from the gallery, keeping the fourteen seats filled, until one prospective juror remained whom the judge had not yet questioned, a young-looking software engineer from a small Silicon Valley company.
Palmieri pointed at the laptop screen-Gary Sansone-but Seeley had already started to think of him as the “kid.” With a blond ponytail and a jockey's wiry build, Sansone had an easy smile and the kind of natural authority that could move the others on the jury, even though all of them were older. At Thorpe's request, Farnsworth asked Sansone whether, as an employee at a start-up company, he might have a bias against a giant, multinational pharmaceutical company.
The kid grinned. “That would depend, Your Honor, on how evil and grasping a multinational it is.”
The jury box broke into laughter, and for a full second a smile lit Thorpe's face as he joined in. The jury expert, seated next to him, tugged hard at the hem of his jacket, but he brushed her hand away. With a chuckle in his voice, Thorpe said, “We have no problem with this juror, Your Honor.”
Thorpe had begun his own seduction of the jury. Farnsworth would use her solicitude to make the jurors feel that they were part of her team. Thorpe's tactic was more subtle. Having now seen the phantom of a smile from this austere, sorrowful man, the jurors would work to please him if that was the price to see him smile once more.
The jury liked Sansone, and they wanted Thorpe to like them, both of which meant that if Seeley tried to exclude the kid, he-and his client-would at once become the villains of the trial, even before opening statements. So far, he had measured each of the prospective jurors against a single question: How deeply would Steinhardt's arrogance offend this man or woman? Now, applying the same question to Sansone, he worried. According to the notes Seeley had jotted on the legal pad in front of him, the kid had taken premed classes, mostly in biochemistry, before switching to an electrical engineering major at Santa Clara University. His hobby was bicycle racing, and he read journals like Science and Cell. He might be sympathetic to Vaxtek as a small company but, like the pediatrician, he could also be the authoritative figure in the jury room who second-guessed Steinhardt and the science behind AV/AS. He could be the juror who kept Seeley from the unanimous verdict he needed.
Seeley decided not to fall into Thorpe's trap.
“We have no objection to this juror, Judge.”
“Then,” Farnsworth said, “if you each exercise your three peremptories, we'll have a jury.”
Seeley tore off from the legal pad the remaining fourteen pages on which he'd written the names and backgrounds of the prospective jurors, and spread them across the table. Barnum pointed at two of the pages, one of them Sansone's. “You can still kick him off,” he said.
Seeley looked past Barnum to the jury box, into the arresting, deep blue eyes of Sansone, then shook his head and picked instead the pediatrician and the two who said their hobby was foreign travel, guessing that, perhaps more cosmopolitan than the others, they would be less responsive to the patriotic bias he had built into his case-protecting American research ingenuity against a foreign poacher. When Palmieri agreed, he wrote the three names on a fresh sheet of paper.
Thorpe was already at sidebar, waiting to hand his three candidates up to the judge. Farnsworth took the two sheets, compared them and removed four of the Post-its she had placed on a chart that indicated the numbered seats in the jury box.
“You see this sometimes,” she said. “You both want to remove the same person.” The retired career counselor whose hobby was foreign travel. She returned their sheets to them. “Why don't you try again.”
Seeley considered what Thorpe's reasons might have been for excluding the career counselor, and again wrote in her name. He folded the sheet and handed it to the judge. Thorpe wrote on his piece of paper and handed it up. This time, after comparing the peremptories, Farnsworth smiled and removed two more Post-its from the chart, leaving eight.
“We have a jury,” Farnsworth said. She handed the chart down to the clerk, and nodded to her to swear in the jury. After that, the judge told them what their duties would be, the procedures they would need to follow in coming to court every day, and cautioned them not to read, watch, or listen to any press coverage of the trial.
Four white faces looked out of the jury box, one Asian, two His-panics, and one black. Five were women, three men. Their ages ranged from twenty-six to seventy-one. Among them were a retired school-teacher; a real estate broker whose avocation was collecting antique dolls; two secretaries, one with a graduate degree in education; a hospital nurse; an AT amp;T cable splicer from Napa; an accountant who said she lived with her “domestic partner”; and Sansone, the kid.
Rolling his chair back and forth at counsel's table, Barnum was a worrier. “The one with the ponytail,” he said. “You're sure he won't be a problem?”
“No,” Seeley said. “I'm not sure.”
“I'm not surprised,” Barnum said. “He reminds me of you.”
From inside the elevator, Thorpe looped his arm around the door, holding it open for Seeley and Barnum. Dusollier, already there, nodded at Seeley. Thorpe introduced the two strangers from the defense table, partners in a well-known Chicago intellectual property boutique. Seeley recognized the names-Witkin and Gallagher-from the depositions that he'd read while he was still in Buffalo. Under the fluorescent light, Thorpe's complexion was gray and mottled with age spots. High on each cheek was a scattering of hairs that the razor had missed, each as fine as an eyelash. Seeley studied the face for some evidence of what Thorpe might have been like as a younger man, something in the set of his jaw or a trace in his eyes that might betray a spark of wonder or curiosity, even will. But if a light ever burned in those dark, rimmed eyes, it had gone out long ago.
The elevator opened to the dimly lit lobby, and Thorpe waited for Seeley while the others walked to the double doors.
“Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Seeley-or may I call you Michael? I'm honored to be your adversary.” As in the courtroom the gravelly voice was reserved, even somber.
Seeley said, “I'm sure it will be an interesting trial.”
“It's a tragedy about Bob Pearsall.” Thorpe rested a hand on Seeley's arm. “Did you know him?”
Seeley turned to escape Thorpe's touch and said, “Did you?”
“How well do we know anyone?” When Seeley didn't respond, Thorpe said, “We had lunch from time to time. He was in a small poker group we have, some local trial lawyers. We get together once or twice a month.”
“What about his family?” Seeley was still unsure why Judy asked him, and not one of her husband's friends, to look into the police handling of his death.
“You mean the loving wife, the adoring daughter? Judy told me you've taken an interest in this.”
“Only because she asked.”
“Surely you've been practicing long enough to know how appearances can deceive. I've been married to the same woman for fifty-three years. My wife is my bridge partner, my life companion, and I devoutly believe that she has been faithful to me all this time. But do I really know that? Would I stake my life on it? Of course not.”
The privacy of the observation startled Seeley, but it was so offhand that he wondered if it was something Thorpe had said many times before, including to strangers.
At the security barrier, one of the guards greeted Thorpe by name, but he ignored it or didn't notice. Thorpe said, “So you don't think Bob threw himself in front of a train?”
“He took pictures of birds. He read philosophy.”
“Bob was a complicated man. He had his secrets.”
Seeley said, “But you're not going to share them.”
“If I did, they wouldn't be secrets.”
Seeley thought Thorpe would smile at his own remark, but he didn't. “What kind of poker player was he?”
“That's what I'm saying. You'd expect someone like Bob to be a methodical player, counting cards, figuring the probabilities, patient, like he was with those birds. But no, he was reckless. He'd bet every hand, so, even if you were holding pretty good cards, you wouldn't know whether to fold. Of course, he lost more than he won, but that never seemed to bother him.”
One the other side of the double doors, a chanting crowd with placards was gathered on the courthouse plaza. Television cameras moved around the protesters.
Seeley said, “What kind of poker player are you?”
Thorpe gave the question more thought than it needed. “Methodical. You could say I'm a methodical player.”
