Jury Town (13 page)

PART TWO

CHAPTER 15

JURY TOWN

Until eight thirty yesterday morning, Kate Wang had been a history teacher in Leesburg, Virginia, which was forty-two miles west of Washington, DC, and not far from the West Virginia line. At eight thirty, after being notified by phone that she had officially been selected as a professional juror, she’d walked into the assistant principal’s office at Loudoun County High School and resigned.

She hadn’t given a reason for her resignation to the stunned older man, hadn’t given him a chance to negotiate, and hadn’t hung around to bid anyone good-bye. She’d exited his office, walked straight to her car, and driven to Richmond. To a staging area at an old armory in the city where last evening, after a long day of completing paperwork, she’d boarded one of four buses waiting to take her and 195 others to their new lives for the next two years.

Kate had been almost certain she’d receive the call. But Victoria Lewis had left a seed of doubt in her mind throughout the eight-month process. Kate had thought it strange last week when she’d started hearing and reading about others who had
definitely
been chosen as jurors. She’d thought it strange until last night when she realized in the Jury Town parking lot, as she was getting off the bus from Richmond, that the “definites” she’d heard and read about in the press were just stand-ins, running cover for her and the rest of the legitimate jurors. The stand-ins were waiting to get on the same buses that had just dropped her and the other legitimate jurors off—to go back to Richmond.

That switch was also the reason Cameron and Victoria had warned her to keep everything about the selection process completely confidential. The reason they’d told her that if they found out she’d communicated
anything
to
anyone
—even to her immediate family, she would be dropped from the program immediately, and there would go four million dollars up in a devastating puff of smoke.

Kate grinned as she applied mascara to her thin line of lower lashes in the mirror above the sink in Room Nine of Floor Two, Wing Three. She’d been passed over for promotion at the high school last year and received only a cost-of-living bump to her meager thirty-one-thousand-dollar salary. She and the assistant principal had disliked each other intensely from her first day at Loudoun High School three years ago, though Kate was never certain why. However, she was certain that the mutual animosity was the cause of her being passed over.

Her grin widened. She’d wanted so badly yesterday morning to tell that horrible little man who’d screwed her why she was resigning and that she was about to become a multimillionaire. But that had to wait until after her two-year commitment was over, and she was a free woman again. Hopefully, he’d still be there in the same dead-end job so she could wave her success in his face—which she definitely planned on doing.

Kate put the mascara down on the sink as she rose up and gazed at herself in the mirror. Twenty-seven and single, she was a mix of Chinese, German, and Brazilian ancestry. An exotic potion, for sure, but if she was going to be honest with herself, the result was resoundingly plain. She had short, jet-black hair, teardrop-shaped brown eyes, a square jaw, and a bit of a pug nose—which was the feature she disliked most about herself.

Twenty-seven, single, and earning thirty-one thousand dollars in Leesburg, Virginia, she’d been on the highway to nowhere—in the fast lane, to boot. She’d been on the verge of deep depression, especially after her cat had died in her arms of a stomach tumor.

Now she was in the fast lane to becoming a multimillionaire. When her two years at Jury Town were finished, she would get plastic surgery, travel the world, and find a husband.

“Can’t think about all that right now,” she murmured to herself as she picked up the knee-length dress she’d laid out on the bed and slipped it over her head, then headed to the desk and glanced at the message on the small screen one more time. “I have to be in Jury Room Seven in five minutes.”

She scrolled down to the inspirational quote at the bottom. A different one every day, chosen by Victoria Lewis.

“Perfection is unattainable. But if we chase it, we catch excellence.”

Kate laughed softly. “I like that,” she murmured.

Harold “Hal” Wilson finished the last bite of a delicious breakfast, which had included three scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, hash browns, freshly squeezed orange juice, and great coffee. Since graduating from William & Mary in 1981, he’d been an insurance salesman, saving 327,000 dollars in his 401(k). He was fifty-six, twenty pounds overweight, and nearly bald. His wife of thirty-three years had died of heart disease last year; his two grown children lived in Seattle and San Diego, and his two closest friends had moved to Florida. He had nothing tying him to his modest three-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood of Williamsburg, Virginia—except memories. And he wasn’t ready to throw in the age towel yet.

