There is a quality to the early-morning light in San Francisco that exists in no other American city. The sun shines silver, burnishing the stone-and-brick buildings like a jeweler's cloth. Only in the medieval quarters of old European cities had Seeley seen such light. Stepping out from the lobby of the Huntington Hotel, he smelled the scent of freshly mown grass from the pocket park across California Street at the top of Nob Hill. A large bird crowed, and the breeze coming off the bay mixed the smells of roasting coffee and just-baked sourdough.
Seeley hadn't taken a break from work for years; he had no talents as a tourist and idleness made him irritable. Setting out for the half-mile walk to the Pearsall apartment on Vallejo Street on a morning like this was all the vacation he needed. The day bristled with challenge, starting with Alan Steinhardt. Seeley had no reason to believe that St. Gall's corporate ethics were above industrial espionage, but he was also certain that neither Leonard nor Ed Barnum had told him the full story of Lily Warren's visit to Steinhardt's lab or her attempted theft of Vaxtek secrets. If, as Leonard said, Vaxtek had caught her alone in Steinhardt's lab, it would have given the story to the DA and to the press-unless Vaxtek, too, had something to hide.
What mattered right now was that St. Gall had dropped Warren as a witness, which meant that Seeley was free to talk to her without going through the company's lawyers. Before leaving the hotel he left a message for Tina to track down her telephone number.
The apartment building on Vallejo was 1930s Art Deco, and the lobby, which rose two stories, was all dark wood and ceramic tile the color of sandstone. The plaster molding along the ceiling was a maze of geometric designs, Aztec in their complexity. Seeley could imagine that, however warm it was outside, the temperature in the lobby never rose above the coolness of a crypt.
At a small desk, the doorman was talking to a girl. Seeley asked for the Pearsall apartment and, before the man could respond, the girl stuck out her hand.
“You're Mr. Seeley. I'm Lucy Pearsall, Robert Pearsall's daughter.”
In her green plaid school uniform, the girl was of a piece with the morning: clear-eyed, bright, self-assured. Seeley studied her face for some sign of loss or sorrow, but other than the dark shadows beneath her eyes, found none. Her hand, when Seeley took it, was small, but the grip was a young athlete's.
“My mother's expecting you. She said you're taking over Dad's case.” It was a statement of fact. Nothing in her voice or her expression asked for sympathy. “He was the best.”
“That's what I heard.”
When she leaned to look around him, Seeley turned. A yellow school bus had pulled into the space in front of the building.
“It was good to meet you,” she said. She swung a bulky backpack over her shoulder and was out the door.
“Impressive kid,” Seeley said to the doorman.
“Mr. Pearsall's death was a knockout blow to the two of them.” The man was looking at the school bus, not at Seeley. “But neither of them would ever let you know that.”
“Could you call up to the apartment for me?”
The man talked as he dialed the apartment telephone. “Since it happened, Mrs. Pearsall won't let her wait for the bus outside. She has to stay in here with me.”
A voice came on the line, and after the man finished and put down the receiver he said, “You know, Mr. Pearsall wasn't the kind of man that can be replaced.”
Seeley thought to tell him that he hadn't come courting. Instead, he just thanked the man for his help.
“Apartment 7C,” the man said. “Second door on your right.”
When Judy Pearsall opened the door, Seeley saw at once the source of Lucy's forthright manner. The face was handsome and intelligent and her handshake was the same firm grip as her daughter's. She wore no makeup and had made no effort to disguise the lines at the corners of her dark green eyes. Her sandy hair was cut short.
She led Seeley into a living room with tall French windows looking out onto Vallejo Street, busy with traffic. Seeley declined the offer of coffee and quickly surveyed the room. Any one of the three up-holstered chairs could have been Robert Pearsall's favorite. He took a corner of the couch.
“I'm sorry about your loss.”
“I appreciate your saying that.” The words were measured, honest. “But, you know, I can't just curl up into a hole and disappear. It wouldn't do my daughter any good, or me.”
Already, Seeley thought, she had fallen into the habit of the singular. My daughter.
“I know you're here to look through Bob's papers, and I'm glad to help you if I can. But, so you don't waste your time, you need to know right off, Bob did not kill himself.”
When Seeley called to arrange the visit, he told her that he was looking for her husband's trial notebook. There was no reason for her to connect this to an interest in how Pearsall died other than that, in Judy's mind right now, everything was connected to his death.
“What do the police say?”
“You don't look like a foolish man, Mr. Seeley, and if you're a trial lawyer, you've had experience with the police. The police don't know anything. Whatever they say is speculation. It's not factual and it's not based on anything they know about Bob.”
