The Jury Master (35 page)
Sloane smiled. He thought of Joe Branick and his cutout of Larry Bird. Though he had never met the man, Sloane had a sense that Joe Branick would also have liked Detective Tom Molia. “You like sports, Detective?”
“My wife says if there’s a ball involved I’ll watch it or play it, basketball more than football, but baseball—now, that’s my passion. Plunkett was just the first person I thought of without hesitation, and when someone asks your name, you can’t hesitate.”
“Did you like Larry Bird?”
The detective sipped his tea. “Bird? He was okay. Slow white guy. I’m a slow white guy. Give me Tracy McGrady on a dunk. I like to dream.” He sat back. “So tell me why an attorney from San Francisco is interested in a suicide in West Virginia, David. You a friend of the family?”
“You can say that.”
“PI?”
“No. Tell me why a Charles Town detective is so interested in a case he was told to close. You guys don’t have any other crime out here in West Virginia?”
“You sound like my boss.” Molia put the mug on the table. “Another thing I’ll never understand: drinking a hot drink to cool off.” He shrugged. “Okay, David, here’s my story. Consider it a show of good faith. I was ready to accept that Joe Branick put a slug in his head, even though my gut told me otherwise from the start, and let me tell you, I got a cast-iron stomach. If something’s bothering me, it means something’s wrong. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“So it would have made my life a hell of a lot easier if I had just closed my file and let it go. I’d be home right now relaxing with my wife and kids, enjoying the summer. Except when I get out to the scene I find the park police claiming jurisdiction and can’t find hide nor hair of the young police officer whose last radio contact says he’s rolling on a dead body in a national park.” Molia paused to make a point.
“You think someone killed him, that it wasn’t an accident,” Sloane said.
“Let’s just say it wasn’t sitting well with me, and that’s before I get back to the station and get a call from a pompous ass named Rivers Jones who’s using words like ‘investigation’ to describe what we’re being told is an open-and-shut suicide. Well, I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack, David, but a light goes on in my dim cranium, and as you might have gathered by now, I’m subtle—like polyester at a country club—so I ask Jones why he’s investigating an open-and-shut suicide. Next thing I know, he gets pissy on me and goes over my head. I get my ass chewed out by my boss. I get pulled from a case I never touched, and the case gets shut down before it gets started. All for a suicide.” He sat back from the table and arched his eyebrows. “I got this thing, likely hereditary because my old man was the same way. Except for my wife—and God knows she’s earned it—I don’t like people telling me what to do and how to do it. Still, I might have let it go.”
“Until the officer turned up in the river.”
Molia nodded. “Until the officer turned up in the river. They made it look like an accident. Did a real good job of it.” He spoke the words as if his jaw hurt just talking about it. “He had a wife and brand-new baby, and a whole life in front of him. Somebody took that away. I can’t live with that. Understand?”
Sloane thought of Melda. “Yes, Detective. I understand.”
P
ARKER MADSEN SCRIBBLED
another note in the margin of the document and considered how the sentence read. The muscles of his face cut deep shadows along his jawbone, his eyes black pins of concentration. He told his secretary to hold his calls and cancel his afternoon appointments, then holed up in his office, working to meet a 6:00 p.m. deadline. That was when Robert Peak, against Parker Madsen’s advice, would go on national television and address the nation with his plan to drastically reduce U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil. The term was “nonreligious oil,” though it could not be found anywhere in the speech, so as not to offend Muslims. The draft of the speech, hastily pulled together by a team of the president’s speechwriters, was bold and confident. Tonight Robert Peak would politely tell the Arabs to go to hell and take their oil with them. He would tell the American public that U.S. policy in the Middle East would no longer be influenced by threats of nationalization or increases in the price of a barrel of oil. America would no longer prostrate itself before military regimes that held out one hand for foreign aid and stabbed the United States in the back with the other. America would not be dictated to by sheikhs and kings with billion- dollar bank accounts. American families would not send their sons to die in the desert. Their tax dollars would go to increase homeland security.
And Robert Peak dared Congress to deny him the votes he needed to approve the pact.