So he’d jumped at the chance to be a juror, even though Cameron Moore hadn’t told him what his compensation would be until a week ago. When he’d heard two million dollars a year, he’d burst out laughing. It was the heartiest laugh he’d enjoyed in quite some time. When he’d realized a few moments later that Cameron was absolutely serious about the money, he’d literally fallen from his chair.

Wilson put his fork down on the empty plate. One of his resolutions, after receiving final confirmation of his selection as a professional juror at nine o’clock yesterday morning, was that he would use his time here to get back into shape. He told himself that over and over on the bus trip up from Richmond last night. And the workout facilities here were incredible. He’d even intended on eating healthy this morning. But at the last minute ordered the full breakfast just to see how the food was. The answer: delicious.

He glanced quickly around the facility’s cavernous Central Zone as he stood up to head to Jury Room Seven. There were about fifty people in the massive room, eating breakfast. He’d thought about joining a group of five people at one of the larger tables after getting his tray through the slot, but he was naturally shy, so he’d kept to himself. Besides, he had two years to meet everyone. There was no need to rush anything.

Including getting back into shape: the lunch menu looked delicious as well.

Felicity West walked briskly down the administrative corridor, headed for Jury Room Seven. For a decade, she’d been an engineer for the CSX Railway—until yesterday morning at six thirty.

She’d grown tired of driving the huge locomotives, which hardly needed driving anymore because they were so automated and computerized. Being constantly away from home on trips up and down the east coast had caused both of her marriages to end—badly—which was the way most things ended, of course.

So when she’d been quietly approached nine months ago about becoming a professional juror, she’d submitted an application and endured the difficult process—then shouted for joy three days ago when she found out she’d be making four
million
dollars in two years.

She’d been on pins and needles about winning a juror spot until Cameron Moore had called yesterday morning—even though they’d told her she was almost a lock to get the job right after they’d told her about the pay. So she’d shouted for joy again after hanging up with him this morning.

Now Felicity was nervous that somehow the powers that be would find out she’d run a one-woman dominatrix business on the side for the last two years—when she wasn’t guiding those huge diesel locomotives all over the east coast. The contract she’d signed at the armory in Richmond clearly stated in Section Fourteen that she had told them about
every
job she’d ever had since college. It had also stated that if she hadn’t disclosed everything, she would forfeit the money and could be criminally prosecuted for lying. So this was a be-careful-what-you-wish-for situation.

She didn’t care about prison. The four million dollars was all that mattered. Jury Town was an all-or-nothing proposition . . . for her.

She caught a glance of herself in the glass of a painting hanging from the admin corridor wall as she headed toward Jury Room Seven. She was tall and naturally blond, which the men—and women—who’d paid her excellent money to be chained and whipped loved.

The odds were tiny that anyone at Jury Town would have ever used her services, but as a precaution, she’d started dying her hair auburn and keeping it very short in the back, above her shoulders, as opposed to the tresses that had fallen all the way to her ass in the back before.

Felicity had brought a good deal of auburn-colored dye with her—but it wouldn’t last two years. Hopefully, her color would be available in the commissary.

CHAPTER 16

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA (WEST END)

David Racine sat at the head of the antique table in the breakfast nook, palms pressed together before his mouth as if praying. Two months ago his wife, Tess, had decided to remodel and expand the kitchen of their big, five-bedroom home.

He’d gone along with everything, hadn’t said a word. He was too busy at work to object—and he loved her that much. He’d never been able to turn Tess down for anything, not since they’d been high school sweethearts twenty years ago.

When the remodeling was complete, he had to admit this kitchen looked stunning, as it should have for forty-seven thousand dollars.

A week later, Tess was gone.

She was having an affair with the tennis pro at the Country Club of Virginia, which was only a nine iron from where he was sitting right now, and the two-timing pair had finally come out of hiding to make it official. The bum with the long, stringy, dirty-blond hair and the annoying accent had been offered a new gig at a club in Beverly Hills, and Tess was moving to the earthquake coast to be with him. She’d explained it all in a brief, hand-scrawled note she’d left on this shiny new six-thousand-dollar table where he now sat. He’d discovered the note one awful night two weeks ago, when he’d finally gotten home from the office a few minutes after midnight.

He hadn’t started divorce proceedings yet. He didn’t have the bandwidth. And, down deep, he was still holding out hope she’d come to her senses and come home.

