A Patent Lie Read Online Free Page B

shortened name might have helped inch her toward invisibility. There was a vulnerability about her that, along with the earnestness, seemed out of place amidst the hard polished surfaces of the conference room.
    Seeley said, “Have you seen the deposition binder for Lily Warren?” Warren was a St. Gall vaccine researcher, and she should have been deposed along with the others on St. Gall's witness list. But the binder was missing. The last transcripts Seeley reviewed in Buffalo had traveled on the plane with him as freight and were now back on the conference-room shelf with the others. He had called Mrs. Rosziak, but she said he hadn't left any Vaxtek papers in the office.
    “We have a sign-out system for them.” Tina took a slender file from the credenza at the far end of the room and quickly paged through it. “No one's checked it out.”
    That meant nothing. Litigators, meticulous about observing court procedures, regularly overlook office protocol, particularly as they get close to trial.
    “How long did you work for Mr. Pearsall?”
    “It would have been one and a half years next month.” Her fingers fluttered first at the file, then at a few stray hairs at her neck. She didn't seem to know what to do with her hands.
    “Did he keep a trial notebook for his cases? You know, his thoughts about the case, the way he planned to try it.” Sooner or later someone would return the binder containing the transcript of Warren's deposition, but if there was anything important in it that needed attention at trial, Pearsall would have mentioned it in his notes.
    Tina shook her head. “He never said anything about a trial notebook.”
    A lawyer with Pearsall's experience would not prepare for a trial of this size without outlining his strategy, setting down the main points for his direct and cross-examinations, noting whether a deposition witness seemed overly forgetful or remembered events that had not occurred. By this point in his preparation, Pearsall also would have sketched out his theory of the case, the story interweaving fact and law that would, or so every lawyer hoped, give the jury no choice but to decide for his client.
    “After Mr. Pearsall died, who moved his things out of the office?”
    “I did. Any documents related to the case, I sent down to the workroom.” One floor down, the workroom had been part of Tina's office tour that morning. The size of three conference rooms, it was where the paralegals working on the case had their cubicles. The storehouse of last resort, the workroom was also where the team kept the correspondence files and documents that were not in the conference room.
    Tina said, “I gave the papers for his other cases to Chris.”
    Palmieri had evidently been Pearsall's lieutenant on other cases, not just
Vaxtek
. The young partner had been in the workroom talking with one of the paralegals when Tina and Seeley came through, and he seemed annoyed at the interruption when Tina stopped to introduce Seeley.
    “What about his correspondence file?”
    “I have it, but it's only letters.”
    “Briefs?”
    “Mr. Pearsall didn't write them. Usually one of the associates did, or sometimes Chris. Mr. Pearsall marked them up, crossed things out and wrote comments on them. Sometimes he rewrote them. But someone in the pool typed them.”
    “Was anything else removed from his office?”
    “I filled some boxes with personal things—you know, diplomas, family pictures.” She remembered something and gave Seeley a small, tentative smile. “There were the steno pads he used to draw in. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, I'd come in and he'd be looking out the window with a stenographer's pad open, drawing.”
    Boats on the bay, Seeley imagined.
    “I put them in the boxes along with the other stuff and had them delivered to Mrs. Pearsall.”
    Papers and belongings dispersed, Seeley thought, how long would it take Pearsall's partners to forget him completely? He was thinking about his own former