The framed black-and-white photograph on the side table showed an erect, wide-shouldered man in corduroys and denim shirt. Binoculars were slung around his neck and he was smiling broadly. In the distance behind him, the face of a mountain was split by a waterfall of astonishing height. Pearsall looked like a grown-up Eagle Scout.
“Did he seem different in any way?”
“That's what the police asked.”
“What did you tell them?”
“He seemed to be distracted the last few days before he died.”
“He was in the middle of preparing for a trial,” Seeley said. “That wouldn't be unusual.”
“I've seen Bob through a lot of trials, and that was one of the things about him: he was totally devoted to his cases, but only in the office or the courtroom. He never brought any of that home.”
“And you didn't ask what was bothering him.”
“Just once. He said he couldn't tell me, and left it at that. I knew better than to ask him what he meant.”
Judy didn't strike Seeley as a woman who could be dismissed so easily.
She must have seen the skepticism in his expression. “You have to understand, Mr. Seeley, in our marriage there was nothing we couldn't talk about, unless it was something to do with one of Bob's cases. Bob would never betray a client's confidence.”
“So you think that, whatever was bothering him, it was something a client wouldn't want anyone to know about.”
“That would seem logical, wouldn't it?”
Sure it would, Seeley thought, along with at least a dozen other possibilities, including a romance gone wrong, money problems, blackmail, drugs, or-he looked again at the good-humored face in the photograph-a despair so profound that living no longer made sense.
“Is it possible that someone made a threat on his life?”
“I don't know. The police asked me that. It's not the kind of thing Bob would talk about. Bob was old school. He thought his role was to protect his family, not worry us.”
And, if Seeley's speculation about despair was right, to put on an upbeat front even though he was in the most excruciating pain.
“And that's why you won't let your daughter wait for the school bus outside the building. To protect her.”
For the first time, there was a break in Judy's composure. She pressed her hands against the arms of the chair, as if to steady herself. “A mother's instinct,” she said. “Bob and I didn't marry until late. He was already in his forties when Lucy was born. She's our only child.” She rose. “This isn't helping with why you're here. I'm sure you have a great deal to do. Let me show you Bob's study. It's where I had them put the boxes from the office.”
There was a desk in Pearsall's study with a computer and what looked like a fax machine. Books filled the ceiling-high shelves and spilled over into piles on the floor. Seeley examined a precarious stack of hardcover and paperbound books next to a well-used leather recliner. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason was on top, works by Hume, Rawls, and Dworkin beneath it.
“Moral philosophy,” Judy said. “It was one of Bob's hobbies. Like his bird pictures.”
Seeley hadn't noticed the photographs of brilliantly colored birds lining the one wall where the bookshelves were only chest-high. The pictures were close-ups taken with a long lens and, Seeley imagined, a great deal of patience. They weren't snapshots, either. Each photograph was carefully composed and captured its subject in full light. Pearsall had an artist's eye.
On the floor, at the foot of the shelves, were six corrugated bankers boxes with HEILBRUN, HARDY AND CROCKETT printed in large block letters.
Judy said, “Those are the boxes the firm sent over.” She hadn't moved from the doorway. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Seeley cleared away a corner of a library table piled with still more philosophy books and set a box on it. On top, when he opened the box, was a silver-framed photograph of a younger Lucy in a bathing suit, seated on her mother's lap. Beneath this was a stack of framed certificates acknowledging Pearsall's good work for the Legal Aid Society, the Sierra Club, the San Francisco Bar Association, and a prisoners' rights project in Chicago. A certificate attesting to Pearsall's membership in the exclusive American College of Trial Lawyers reminded Seeley that he had misplaced his own certificate long ago.
He tried the next box, and the one next to it, but found nothing that looked like a trial notebook. In the fourth box, under a layer of bar association magazines, he found the stenographer's pads that Tina said she saw Pearsall sketch in at the end of the day. Seeley selected one. “U. S. v. Gunnison Oil, 6-17-95,” was printed neatly in ink on the cardboard cover, and when Seeley flipped the cover open, the notebook gave off the musty smell of old paper. He riffled quickly through the pages. The book was a sketch pad filled with pen-and-ink drawings. Some were of sailboats on the bay, as Seeley expected, but most were portraits.