The e-mail hit his laptop with a resounding ping that seemed louder than normal. He confirmed the sender’s address and then closed his eyes. He’d been waiting all day for this message and anticipation surged through him. He wasn’t a hard-practicing Episcopalian—as if any Episcopalian really was, in his opinion—but it seemed an appropriate time to ask for divine intervention. And his hands were already in position.

“Give me something,” he whispered. There hadn’t been much good news lately, but this e-mail could quickly right a dangerously listing ship. “I haven’t asked you for much in my life. I’ve tried to stay out of your way as much as possible. But I need this one.”

Racine was cofounder and chief executive officer of Excel Games, an online sports-fantasy-league company he’d cofounded in Richmond with his best friend, Bart Stevens. Racine and Stevens were seeking five million dollars of equity from a wealthy Chinese investor. In return for the cash, they were offering the man a fifty percent equity stake in Excel Games. With that cash and a little luck, EG could be worth a hundred million dollars inside a year. And the man from China had been making all the right noises for the last week.

Racine opened his eyes and then the e-mail.

The message was short and sour. The man from China was intrigued with the opportunity to purchase ten million shares of Excel Games at fifty cents per, but he wanted more time to think.

Being “intrigued” and “wanting more time to think” were the words all sophisticated investors used to nix a deal. Racine had read enough of these rejections in the last few months to decipher the code.

Even on the remote chance this man was sincere about being intrigued, EG would be out of cash in a few days, and then Racine wouldn’t be able to pay his all-important programmers. The last-gasp flame of saving his company had just been snuffed out.

He leaned back, rubbed his eyes, and then ran his fingers through his long, dark hair as he stared at the ceiling fan twirling slowly around and around ten feet above him. As he gazed up, a gut-wrenching wave of panic squeezed his chest. He’d always worked hard for his success, but it had always come. Failure was new and terrifying.

Maybe he should have kept that marketing job at Proctor & Gamble. And maybe he would have if he’d known how brutally tough this entrepreneurial path was going to be. The P&G job had been about as stimulating as watching hay grow, but he’d been outstanding at it. And you never worried about a Fortune 50 company running out of cash.

Being CEO was a ruthlessly lonely place at times like these.

He checked the name flashing on his phone’s tiny screen, and for a moment, considered not answering. But that wouldn’t be fair. At least it wasn’t a bill collector.

“Hello, Bart.”

Bart Stevens wasn’t just the cofounder of Excel Games. He was also its chief financial officer and a man Racine leaned on twenty times a day. They’d known each other for over a decade, ever since their first day of Harvard Business School. Since then they’d become best friends.

After Harvard, Bart had gone to Wall Street to be an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, beating out scores of classmates to win the coveted job. Stevens had been on the fast track to making millions when Racine had convinced him to be CFO of Excel Games in return for twenty percent of the company. In return for the prospect of making even more money than he could at Morgan Stanley.

But the prospect light of that had just faded from dim to out. What was he supposed to tell Bart now?

“Hello there, Bart,” he said in an enthusiastically confident way, making certain his tone gave away no hint of the panic attack he was battling. “Why the heck are you calling? I’ll be at the office in a few minutes, as soon as Claire gets off to school.”

“You know why I’m calling,” Stevens replied matter-of-factly. “So?”

“So . . . what?”

“Come on, David. Don’t play me. Did you get the damn e-mail? Did you hear from the man in China?”

“Nope, nothing yet.”

Bart groaned.

But not like he would have if he’d known the truth, Racine figured. “Stop worrying so much. It’ll be all right, Bart.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Racine replied convincingly. “Mao Xilai is going to invest. He’ll jerk us around on terms a bit, but we’ll get the money.”

“I hope so. I believe in you, David. Everyone at the company does.”

“I’ll bring this home.”

“Are you okay?” Bart asked as Racine was about to hang up.

“Sure. Why?”

“Amy and I have been thinking a lot about you lately. What Tess did, well . . .” Bart’s voice trailed off momentarily. “Why don’t you and Claire come over for dinner this weekend? We’ll grill out.”

“That’s nice, Bart. We’d love to. I’ll see you at the office in a few.”

After ending the call, Racine pushed the laptop aside and allowed his head to sink slowly down onto the table.

“Dad.”

