven through the San Joaquin Valley with the windows down, Springsteen’s “Born to Run” blasting from the speakers, the hundred-degree-plus heat whipping the smell of onions and cow manure from the pastures through the car. With each mile he put between himself and Emily Scott, his optimism had grown that he was moving forward and, in doing so, leaving the nightmare behind.
But he was wrong. The nightmare had followed him.
He should have known. His optimism had not been born of fact or reason, but of desperation. So encumbered by his need to forget, he had chosen to ignore the flaws in his reasoning, to invent facts that did not exist—a dangerous mistake for a trial lawyer. Now, like the dying embers of his campfire, his optimism had been suffocated, leaving only irrepressible frustration.
The pain spiked like an abrupt fever and spiderwebbed across his forehead and scalp. The headache always followed the nightmare, the way thunder followed lightning. Sloane grabbed his headlamp and stumbled across the blanket of pine needles and pebbles gouging the bottoms of his feet. His backpack was suspended from a tree branch, beyond the reach of animals. The daggers of pain spread like tentacles; a black-and-white discotheque of shimmering light blurred his vision. He bent to retrieve the stick he’d used to push the backpack high out of reach, and felt his stomach cramp, the pain driving him to one knee and forcing up his freeze-dried meal in a series of violent convulsions. The migraine would get worse, even temporarily blind him. That thought pushed him to his feet. He retrieved his backpack, pulled the small plastic container from the front pouch, and swallowed two of the light blue tablets with a squirt of water. The Fiorinal would dull the pain; it would not dull his frustration.
“Enough,” he said, looking up at a full moon in a star-pocked sky. “Enough, goddamn it.”
S
LOANE CROUCHED ON
his haunches in the rim of light emanating from the rebuilt fire and poked a stick at the flames, adding dry twigs. Pine needles crackled in a burst of yellow. He had broken camp, and his need to leave was now waging a battle with the voice of reason, telling him to wait for daylight. At the moment, his rational side wasn’t listening. Though he had never ventured far from the catacomb of developments that sprawled cookie-cutter homes across the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California, Sloane had come to find the Sierra Nevada an unlikely escape from work and the problems that plagued him.
Not anymore.
Whatever haunted his sleep would not be cloaked like furniture in an abandoned home. It existed independent of the Emily Scott trial, fluid and unpredictable, alive. He looked out into the darkness and felt it, something, a presence. Whatever it was, it was not going away, and he could not hide from it. It was coming for him, relentless and determined.
He stood and kicked dirt over the fire, smothering it.
It was time to move.
Black Bear National Park,
West Virginia
D
ETECTIVE TOM MOLIA
pulled back the shrubbery and fought that moment of revulsion when any normal person with a normal job would have tossed up the Italian sausage he had slapped between two slices of bread and called breakfast as he rushed out the door to his car. The body lay on its side, presumably as it had fallen—a well-built man, his white shirt and tie splattered in burgundy-red and gray brain matter. Near the curled fingers of the right hand, partially obscured by the tall grass and Scotch broom, protruded the ventilated-rib barrel of a Colt Python .357.
Serious shit.
Molia crouched to take a closer look. The bullet, a .357 Magnum or .38-caliber Special, had ripped through the man’s temple like a runaway freight train, taking with it a substantial portion of the top of his head.
“I hope I never get used to this,” he said.
He warded off a fly with the back of his hand. With the temperature quickly warming, it hadn’t taken them long to find the body. Molia pulled a wood leek from the ground and stuck the root in his mouth, spitting bits of dirt off the tip of his tongue. The sharp onion taste would temper the smell of death, but it wouldn’t keep it from clinging to the linings of his nostrils and clothes long after he’d left the scene.
“Colt Python. Probably a three fifty-seven. Serious piece. He meant business.”
He might as well have been talking to the dead man. West Virginia Park Police Officer John Thorpe stood above the detective on the sloped ground, whacking at the tall grass with his flashlight; he had the personality of a lamppost.
Molia stood from his crouch and considered the terrain. “The grass will hide a lot. With an exit wound that big, the bullet could be just about anywhere around here—doubt we’ll find it. But . . .” He paused, and if Thorpe ever learned the art of communication, he just missed another golden opportunity to show it.
Molia wiped a handkerchief across his brow and looked back up the steep bluff. Though he couldn’t see them, he knew that a horde of park police investigators and FBI agents were converging on the black Lexus like ants on candy—and just one step behind the press. Thorpe had failed to cover the car license plate, and it hadn’t taken long for the identity of the victim to be broadcast across the newswires. By the time Molia drove up the fire trail two uniformed sheriffs were already stringing a rope across the road to keep the reporters at bay.
Molia slipped off his sport coat and draped it over his shoulder, continuing to blot his brow. Maybe it was the exertion from climbing up and down the bluff, but the morning sun, already a white beacon in a cloudless blue sky, seemed intent to beat on him especially hard. Given the weather forecast, ninety degrees with 90 percent humidity, he figured to be dripping the rest of the day.
“It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity,” he said. Born and raised in Northern California’s comparatively mild climate, he found it one of the things about West Virginia he’d just never get used to. “Well, whoever said that never stood in ninety-degree heat sweating his ass off, did he, John? Hot is hot, humidity or not.”
Thorpe looked out over the bluff as if stricken by gas. If Molia had twenty more like him, he could start a vegetable garden.
He loosened his tie and lowered it three buttons; his shirt was already wrinkled. Maggie always said she could send him out the door dressed in fine linen and he’d look like a rumpled bed before he made it to the end of the driveway. It was big-man’s syndrome. At six feet he had never been what they called svelte, though as a younger man he had carried his weight like an athlete, in his shoulders, legs, and chest. But come forty, gravity had taken over, and everything seemed to be slipping to his midsection and butt, enough extra flesh for Maggie to grab and refer to as “love handles.” Love, nothing. It was a spare tire, and it was inflating. Dieting was out of the question—he loved to eat too much, which was a part of the joy of being Italian. And if getting up at the crack of dawn to jog was his alternative, well, then, he’d rather be fat. When he stepped on the scale butt naked this morning he was forty-three years old and 228 pounds.
He stuffed the handkerchief into the back pocket of his khakis and found one of the tiny Confederate soldiers from the Gettysburg Museum that he had purchased for his son, T.J. “They’ll have to go with powder burns,” he said, assuming they’d never find a bullet for ballistics. “You sure you didn’t see one of our guys, huh?”
Thorpe shrugged. “Look around.”
Molia had. According to Operations, Bert Cooperman called in just after 3:30 a.m. to say he was rolling on a report of a dead body. That had been Cooperman’s last transmission. Operations contacted the park police, and Kay got Molia’s ass out of bed with that Southern twang that gave him butterflies in places that could get a married man hit over the head. But Kay wasn’t calling out of love. Molia was the detective on call. It was all standard procedure, except that when Molia reached the site he found Thorpe, not Coop, claiming to be the responding officer and walking around like Alexander Haig at the White House. Thorpe directed Molia to the black Lexus, which was where he had found the blue and white laminated card that set off all the bells and whistles and was responsible for the federal agents in dark blue windbreakers with bright yellow lettering buzzing around the bluff like bumblebees from a disturbed hive. The dead man was Joe Branick, personal friend and White House confidant of United States President Robert M. Peak.
