The Jury Master (26 page)

After getting as much information as he could from the Internet, Sloane found a men’s store in a mall, bought additional clothes, then drove around the Bay Area picking up airline boarding passes. He called Tina’s cell phone from a pay phone in the airport just before catching a red-eye to Dulles.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t say good-bye,” he said.

“Then don’t. Tell me you’re coming back.”

“I’m coming back,” he said, “after I find myself.”

“David, I didn’t mean that.”

“You couldn’t have been more right, Tina. Count on me.”

“I will.”

T
HREE MILES OUTSIDE
Berryville, Sloane drove with the window of the rental car down. The air had a tranquil, undisturbed feel indicating that it would be hot, with little or no breeze. Thick groves of trees had given way to fields of summer-brown grass and a landscape of scattered farmhouses and grazing horses. After the slope in the road, a landmark, he slowed and turned onto a country road, then drove until he came to the string of mailboxes on wooden posts—his second landmark—and turned onto the dirt-and-gravel easement. Lush green lawn rolled out like carpet around a white two-story farmhouse with dormer windows, forest-green shutters, and a large wraparound porch. A red barn loomed behind it, and chestnut and bay horses grazed in an expansive pasture.

Talking to surviving relatives was always delicate because their response could never be predicted, but Sloane hoped Joe Branick’s family would share something in common with a stranger: a desire to know why he was dead. He considered the burnt-orange envelope on the passenger seat beside him. As he had suspected, the information it contained generated more questions than it answered.

A thick hedge blocked his view around a turn in the road, and he had to brake suddenly to keep from rear-ending a police cruiser parked in front of a freestanding garage. A golden retriever bounded off the porch to announce his arrival, barking, tail wagging. Sloane stuffed the package into his briefcase and turned to find the dog’s paws on the window, head in the car, tongue panting.

“Well, how are you?” he asked. “How about letting me out?” The dog whined and got down from the window.

Sloane stepped out and bent to let the dog smell the back of his hand, then scratched her behind the ears and under the chin. She responded by jumping up and putting her paws on his hips. It never hurt to make friends with the family pet. At worst it was a topic of conversation.

A uniformed officer approached. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“That’s all right, Officer.” A distinguished-looking woman in khaki cotton slacks, a blue silk blouse, and flat shoes walked down from the porch. When she reached Sloane she tugged once on the dog’s collar. “Down, Sam. Sit.” She looked at Sloane. “I’m sorry. She hasn’t had much exercise lately.” She spoke with a New England accent that rolled off her tongue, ignoring the letter “r.”

“That’s all right. She’s a beautiful dog.”

“She was my brother’s. Are you David Sloane?”

Sloane held out a hand. “Call me David.”

She gripped Sloane’s hand with the firmness of a woman used to shaking men’s hands. There was nothing feminine or conciliatory about it. “Aileen Blair.”

Sloane guessed Blair to be in her early to mid-fifties. She had a tall, athletic build, with auburn hair cut naturally to lie just past her shoulders, a streak of gray just to the left of the part. Her face remained youthful, with just the trace of crow’s-feet showing at the corners of her eyes. A strand of pearls dangled from her neck. She was an attractive woman.

“I have iced tea inside,” she said.

Sloane followed Aileen Blair up two wooden steps that creaked under his weight. A porch swing hung motionless in the corner, near a wicker table. Clay pots lined the porch edge, the flowers beginning to wither. Sam followed them, but Blair would not allow her through the screen door.

“Stay,” she directed, and the dog stopped. “She’s really a good dog. It’s a shame they can’t keep her. Do you know anyone looking for a dog?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Sloane said. He followed Blair through the screen door. It was dark inside the house, mostly from the dark oak floor and patterned wallpaper. The house smelled of dough baking—cookies or a piecrust. He heard voices in other rooms of the house, but no one came into the hall to greet them. Blair slid apart two paneled doors and stepped into a den of green walls and white-shuttered windows. Two burgundy leather couches, a glass coffee table, and a forest-green wingback chair surrounded an oak entertainment console. Behind one of the couches was a green felt pool table and, standing near it, a life-size cardboard cutout of Larry Bird, the former Boston Celtics basketball player and living legend. A basketball junkie, Sloane gravitated toward it as Blair slid the doors behind him closed. This would be a private conversation.