He rose back off the table quickly, jolted by the soft voice. Claire, his fourteen-year-old daughter, stood on the other side of the new kitchen, clad in her school uniform. God, she was growing up fast. Why did she have to look so much like Tess? At least she didn’t act like her mother. Claire had a wonderful heart.

“Hi, honey.”

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“Of course, Claire, I’m fine, just fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“Thanks a lot.” He regretted his sarcasm instantly. She was just worried about him. “Really, I’m doing great.” He gestured at the laptop. “Just getting a jump on the day, that’s all.”

As she gazed at him her lower lip began to tremble. “I love you, Dad,” she murmured. “And I hate Mom.”

“No, no,” Racine murmured. “You can’t hate her, honey. You have to love her no matter what because—”

“She’s a bitch.”

The word shocked Racine. He wasn’t naïve enough to think that fourteen-year-olds didn’t already know everything there was to know in this day and age of impossible-to-block information highways. What shocked him was that Claire would say it. He’d never heard anything remotely offensive come from her mouth.

It was definitely something Tess would say, and he hated that she was still influencing their daughter from three thousand miles away. On Monday morning, despite what he’d have to deal with at the company, he’d start the divorce process. He had to face facts. Tess wasn’t coming back.

“Your mother’s going through a hard time.”

“
What?
We’re the ones going through a hard time. She’s off in California, partying. She’s sent me pictures.”

“It’ll all work out, Claire. I promise.” There he went again, promising things he had little hope of delivering on. But that was life as a CEO and a parent. He found the roles similar in that way.

“How can you be so nice about this, Dad?” Claire asked in a frustrated tone. “I mean, she ditched us.”

Racine gazed into her beautiful bright eyes for a few moments and then looked away when he couldn’t meet the glare any longer. His life was imploding. But that wasn’t the tragedy. As his life went, so did Claire’s. That was the disaster.

She was an eighth grader at St. Catherine’s School, the most prestigious girl’s prep school in Richmond. She was making straight As, her teachers loved her, and she had tons of friends. She had the world in front of her for the taking.

But tuition at St. Catherine’s, even for an eighth grader, was over twenty grand. And Racine had put every penny he could get his hands on into Excel Games—including the proceeds from a second mortgage he’d taken out a few months ago. At this point he had no way to pay for her second semester.

Hell, a week from now, he wouldn’t have a buck for a burger at McDonald’s.

“Get going to school and I’ll see you tonight,” he said, just as the doorbell rang. He rose and headed down the hall toward the foyer.

“Hello,” Racine said politely to the middle-aged man waiting on the stoop when he opened the front door. The man wore a paint-smeared jacket and jeans, along with scuffed construction boots. His leathery face looked vaguely familiar. “Can I help you?”

“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Racine?” the man asked as two younger men emerged from behind the big oak tree in the front yard.

Racine glanced at the two younger men apprehensively as they moved to where the middle-aged man stood. “No. Should I?”

“My sons and I remodeled your kitchen.”

“Oh,
that’s
right. My wife was the one who worked with you mostly. But now I remember.”

“You owe me forty-seven thousand dollars.”

“I’m sorry, but I—”

“I’ve been calling you a lot. I must have left you fifteen messages.”

Racine winced and nodded. “I’ve been very busy at work. No excuses, but I’m very sorry.”

“You need to pay me.”

“I’ll write you a check as soon as I get to the office.” He couldn’t come close to covering a forty-seven-thousand-dollar bill, but what was he supposed to say? “I’d do it right now, but my checkbook’s at the office.”

“Okay,” the older man agreed in a friendly tone. “I really appreciate that, Mr. Racine. I’m glad this was easy.”

Relief coursed through Racine. The sons seemed relieved, too. This could have gotten nasty.

“And just so I’m sure you’ll remember to write that check, my sons are going to leave you a little reminder.”

Racine tried to slam the door shut as the man’s sons lunged for the door. But one of the young men wedged his boot into the doorway, and then both of them quickly forced the door wide open. One of them grabbed Racine from behind, while the other struck him three times in the gut with wicked punches.

As they took off, Racine collapsed to the foyer floor in a tight fetal position. Eyes shut tightly, he tried desperately to suck air into his lungs as he groaned loudly.

When he was finally able to pry his eyes open, Claire stood in front of him, tears streaming down her face.