The Jury Master
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by La Mesa Fiction, LLC
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
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First eBook Edition: July 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-53965-4
Contents
ALSO BY ROBERT DUGONI
The Cyanide Canary
For my father, Bill, the best man I know;
my mother, Patty, who inspired me; and
my dear friend Ed Venditti—
God took a good man too soon
A
S WITH ANY PROJECT,
there are many to thank. To all I am eternally grateful for your time and your talents. Your insight helped to make
The Jury Master
better. To any I forget to mention here, you know who you are, and your work is reflected within these pages. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone.
In particular, I am, as always, grateful to Jennifer McCord, Pacific Northwest publishing consultant and good friend, who helped me to find a home for my writing and who continues to promote my career. To Redwood City Sheriff Pat Moran and EPA Special Agent and former FBI agent Joseph Hilldorfer for their help with police procedure and for letting me hang out and bug them. To James Fick, gun enthusiast, for his fascination with weapons in particular, and knowledge of just about everything. You are a valuable resource. To Robert Kapela, M.D., for his thirty-plus years of experience in pathology and with autopsies and generally helping me to think of interesting and creative ways to do people in. To Bernadette Kramer, clinical pharmacist, for her help with drugs and their effects on the body, hospitals in general, and psychiatric wards in particular. I never knew my sister was that smart. And to the numerous librarians who pointed me in the right direction to find answers to every question.
To my good friends and former colleagues at Gordon & Rees in San Francisco, particularly Doug Harvey, who taught me the subtle and not-so-subtle practice of law during our twelve years together, my thanks. To my new good friends and colleagues in Seattle at Schiffrin, Olsen, Schlemlein and Hopkins, and to Theresa Goetz, terrific lawyers and friends whose flexibility has helped me to keep the lights on and the water running while encouraging me to write my novels and nonfiction books, my wife and children especially thank you.
To Sam Goldman, the wildest journalism teacher in the West. You taught me how to write and to love doing it.
To my agents, Jane Rotrosen, Donald Cleary, and everyone at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, but especially to Meg Ruley. You are better than advertised. I’ve said it before: You possess the three best qualities any writer could want—always available, always interested, and always helpful. I owe you all much. Meg, dinner is on me my next trip to New York.
I am extremely grateful to the talented people at Time Warner Book Group. My special thanks to publisher Jamie Raab for making me feel so welcome and giving my writing a home. To Becka Oliver for working so hard and so successfully to ensure that
The Jury Master
will be read in countries all over the world. To art director Anne Twomey for a classy and interesting cover, to production editor Penina Sacks and Michael Carr who copyedited the manuscript and made me look smarter than I am, and to Tina Andreadis, in publicity. And to my editor, Colin Fox, thanks for being in my corner and taking such good care of me and
The Jury Master.
We need to have that beer together, and soon.
As wonderful as you all have been, I tried to ensure that you only saw my good side. I saved most of the lamenting and self-doubt for my wife, Cristina. Through it all, she never wavered in her faith or patience. She believed in me more than I believed in myself. I am your biggest fan.
I once was lost, but now am found.
Was blind but now I see.
“AMAZING GRACE”
John Newton, 1779
San Francisco
T
HEY SHUFFLED INTO
the courtroom like twelve of San Francisco’s homeless, shoulders hunched and heads bowed as if searching the sidewalk for spare change. David Sloane sat with his elbows propped on the stout oak table, hands forming a small pyramid with its apex at his lips. It gave the impression of a man in deep meditation, but Sloane was keenly aware of the jurors’ every movement. The seven men and five women returned to their designated places in the elevated mahogany jury box, bent to retrieve their notebooks from their padded chairs, and sat with chins tucked to their chests. When they lifted their heads, their gazes swept past Sloane to the distinguished gentleman sitting at the adjacent counsel’s table, Kevin Steiner. A lack of eye contact from jurors could be an ominous sign for an attorney and his client. When they looked directly at the opposing counsel it was a certain death knell.
With each of Sloane’s fourteen consecutive trial victories and his growing notoriety, the plaintiffs’ firms had rolled out progressively better trial lawyers to oppose him. None had been better than Kevin Steiner. One of the finest lawyers to ever grace a San Francisco courtroom, Steiner had a head of thinning silver hair, a smile that could melt butter, and oratory skills honed studying Shakespeare as a college thespian. His closing argument had been nothing short of brilliant.