“Joe loved the Celtics, especially Larry Bird,” Blair said, adjusting the shutters to let in slatted light. “He bled Celtics green. He and his brothers considered the parquet that man walked on to be sacred. They went to every game at the Garden and cried like babies when they tore it down. I’m not sure how Joe got that thing, and even less sure how he convinced his wife to let him keep it, but my brother was pretty persuasive when he wanted something.” She turned from the shutters. “So am I. ”

Sloane turned to her.

“You damn well better not be looking for a story, Mr. Sloane. I handle the family business matters.” She looked up at a family photograph still mounted on the wall. Five grown men stood in mud-covered cleats and rugby uniforms with their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, Joe Branick in the middle. “Joe’s brothers handle the physical matters.”

47

The Zona Rosa,

Mexico City

T
he telephone call startled him from a deep sleep. Joe Branick offered no pleasantries. “Get dressed. Be in front of your building in five minutes.”

Charles Jenkins hung up, took seconds to clear his head, threw aside the covers, and stood. He took a moment to allow his body to adjust to being suddenly vertical instead of horizontal, then stepped across the room to the cold bathroom tile, splashed lukewarm water on his face, and relieved his bladder. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a button-down shirt he picked from a pile on the floor, and four minutes after hanging up the telephone he walked out the door, slipping into his blue windbreaker with “Entarco” embossed in gold letters across the right breast. He waited beneath the glow of a streetlamp. At not quite three in the morning, beads of perspiration were already forming on his forehead. It would be hot and humid in Mexico City—no surprise. The smog would be bad. By the end of days like this it hurt his chest to take a deep breath.

Jenkins rented a small apartment above a sidewalk café in the Zona Rosa, an affluent suburb of lively, colorful shops and restaurants he had come to enjoy for their vitality and for the women who frequented them. At the moment, the Zona Rosa remained asleep, the store windows dark, the streets uncluttered with the persistent flow of cars or the sound of taxis honking. He bit into a green apple and watched the headlights of a blue Ford racing toward him and pulling to the curb.

“I’ll need directions,” Branick said as Jenkins lowered himself into the passenger seat.

Jenkins spoke through a mouthful of apple. “Where are we going?”

Branick pulled from the curb and drove around the back of a VW Beetle taxi, the only other car on the street, ran a red light, and headed south. Wherever they were going, they were going in a hurry.

“The village,” he said.

Jenkins stopped chewing. In the dark of early morning he had not noticed it, but now he saw the strain on Branick’s face. He looked troubled, his expression grim. “What’s the matter, Joe?”

Branick spoke softly, like whispering a prayer. “I think something happened there last night.” He looked over at Jenkins. “Something bad. Something very bad.”

Jenkins rolled down the window and tossed the apple out onto the street. In the past several weeks he, too, had sensed something happening, like a man whose body begins to ache with the first signs of a flu. Only it wasn’t his body that ached, it was something inside him, something deep within the fabric of who he was, something that the years of sitting in a pew in a Baptist church had planted—his soul troubled him.

“Why?” he heard himself ask, though he knew he would have been more correct to ask, “What happened?” And that, too, troubled him.

“Because of your reports, Charlie,” Branick said. “Your reports made people nervous.”

Jenkins felt heat spreading from his gut, tension and anxiety flowing to his limbs. Branick glanced over at him, then turned back to the windshield as if speaking to a ghost on the highway. “They were so believable,” he said. “You made them so damn believable.”

C
HARLES JENKINS SAT UP
, momentarily disoriented. Something was ringing—his cell phone. He reached for it on the laminated nightstand in which someone had carved, “DS sucks dick,” and flipped it open.

“Hello? Hello . . .
Damn
it.”

