The Jury Master Read Online Free

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.

3
    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