Free The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni Page A

otherwise empty arsenal.
    Assistant United States Attorney Rivers Jones had been fast.
    Franklin ripped the glasses from his face, getting one of the wires caught behind his ear and bending it as he struggled to pull it free, which only added to his frustration. He was out of breath, though the walk from his office was perhaps twenty yards.
    “Do you want to explain to me how, in the course of a five-minute conversation, you can manage to piss off an assistant U.S. attorney
and
insult the president of the United States?”
    “Hell, Rayburn, all I said—”
    Franklin raised a hand. “I’m not interested in what you said or have to say. What I am interested in is what he had to say you had to say. Do you get some perverse pleasure out of making my life miserable?”
    “Rayburn—”
    “Don’t you have any other hobbies to keep you busy?”
    “Chief—”
    “Because if you don’t, I would strongly suggest you find some.” Franklin held his index finger and thumb a fraction of an inch apart and leaned well into Molia’s personal space. “I am this close to involuntary retirement, and if I go, I guarantee you I’m taking you with me.”
    “The guy was a horse’s ass, Ray. Hell, I was looking out for you.”
    Franklin smiled, but it looked more like a grimace. “You were looking out for me?” He stood back and waved his arms, the glasses dangling from his hand. “Well, hell, why didn’t you just say so? I guess I made a mistake. I guess I should be thanking you.”
    “You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”
    “No, Mole, why would you think that? It’s not like you just told off a U.S. attorney calling on behalf of the president of the United States—”
    “—United
fucking
States.”
    “What?”
    “He called it the ‘United
fucking
States.’”
    “I don’t give a shit what he called it. I just got my ass chewed out so bad I may not sit for a week in my
fucking
office.” Franklin delivered the final sentence inches from Molia’s face; strands of his thinning hair, which he parted in the middle and slicked straight back, fell in front of his eyes.
    “You
are
being sarcastic.”
    Franklin pulled back. “Come on, Mole. Christ. Quit fucking around here.”
    Molia spoke softly, as he did when pacifying his children. “He called it an
investigation,
Ray. Why do you think he would call a routine suicide an investigation?”
    Franklin blinked one long blink. It could have been an incredulous blink, as if he could not believe what he had just heard, or it could have been a pause to regain his composure, but Molia suspected it was neither. He suspected that it was a blink of frustration, but with a hint of curiosity. As much as Molia frustrated the crap out of J. Rayburn Franklin, he was also his best detective, and his instincts were rarely wrong.
    “I don’t care what he called it,” Franklin said. “I don’t care if he called it Christ’s Last Supper. What I care about is keeping my job. And I assume you do, too, or are you independently wealthy and I didn’t know?”
    “I don’t like this one, Ray. My stomach’s bothering me.”
    “With your diet, I don’t doubt it. You eat crap a billy goat wouldn’t touch.” He put his glasses back on, pushed the hair back from his forehead, and smoothed the sides with his palms, calming. After a moment he asked, “Okay, so what’s bothering you?”
    “We still haven’t heard from Coop.”
    “Coop’s got the weekend off. He put in for it two weeks ago.”
    “There’s no answer—”
    “At his home. I know. That’s because his wife is in South Carolina showing off the baby to her family, and Coop’s using the time to get in some hunting and fishing. She took the car, so he put in to use the cruiser for the weekend. I okayed it. Said he was taking off immediately after his shift. Would you or I leave immediately after pulling the twelve-hour graveyard? No, but we aren’t twenty-five years old anymore, either, Mole.”
    “What about the