He flipped the phone closed, stood, and paced the tiny room. His shirt was damp, his hands clammy. The joints of his fingers and the backs of his knees ached with a cold pain, as if his body temperature had dropped, leaving him numb. Feeling suddenly claustrophobic in the squalid motel room, he stuck his head out a window he’d managed to pry open despite several coats of paint. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell of rotting garbage and urine rising from the alley below.

After leaving Sloane’s apartment he and Alex knocked on several of the other tenants’ doors. Those willing to speak had a lot to say. What they said led them to a Detective Frank Gordon.

They found Gordon propped in a leather chair in his den, his arm in a sling and his mood foul. On a Sunday morning, Gordon looked like it was five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Red lines made his eyes look like a road map; they seemed to be begging for sleep. His face said “fatigue.” The only things that seemed to keep him going were the pain pills he washed down with gulps of cold coffee; Alex’s legs, which he eyeballed while rocking rhythmically; and the self-satisfaction that he had been right, that there was more to Sloane’s story than Sloane was letting on. This last piece of information he inferred from the fact that the CIA was sitting in his den.

In Jenkins’s experience, the only thing cops loved more than having a good story to tell was telling it. Gordon was no different. After an hour Jenkins had pried from him three important pieces of information: Sloane was alive, though where he was at that moment, Gordon didn’t know. Someone had died in Sloane’s apartment—the woman Sloane had named in his will, Melda Demanjuk—and apparently Sloane had found the body. When Gordon told them the woman’s throat had been slit, Jenkins had to momentarily close his eyes and regain his composure. When the police arrived, Sloane was clutching the woman, crying, and unresponsive. That had led to his being hospitalized under the care of a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Brenda Knight at UCSF Hospital. Knight apparently had experience with post-traumatic stress disorder and believed that Sloane was suffering from a similar condition. Finally, Gordon was holding a stiff in the county morgue—a man he said was likely ex-military and carrying enough firepower to keep a small platoon hunkered down for a week.

The cellular telephone in Jenkins’s hand rang again. Only one person had the number. He flipped it open. “You’ve arrived?”

After leaving Gordon’s home he had driven with Alex to the airport. They paid cash for one-way tickets to Washington. Even with false identifications the two of them would have been a difficult couple to miss. Besides, the conversation with Gordon had triggered one more thing that Jenkins wanted to do before he left town, and since a psychiatrist would not readily talk with him, he’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. Alex had called a friend in Langley who would meet her at the airport with a few of his buddies. In the interim she had asked him to look discreetly into David Sloane.

“No problems,” she said.

“What do you know?”

“Sloane made eleven airline reservations to eight different destinations on six different airlines departing from the San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose airports. In each city of arrival he made reservations at car rental agencies and local hotels. He used a credit card for each transaction so the reservations could be easily traced. Then he picked up at least three boarding passes, each to a different destination but leaving at roughly the same time.”

“It’s a shell game.”

“Maybe, but you picked the right shell. One of the tickets was to Dulles. Are you going to tell me how you knew that?”

“What, and spoil the surprise?”

“I’ll keep an eye on his credit cards and bank accounts, but my guess is, he’ll use cash from here on out.”

Jenkins was sure Sloane would, and that was a good thing. If Jenkins couldn’t find Sloane, maybe nobody else would, either. “What about the tattoo Detective Gordon described?”

“I’m working on it, but it will take time if you want to keep it discreet.”

“I do,” Jenkins said. He looked down at the yellow pad with the scrawled notes and the small blue dots and doodles in the margin that he’d taken from Dr. Brenda Knight’s office.

“You okay? You sound a million miles away,” Alex said.

Jenkins thought of the village in the jungle and what he had seen there that morning. “You woke me. I was napping.”

“Must be nice.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow when I get in. Keep your head down, Alex. I can’t emphasize that enough.”

He hung up, picked up the notepad, and studied Dr. Knight’s scribbled handwriting detailing David Sloane’s recurring nightmare—and his own.

48

A
ILEEN BLAIR DIRECTED
Sloane to the couch and handed him a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon. It was cool in his hand. Condensation clouded the outside of the glass. She took a seat in the wingback chair, shook a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, studying him as she did so, then offered him the pack. Sloane declined.