The Jury Master Read online

  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.

  First eBook Edition: July 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-53965-4

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Epilogue

  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

  Acknowledgments

  AS 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

  1

  San Francisco

  THEY 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.

  The light flashed—a blinding white that sent a lightning bolt of pain shooting from the base of his skull to a dagger point behind his eyes. He gripped the edge of the table as the now familiar image pulsed in and out of clarity: a woman lying on a dirt floor, her broken body surrounded by a blood-red lake, tributaries forging crimson paths. Struggling not to grimace, Sloane forced the image back into the darkness and pried open his eyes.

  Judge Brown rocked in her chair with a rhythmic creaking, as if ticking off the seconds. Steiner, too, remained indifferent. In the front row of the gallery, Patricia Hansen, Emily Scott’s mother, sat between her two surviving daughters, arms interlocked and hands clasped, like protesters at the front of a picket line. For the moment her steel-blue eyes ignored Sloane, locking instead on the jurors.

  Sloane willed his six-foot-two frame erect. At a muscled 185 pounds, he was ten pounds lighter than when he’d stood to give his opening statement, but his attire revealed no sign of the mental and physical deterioration inevitable after five weeks of fast-food dinners, insufficient sleep, and persistent stress. He kept a closet full of suits sized for the weight fluctuations. The jurors would not detect it. He buttoned his jacket and approached the jury, but they now refused to acknowledge him and left him standing at the railing like an unwelcome relative—hoping that if they ignored him long enough he would just go away.

  Sloane waited. Around him the courtroom ticked and creaked, the air ripe with body odor.

  Juror four, the accountant from Noe Valley, a copious note taker throughout the trial, was first. Juror five, the blonde transit worker, followed. Juror nine, the African-American construction worker, was next to raise his eyes, though his arms remained folded defiantly across his chest. Juror ten followed juror nine, who followed juror three, then juror seven. They fell like dominoes, curiosity forcing their chins from their chests until the last of the twelve had raised her head. Sloane’s hands opened in front of him and swept slowly to his side, palms raised like a priest greeting his congregation. Foreign at first, the gesture then made sense—he stood before them empty-handed, without props or theatrics.

  His mouth opened, and he trusted that words would follow, as they always did, stringing themselves together like beads on a necklace, one after another, seamless.

  “This,” he said, “is everyone’s nightmare.” His hands folded at his midsection. “You’re at home, washing the dishes in the kitchen, giving your child a bath, sitting in the den watching the ball game on television—routine, ordinary tasks you do every day.” He paced to his left. Their heads turned.

  “There’s a knock at your door.” He paused. “You dry your hands on a dish towel, tell your son not to turn on the hot water, walk to the front door with your eyes on the television.”

  He paced to his right, stopped, and made a connection with juror seven, the middle school teacher from the Sunset District, who, he knew, would be his client’s harshest critic.

  “You open the door.”

  Her Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “Two men stand on y
our porch in drab gray suits, a uniformed officer behind them. They ask for you by your full name. You’ve seen it too many times on television not to know.”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  He moved down the row. The tip of the accountant’s pen rested motionless on the pad. The construction worker uncrossed his arms.

  “You assume there’s been an accident, a car crash. You plead with them to tell you she’s all right, but the expressions on their faces, the fact that they are standing on your porch, tell you she is not all right.”

  The white sheets of paper stilled. Steiner uncrossed his legs and sat forward with a confused, bewildered expression. Patricia Hansen unclasped her daughters’ arms and put a hand on the railing like someone at a wedding who is about to stand and object.

  “Their words are harsh, matter-of-fact. Direct. ‘Your wife’s been murdered.’ Your shock turns to disbelief and confusion. You feel a moment of absurd relief. It’s a mistake. They’re at the wrong house.

  “‘There’s been a mistake,’ you say.

  “They lower their eyes. ‘We’re sorry. There’s been no mistake.’

  “You step onto your porch. ‘No. Not my wife. Look at my house. Look at my car in the driveway.’ You point up and down the block at your middle-class neighborhood. ‘Look at my neighbors. Look at my neighborhood. People don’t get murdered here. It’s why we live here. It’s safe. Our children ride their bikes in the street. We sleep with the windows open. No!’ you plead. ‘There’s been a mistake!’”

  He paused, sensing it now, seeing it in their hollow eyes, pleading for him to continue, yearning to hear the soothing comfort of his voice, taking in his words like drugs from a syringe.

  “But there hasn’t been a mistake. There hasn’t been an accident. No. It was a deliberate, calculated act by a sick and depraved sociopath who, on that particular night, at that particular moment, was intent on killing. And there was absolutely nothing anyone could have done to prevent him from doing that.”

  He spread his arms, offering to shelter them from their pain, acknowledging the difficult task that awaited them.

  “I wish the question before you was whether Emily Scott’s death was a horrific, senseless killing.” It was a subtle reference to Steiner’s closing argument. “On that we would certainly all agree.”