It was all well and good. In fact, Madsen would have liked nothing better than to be the first in line to tell the Arabs to drown in their oil, but for one nagging fact: Peak and the Mexicans had yet to actually ink a deal. Castañeda was pushing for it. He wanted a summit in Washington, sooner rather than later, but Madsen was uncomfortable with the pace of things.
In between considering the speech, Madsen continued to receive reports on the man who had come to the White House, and was only mildly surprised to learn that it was David Sloane. The car had dropped Sloane off at the Charles Town Police Station, and Sloane had driven off with someone in the passenger seat. They both now sat in a booth in a diner, engaged in what looked to be an interesting conversation. Sloane was an anomaly, his involvement in the matter a complete mystery, as was his background. He seemed to have materialized from thin air. He had no wife, no children, no relatives. Madsen wondered if he was a spook. A man without attachments was a tough man to negotiate with. And that had been the problem. Without a family, Sloane had no readily accessible weakness, nothing he was unwilling to sacrifice.
That was about to change.
Madsen’s men had found Sloane’s Achilles’ heel. Every man had one.
Exeter looked up from his beanbag a second before the knock on the door. Madsen didn’t bother to put down the red pen in his hand. He knew who it was. “Enter.”
Rivers Jones walked in as though dragging a ball and chain. “I’m sorry to disturb—”
“I don’t have time for apologies, Mr. Jones.”
“I think you’ll find this important.”
Jones’s Hugo Boss appearance looked beaten: the collar on his shirt unbuttoned, the tie missing. His face sagged like dough left in the sun. Jones looked at Madsen with bloodshot eyes, and Madsen detected the lingering odor of alcohol. Stress weighed on some men like wet clothes, leaving them weighed down and drained. Madsen was not one of them. He relished it, fed off it—like drinking pure adrenaline. It was not something that could be taught or learned. It was genetic. He saw tough men cower and fold at the sound of a car backfiring, while others, equally well trained, could be pinned down in the middle of a firefight, wearing a shit-eating grin.
“I know who came to the office, and I know how we might find them,” Jones said.
Madsen set the pen down and leaned back in his chair.
Jones took a breath, gathering himself like a condemned man making his final speech for clemency to the governor. “I spoke to the security guard at the desk in the Old Executive Office Building. He said one man signed in as Jon Blair. He had a license, which means he was there with the family’s knowledge.”
“You said you knew his identity,” Madsen said, his patience dwindling.
“Not that man. The man he came with. Security said he had a badge. He’s a Charles Town police detective named Tom Molia. I had a run-in with him when I pulled the file. He’s an arrogant son of a bitch. I’m not sure who Jon Blair is, but he’s apparently working with this detective. I will call his superiors and haul his ass in here tomorrow and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Madsen said nothing.
“And there’s something else. The pathologist who performed the autopsy on Joe Branick called and said there appeared to have been some work done on the body.” Jones put a finger in his mouth, pointing to his palate and obstructing his speech. “A hole in the roof of the mouth. He said it was as if someone was trying to conceal a biopsy. It must have been the county coroner. I shut him down, too.”
“Apparently not,” Madsen said.
Jones cleared his throat. “I’ve already called and spoken to him, General. I’ll have his license. Tomorrow I will personally call Detective Molia’s superiors and get to the bottom of this. If he is working on this case, it will be the last case he ever works on. I’ll have his badge.”
Madsen stood, out of time and patience. “Thank you, Mr. Jones. However, you have been dismissed from further work on this matter.”
“General, I assure you I will handle this—”
“You made a mistake, Mr. Jones. I do not tolerate or excuse mistakes. I advised you of that fact up front. In my profession there is no room for error. You’re dismissed. If you make any further calls, this will be the last file you ever work on.”
Jones gathered himself. “This is my investigation. I started it. I would like to complete it.”
“That’s not going to happen. If I find you are involved in this investigation, you will be out of a job.”