Despite Sloane’s prior admonition not to react when the jurors reentered the courtroom, he sensed Paul Abbott leaning toward him until Abbott’s Hickey-Freeman suit nudged the shoulder of Sloane’s off-the-rack blue blazer. His client compounded his mistake by raising a Styrofoam cup of water in a poor attempt to conceal his lips.
“We’re dead,” Abbott whispered, as if reading Sloane’s mind. “They’re not looking at us. Not one of them.”
Sloane remained statuesque, a man seemingly in tune with everything going on around him and not the slightest bit concerned. Abbott, however, was not to be ignored. He lowered the cup, dropping all pretenses.
“I’m not paying you and that firm of yours four hundred dollars an hour to lose, Mr. Sloane.” Abbott’s breath smelled of the cheap glass of red wine he had drunk at lunch. The vein in his neck—the one that bulged when he became angry—protruded above the collar of his starched white shirt like a swollen river. “The only reason I hired you is because Bob Foster told my grandfather you never lose. For your sake you better have something good to blow that son of a bitch out of the water.” Threat delivered, Abbott finished the remnants of water in his cup and sat back, smoothing his silk tie to a point in his lap.
Again Sloane did not react. He had visions of a well-placed elbow knocking Abbott over the back of his chair, and walking calmly from the courtroom, but that wasn’t about to happen. You didn’t bloody and abandon the grandson of Frank Abbott, personal friend and Saturday morning golf partner of Bob Foster, Foster & Bane’s managing director. Pedigree and circumstance had made Paul Abbott the twenty-nine-year-old successor to the multimillion-dollar Abbott Security Company, and Sloane’s worst type of client.
Abbott had conveniently forgotten that he now sat in a San Francisco courtroom because, in the brief period he had served as the CEO of Abbott Security, his incompetence had eroded much of what it took his grandfather forty years to build. An Abbott security guard, convicted of three DUIs that a simple background check would have revealed, had sat drunk at the security desk in the lobby of a San Francisco high-rise. Half asleep, the guard never stopped Carl Sandal for identification, allowing the twice-convicted sex offender access to the building elevators. Sandal prowled the hallways late that night until he found Emily Scott alone in her law office. There he viciously beat, raped, and strangled her. A year to the day after that tragedy, Scott’s husband and six-year-old son had filed a wrongful-death civil suit against Abbott Security, seeking $6 million in damages. Sloane had urged Abbott to settle the case, especially after pretrial discovery revealed a number of failed background checks on other security guards, but Abbott refused, calling Brian Scott an “opportunistic whore.”
From the corner of his eye, Sloane watched Steiner acknowledge the jurors’ gaze with a nearly imperceptible nod of the head. Though too much of a professional to smile, Steiner gently closed his binder and slid it into a trial bag creased and nicked with the scars of a thirty-year career. Steiner’s job was finished, and both he and Sloane knew it. Abbott Security had lost on both the evidence and the law—and for no other reason than that its CEO was an arrogant ass who had ignored all of Sloane’s advice, including his pretrial admonitions against wearing two-thousand-dollar hand-tailored suits into a sweltering courtroom of blue-collar jurors just looking to find a reason to give away his grandfather’s money.
From her perch beneath the large gold seal of the State of California, Superior Court Judge Sandra Brown set aside a stack of papers and wiped her brow with a handkerchief hidden in the sleeve of her black robe. The elaborate climate control system in the recently constructed state-of-the-art courthouse had crashed under the weight of a weeklong heat wave gripping the city, causing a pack of maintenance men to scurry through the hallways lugging bright orange extension cords and portable fans. In an act of mercy, Judge Brown had taken a ten-minute recess after Steiner’s closing argument. To Sloane it felt like a temporary reprieve from the governor. That reprieve was about to be rescinded.
“Mr. Sloane, you may give your closing.”
Sloane acknowledged Judge Brown, then briefly reconsidered the scrawled blue ink on his yellow legal pad.
It was all an act.
His closing argument wasn’t on the pad. Following Steiner’s summation Sloane had slipped his own closing into his briefcase. He had nothing to rebut Steiner’s emphatic appeal and horrific description of the last moments of Emily Scott’s life, or the security guard’s wanton negligence. He had nothing with which to “blow the son of a bitch out of the water.”
His mind was blank.
Behind him the spectators sitting in the gallery continued to fan the air like a summer congregation in the pews of a Southern Baptist church, a blur of oscillating white sheets of paper. The persistent drone of the portable fans sounded like a swarm of invisible insects.
Sloane pushed back his chair and stood.