Seeley turned back to the first page. On it was a quick but accurate sketch of a well-known university economist who often testified as an expert witness in antitrust cases. Then Seeley saw that in the same loose hand as the drawings-which is why he had at first missed it-Pearsall had written, “Theory of lost profits has hole in it. Check with WFB.” Paging through the rest of the notebook, Seeley found similar comments, no more than a line or two on any sheet, written with a flourish beneath, or sometimes above, the portraits.
From Pearsall's comments, and two or three recognizable faces, Seeley immediately understood what the steno pads were. U. S. v. Gunnison Oil was an antitrust case in the 1990s and here, in pictures of the key players-witnesses, lawyers, the trial judge-Seeley had found Pearsall's trial notebook. Pearsall knew what any experienced trial lawyer knows: not only are cases mostly about facts, but no facts are more important than the personalities of the participants. Instead of writing extensive notes to himself, Pearsall did what an artist would naturally do: he captured the theory of his case, and the holes in his adversary's, by sketching the cast of characters, with the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Seeley rapidly searched through the fifth box, but the notebooks went no further than the 1990s. Only at the bottom of the sixth box-Tina had organized the notebooks in reverse chronological order-did he find three stenographer's pads labeled “Vaxtek v. St. Gall.” The notebooks, like the one from the Gunnison case years earlier, had a few street scenes, but were mostly filled with pen-and-ink sketches of witnesses and lawyers. Some pages had only pictures, not words. On one of these, a cluster of three spare drawings of Chris Palmieri revealed not only the young lawyer's intensity but also Pearsall's affection for him. On most of the pages, a sentence or two connected the portrait to a concern Pearsall had about the case or a trial tactic he planned to employ. A head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman in judicial robes took up a whole page in the second Vaxtek notebook. Ellen Farnsworth. First patent trial. Build legal foundation slowly. Pearsall probably made the drawing during an early 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?”
“Of course I did.” He sat up straighter. “It's standard procedure.”
“Was there anything to indicate that Steinhardt wasn't the sole inventor?”
“He's the only one who signed off on the entries.”
A bench scientist's lab notebooks should be as precise and complete as a ship's log. If some of the hardest-fought patent battles are over which of two competing inventors completed the invention first, it is the laboratory notebooks, witnessed by others in the lab who understood the invention, that provide the indelible fingerprints of priority.
Seeley said, “When was the last time you wrote an application for a drug patent that named only one inventor?”
Mousetraps have sole inventors, as do windshield wipers and railroad couplers. But pharmaceutical inventions are team efforts. Seeley had reviewed dozens of other patents to see how close their subject matter was to AV/AS, and none listed fewer than three inventors.
McKee said, “When was the last time you wrote a patent application?”
The accent and attitude were pure New York-Brooklyn, Seeley guessed. McKee knew as well as he did that trial lawyers litigate patents, they don't apply for them. “Did you interview any of Steinhardt's witnesses?”
McKee swiped a hand over his shaved head as if he were brushing back a lock of hair. He was sitting erect now and the other hand was a fist in his lap. “Steinhardt said I didn't have to. He said he was the one signing the inventorship oath, so it wasn't my problem. Even if I pushed him on it, he'd never let me talk to his witnesses.”
“Vaxtek's your client, not Steinhardt.” Seeley made no effort to hide his anger. “You realize, because you let Steinhardt intimidate you, St. Gall can destroy our inventorship claim.”
“You try talking to Steinhardt.”
“He's in Paris. That's why I'm talking to you.”
Business clients will roll right over their lawyers anytime it suits their purposes. But evidently no one had taught McKee that the lawyer's first duty is not to let that happen.
McKee shifted in the chair and worked his jaw. “You know, there's a difference between patents on monoclonal antibodies and patents on garbage trucks.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“This isn't Brigadier Dumpster.”
Seeley hadn't thought about Brigadier Dumpster Corp. v. DeSimone and Sons, Inc. for years. It was the first patent case he had tried after making partner at his old Buffalo law firm, and remarkably the case had made its way into two or three law school texts. Brigadier, a Decatur, Illinois, manufacturer of truck bodies and rigs, owned a patent on the front-end loader that garbage trucks use to lift dumpsters over the truck cab to empty their contents into the hopper in the rear. Brigadier had sued its way around the country, bullying payments from manufacturers that lacked the money or the will to fight its patent in court. The DeSimones, who owned a foundry and fabrication plant in Cheektowaga, outside of Buffalo, had little cash to defend a lawsuit, but when Brigadier sued them for copying their rig, they refused to settle and hired Seeley to defend them.
McKee said, “The guy who taught me patents at NYU thought your defense was brilliant.”
It was clear from McKee's tone that he didn't agree.
“And you?”
