Seeley said, “If they're as perfect as you say they are, he may have kept rough notes as he went along and then transcribed them later.”
“Sure, and dated his discoveries to before he made them.”
If Steinhardt kept two sets of books, and Thorpe found that out, it would open another door for Thorpe to prove fraud on the Patent Office-that Steinhardt's dates of discovery were in fact later than he claimed. It would be the end of Vaxtek's case.
“Are all the entries witnessed?”
“Every one of them.”
The fact that each day's notebook entry was signed not only by Steinhardt but by a witness from his laboratory meant nothing. A scientist of Steinhardt's eminence could, if he wanted, get an assistant to swear that he had watched the great man map the human genome single-handed.
“When can you finish with the notebooks?”
“Hey,” Palmieri's forced a smile, “I have fifteen lawyers and paralegals to get ready for trial. My hands are full just keeping this crew on course.”
Since arriving in San Francisco, Seeley had been so absorbed with his client and the case, and so out of practice at running a large-scale trial, that he failed to do what he automatically did at the start of a case, big or small: meet with his trial team. “I'll ask Tina to get everyone together for a meeting.”
“They'll appreciate that,” Palmieri said. “Right now, you're still the mystery man from back East.” Seeley glanced at his watch. “Let's talk when I get back. I'm meeting with Lily Warren.”
“What for?”
“The usual pretrial diligence.” Seeley tried to make it sound offhand. Then he thought about what they'd just discussed. “If she told St. Gall's lawyers how Steinhardt keeps his notebooks, I don't want to be hearing about it for the first time when Thorpe cross-examines him.”
“Where are you meeting her?”
“Some place down the coast. Princeton-by-the-Sea.” Seeley fumbled in his pocket for the note he had written. “Barbara's something.”
“Barbara's Fish Trap.”
That was it.
“Order the tempura oysters. One bite and you'll never come back.”
Seeley wondered whether that was in fact what the young partner wanted.
Barbara's wasn't a shack, but it was close. Neon tubing in the windows traced the logos of popular beer brands and outlined caricatures of fish, lobster, and crabs. At the far end of the low red building, a window was open for takeout. A man and woman, both in shorts and hugging themselves against the cold, waited for their orders, and a well-dressed Asian woman sat at the single outside table. Behind her, stairs led down to a parking lot and, beyond that, to an intricate network of piers and ramps. Pleasure and fishing boats crowded the harbor, white hulls rocking in the black water.
Seeley went through the door into the restaurant's front room, little more than a screened-in porch with electric coiled heaters hanging from the ceiling against the chill, and from there into the dining room. Couples and families were at the oilcloth-covered tables. There were a few tourists, but most of the customers, in unfashionable jeans and flannels, appeared to be locals. None looked like a thirty-six-year-old immunologist named Lily Warren. Seeley went back outside to wait. The couple at the takeout window had gone and the Asian woman came toward him.
“Mr. Seeley?” It was the assured voice from the telephone, and she smiled tentatively when he nodded. “You're embarrassed. Don't be. People are always surprised. Warren's not a very Chinese name is it?”
She was slender and slim-hipped, but buxom in a way that made Seeley think of the recruiting poster in Palmieri's office. What most struck Seeley was the erect dancer's posture. Care had gone into Lily Warren's makeup, and her hand, when she extended it, was marble smooth and perfectly manicured.
They went into the restaurant, and a waitress led them to a corner table, leaving them with menus. There was the faintest hint of something savory in the air, less a fragrance than a memory for Seeley of some fine meals in the past. The window looked out onto a small patch of sand and, beyond that, the Pacific. At the next table, a sheriff's deputy in sharply pressed khakis was having a solitary lunch.
“Thank you for meeting me,” Seeley said. “Can we talk about why you went to see Alan Steinhardt that night?”
Warren said, “Let's look at the menu.” She pushed his toward him and studied her own. “Everything here is good. The crab's better than anything you can get in San Francisco.” She saw that Seeley wasn't reading the menu. “Why are you smiling?”
“I was hoping that if you met me, you'd see you could trust me.”
“And maybe I will, after I get to know you. The fact that someone is direct doesn't mean he deserves to be trusted.”
“But you came anyway.”
“You told me you'd get a subpoena if I didn't.”
Seeley said, “That's not what's worrying you. There's something you want to talk about.”
She put the menu down. “I don't understand why you're making such a big deal about my going to see Alan at his lab. I knew him. I already told you, I worked with him at UC.” When Seeley frowned, she said, “I know people think he's cold-have you met him?”
Seeley nodded.
“In fact, Alan is a kind man. Warm, too, in his own way. I went to see him because he offered to help me professionally.”
The waitress returned. Warren ordered a crab salad and Seeley, remembering Palmieri's suggestion, ordered the tempura oysters. When the waitress asked about drinks, he glanced at the decorative rows of imported and domestic beers along one wall and told her water would be fine.
“So you went there at night, after the building was closed.”
“It was the only time I had free. I was working full-time at St. Gall. There was nothing suspicious about it. Alan met me at the front door and let me in.”
“So he could help you professionally.” Seeley remembered Steinhardt telling him about her crush on him, but Warren didn't look like a woman who pursued men.
“The AIDS research community isn't very big, especially vaccine research.” Warren was as erect sitting as she was standing, her posture accentuated by the way she thrust out her chin as she talked. In a face with conventional Asian features, one was not: a delicately hooked nose that made an otherwise pretty face achingly lovely.
“Alan knew what the bureaucracy was like at St. Gall. He knew they weren't going to give a young scientist, particularly a woman, credit for her work. So he offered to go over our experiments together at UC and co-author some papers with me.”
Seeley didn't doubt that Steinhardt could be charming, or that he was capable of concealing his motives, whatever they were, behind a mask of amiability. But after more than twenty years litigating patent cases, it was inconceivable to him that two people working on directly competing research projects could visit after hours without one planning to extract information from the other, particularly when the two already knew each other well, and one was famous and the other was ambitious for fame.
She continued on about Steinhardt and the exciting work that they had done together at UC. There was an energy in the air as she talked about her science. It was as if someone had struck a tuning fork and the vibrations hadn't ceased.
The waitress brought their food, Seeley's a heaped pile of crisp-battered Pacific oysters, each as fat as a baby's fist. A mound of creamy coleslaw was on the side. Warren started on her salad, and he bit into an oyster. Palmieri was right. Seeley had not tasted anything like this before. First, there was the sensation of the grainy, almost buttery crust, and then the sudden astonishment of the oyster's intense flavor exploding and liquefying in his mouth like the essence of the ocean itself. There was a genius at work in the kitchen, someone who knew the secrets of frying seafood.
Seeley looked around the room with its corny nautical decorations hanging from the ceiling and walls. Behind the cashier's stand was a small open kitchen, with the cooks' busy white backs. Every fifteen seconds the booming