“General, I don’t want to say this, but I don’t work for you. I work for the Justice Department. If I have to, I will go to my superiors, and I think they would be very interested to know that the White House has misrepresented the results of an autopsy and concealed relevant evidence. So I think we both need to cooperate with each other, or we
both
might find ourselves out of a job.”
Madsen knew enough about men to know that Jones’s bravado was born not of courage but of desperation and fear. Still, he had to give the man some credit. Maybe he did have a backbone. Good for him. He’d need it.
“I’ll call the detective in the morning and get him in here,” Jones stammered through Madsen’s silence. “Once I do, I’ll find out the identity of . . .”
Madsen opened the top drawer of his desk, removed a manila envelope, and unclasped the prongs.
“. . . his companion. If I need to issue a subpoena, I . . .”
Madsen turned the envelope upside down, photographs spilling. Jones stood in stunned silence, mouth open, his naked image spread across the desk in various positions of submission, Terri Lane hovering over him dressed in black leather, a riding crop in her hand.
Sunset District,
San Francisco
T
INA PULLED THE
clear packing tape across the top of the box and pressed it down with the palm of her hand, sealing the two flaps together. She was about to rip the strip of tape against the serrated teeth when the last of it came off the spool. End of the roll.
She picked up the black marker and neatly wrote “Jake’s Room.” Then she stacked the box with the other two near his bedroom door. The room looked so empty, and still so full. She hoped the landlord didn’t have a problem with the wallpaper. She couldn’t resist it when she saw it in the store, a three-dimensional version of the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. She’d painted the wall black where the cockpit windows looked out into space, and affixed plastic stars that glowed in the dark. The first time Jake saw it he’d been struck dumb. Then he broke into a wide grin. “This is the best!” he told her.
She’d packed up his stuffed animals and cleaned out most of his closet. The Lego airplanes they had built together still hung by fishing wire from the four arms of the old-fashioned ceiling light. They flew when the fan was turned on. How was she going to pack those without breaking them? On his other walls were posters of his favorite athletes—Barry Bonds, of course, and ones she’d picked out for him: Joe Montana because he was gorgeous, and Muhammad Ali because she could tell Jake how Ali pursued his dreams.
She pushed strands of hair from her face and took a moment to pull it tight into a ponytail. She could get so much more accomplished with Jake and her mother out of the house than when he was underfoot, wanting her to play. And she needed to get a lot done. During the ten years that she’d rented the two-bedroom flat on the top floor of the converted Victorian, she and Jake had managed to accumulate enough possessions for a family of five. She’d have to get a lot more accomplished and a lot faster if she was going to be ready for the moving van Friday.
She sat on the edge of Jake’s bed and felt the floor shake as the N-Judah streetcar rumbled past the front of the house. David’s telephone call had been unexpected, but a sure sign, at least, that he was thinking of her, that perhaps they had a future together. The emotion welled in her eyes as she thought of him telling her to wait for him in Seattle, that he would find himself and be there. She only wished she could help him, even if only to comfort him. But he had never been that way. He had never been the comfort-seeking type.
He had no family. That thought continued to amaze her. It made what he had accomplished on his own all the more remarkable. It was startling that he would develop such a work ethic, become so driven—and yet that was what made him such a tragic figure. He had no one else. He had
nothing
else. Work was all he had. Being good at what he did was his only sense of accomplishment, the only reassurance that his life had purpose and meaning.
She stood from the bed and walked to the window, looking out from beneath the peaked roof. Parked at the curb in front of the walk was the police cruiser that Detective Gordon had insisted on. It was like leaving on a security light at night.
“Enough,” she said, needing to get back to the task at hand. “Tape.”
She walked down the narrow staircase to the tiny kitchen at the back of the apartment. Her new place had a kitchen twice the size, and granite instead of those tiny mosaic tiles, which were so hard to clean. She grabbed another roll of packing tape from the bag of supplies she had picked up from U-Haul, then opened the fridge for a Diet Coke. That was when it dawned on her. She turned her head to the right, looking over the top of the refrigerator door. The lock on the door to the back porch was vertical—unlocked. Living alone with a small child, she had become attuned to such things. She never left the door unlocked. Ever.
