hearing. The information on the judge, and the caution, though mundane, would be useful.
Several drawings of St. Gall's lead lawyer, Emil Thorpe, were scattered through the second notebook. From the changing backgrounds, it appeared that Pearsall had sketched the portraits over a period of time, each portrait depicting Thorpe's dissolute features from a different angle. Studying the images, it struck Seeley that Pearsall had made them with the same patience and keen observation as he had given to his bird photographs. The trial lawyer made the sketches to gain a purchase on his adversary, to understand what was driving him.
The early pages of the last notebook were sketches of St. Gall witnesses made during their depositions, each with a name and a comment or two beneath the portrait. Following these was a single portrait of Alan Steinhardt. With features that verged on caricature, Pearsall had uncannily captured the man's self-absorption and pomposity. An eyebrow arched ever so slightly; the ears elongated and sharpened; the goateed chin pointed, as in life. For a glancing moment, the portrait could have been of the devil himself. The words beneath were, What else is A. S. hiding?
Seeley put the steno pads back in their boxes, keeping out the three that Pearsall had filled with sketches for the Vaxtek trial, and returned the boxes to their place beneath the shelves. He sank into the worn leather recliner and leafed through each of the Vaxtek notebooks a second time, looking… looking for what? Easing the recliner back, he stared for several minutes at the ceiling, letting his thoughts slide back and forth past each other. Then he pulled the chair upright and looked again at the bird portraits on the wall and the volumes of moral philosophy stacked on the floor and on the table. His right hand resting on the small stack of stenographer's pads, like a witness about to take an oath, Seeley decided that Pearsall had not taken his own life.
In the hallway he called out to Judy to let her know he was leaving.
She came into the front hall, drying her hands on a towel. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Seeley said. “Your husband had a fine eye.” He showed her one of the notebooks. “Would it be all right if I borrowed these for a few days?”
“Of course,” she said. “Bob called them his doodles.” Then the firm voice wavered, as if something had caught in her throat. “I know it's not why you came, but did you find anything that shows the police are wrong?”
“All I found were the drawings,” he said. How many times had he lifted others' hopes to the level of his own, only to let them down? He was not going to make that mistake with Judy Pearsall. “I'll let you know if I come across anything.”
The doorman was still at his desk in the lobby, and Seeley found a corner out of earshot where he could call the office. Tina picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Did you find Lily Warren?” If, as Pearsall's question indicated, Steinhardt was hiding something, perhaps his postdoc-and alleged thief-could tell him what it was.
“I checked the local directories. There's a number in Half Moon Bay, but it's unlisted.”
“Chris said there was something about her in the Chronicle a few weeks ago. See if you can find it. Maybe there's a copy in the work-room. Call the reporter and ask him if he has her phone number.”
“Do you really think he'll give it to me?”
“No. Just see if he kept the number. And ask Boyd McKee to meet me in my office in half an hour.” McKee was the Heilbrun, Hardy lawyer who had prepared the application for the AV/AS patent. Like Warren, he might be able to explain to Seeley how Steinhardt made his scientific breakthroughs.
Pearsall's office, which had been assigned to Seeley along with the conference room, was one floor up from Heilbrun, Hardy's reception area. Seeley passed his key card over the electronic lock to the double door and took the private corridor to Tina's cubicle. She handed him an orange message slip.
“It's the number for the reporter at the Chronicle.”
“Did he have a number for Lily Warren?”
“He's a she. A business reporter.”
Seeley looked at the slip. The reporter's name was Gail Odum.
“She said you can call her at the paper anytime before six.”
Seeley folded the slip and put it in his pocket. “What about Boyd?”
Tina said, “He gave me the impression that he's too important to wait in your office.” The crease in her brow told Seeley that McKee wasn't one of her favorite lawyers at the firm. “He said if I let him know when you got in, he'd see if he could find the time.”
Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy. Suddenly every large corporate firm like Heilbrun, Hardy had to have its own patent department. But even as the corporate firms sought mergers with the few remaining intellectual property boutiques, the tensions between the two camps persisted.
Seeley dialed the number Tina gave him for Gail Odum at the Chronicle. Her voice was hard to hear over the clatter of keyboards in the background.
She said, “Lily Warren is a source. I told your secretary, I can't give out a source's telephone number.”
“I understand that,” Seeley said, “but could you call her yourself and give her my number so she can decide if she wants to talk with me?”
“What would I tell her you want to talk about?”
Seeley knew the reporter would jump at any suggestion that a question had arisen about the trial. Still, he had to give her a reason to call Warren, and he had to give Warren a reason to call him.
“Tell her it's about a stipulation in the Vaxtek case.”
“What stipulation?”
“Just tell her. She'll understand.”
“And if I get her to talk to you, you'll give me the story?”
“I don't know that there is a story.”
“But if there is.”
“I can't promise that.”
The reporter was silent and the sounds of the newsroom took over. After a few seconds, Seeley said, “Look, if it turns out there's a story, and if I can give it to you, it's yours. You'll have an exclusive.”
There was another silence. Then Odum said, “I'll tell her you want to talk to her.”
Seeley gave her his phone number and hung up. He opened the loose-leaf litigation binder he was assembling-a trial notebook, but without pen-and-ink sketches-and removed the copy of U. S. Patent No. 7,804,438: Human Neutralizing Monoclonal Antibodies to Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
Like all patents, this one had begun as a somewhat different document, an application for a patent prepared by McKee. If the application followed the usual back and forth between the patent lawyer and the examiner in the U. S. Patent Office, it had been revised repeatedly, the patent examiner insisting that McKee narrow the scope of Vaxtek's claimed invention and McKee pushing back to get the broadest scope of protection he could. After two years of these negotiations, the patent that finally issued was a compromise that described precisely how far Vaxtek could go to stop anyone else from making, using, or selling a vaccine that was similar to AV/AS, much as the legal description for a parcel of real property describes the landowner's boundaries.
Seeley was reading the patent for what felt like the hundredth time when McKee walked in.
“Hey,” McKee said, “what's up?”
Seeley guessed that the patent lawyer was in his early thirties, which meant that he couldn't have been a Heilbrun, Hardy partner for more than a year or two. The tennis shirt and jeans showed off a good build; McKee's head was shaved as smooth as a billiard ball.
Seeley said, “I wanted to talk to you about the Steinhardt patent.”
McKee dropped into the chair across from Seeley and draped his arms over the sides, looking as exhausted by the effort if he had just finished a triathlon. In another minute, Seeley thought, he's going to put his feet up on the desk so I can admire the soles of his high-tech running shoes.
“AV/AS?” It was a groan, not a question. “You don't think it's a little late?”
Instantly Seeley felt older than forty-seven, and the day that had started so brilliantly turned dark. “Did you review Steinhardt's lab notebooks before you filed the application?”