“Too much flash, not enough engineering.”
The DeSimones needed more than engineering to win their case. Vincent DeSimone, the older of the two sons, stood with Seeley in the company's parking lot in a driving sleet storm, discussing the litigation to come. The two were watching the company's foreman test a DeSimone rig before it was crated for delivery. Vincent shook his head in disgust at the thought that the government had granted a patent to a device as simple as the Brigadier lift. He said, “My three-year-old could've dreamed one of these up with his Tinkertoys.”
Seeley watched the rig's two robot-like arms swing out over the cab, grab a bin, jerk it up, then toss it in a single, smooth arc backward over the cab. “A catapult,” he said to Vincent.
“A what?”
“The rig is nothing more than a catapult.”
After that, preparation for trial was straightforward. Seeley paged through histories of ancient siege weaponry until he found a diagram for a thirteenth-century advance on the catapult, called a trebuchet, that bore a striking resemblance to the Brigadier rig. He hired a local cabinetmaker to build tabletop operating models of both the trebuchet and the rig. “Just the rig,” Seeley told the man. “I don't want the jury to see the truck chassis or body. And make the two models exactly the same size.”
“Do you want me to paint them?”
“Sure,” Seeley said. “Paint them whatever color Brigadier paints their rigs.”
Three months later, Seeley's entire case consisted of demonstrating to the jury how the structure and operation of the Brigadier rig was virtually identical to that of its medieval predecessor. It took the jurors less than an hour to return with a verdict that the Brigadier patent was invalid. Most of that time they spent composing a note to the judge asking whether there was some way he could order Brigadier to reimburse the DeSimones for their attorney's fees and the expense of building the two models.
Seeley said to McKee, “Are there any catapults out there that St. Gall's going to surprise us with?”
Vaxtek wanted the broadest patent it could get, and McKee had accomplished that by referring in his patent application to only a few prior inventions. But that meant St. Gall could in court come up with another invention-a catapult-that, even though it was not exactly like AV/AS, would be close enough that a jury would vote against the patent.
McKee shrugged. “Steinhardt told me what inventions to cite.”
“And you didn't do your own research to see if there were others?”
“Hey, back off. My instructions were to limit myself to what Steinhardt gave me.”
“That's what Steinhardt told you?”
“No, the chief medical guy. Leonard Seeley.”
It was odd hearing a stranger refer to his brother by name.
A sly smile spread across McKee's face. “You two are related.”
Seeley said, “When was the last time a company's head of research told you what prior art to cite?”
“When was the last time you tried a pharma case? All the drug companies have committees that review the R amp;D and decide if they want broad patents or narrow ones.”
Seeley said, “But, once a company decides what it wants, did you ever have the company's head of research tell you how much prior art to cite?”
McKee looked unhappy. “No.”
“And because you didn't cite the prior art, St. Gall can argue there was fraud on the Patent Office. The court could invalidate the patent.”
Seeley thought about Leonard and his deceptions. It's one thing to lie that you clipped stories about your brother from legal newspapers. But to bully a young lawyer into deceiving the U. S. Patent Office was dangerously wrong and, by not telling Seeley what he had done, Leonard had exposed him to judicial sanctions for perpetuating that fraud in court. The equation, he knew, was lopsided: when Seeley held facts back from Leonard it was to protect him, and when Leonard held facts back it was to protect himself. He and his brother had that in common-they were both protecting Leonard Seeley.
McKee said, “St. Gall's complaint didn't say anything about fraud.”
“But they can make the argument at trial, and I don't want to be blindsided if they do. Make me a list of all the prior art you would have cited if you hadn't listened to Steinhardt or Leonard Seeley.”
“I've got a lot on my desk.”
“I want the references by the end of the day.”
McKee rocked back on the balls of his feet, chest out, jaw working. “You're not even a partner here.”
Seeley didn't get up. “I'm trying a case for a client of this law firm, and I'm not going to lose it because one of the firm's lawyers was too lazy or insecure to stand up to a client and tell the client that what it was asking him to do was wrong.”
“They would have fired us.”
“You've got it backward, Boyd. You should have fired them. If you can't stand up to a client, you might as well turn in your bar card.”
McKee reddened. “Like I said, I'll get to it when I can.”
Seeley watched McKee's back go through the door. He had made no friends at Vaxtek yesterday, and it seemed that he wasn't making any at Heilbrun, Hardy, either. But it was none of his business what these people thought of him. Sitting at Pearsall's desk, Seeley sensed that he was doing exactly what Pearsall himself would have done were he alive. What he didn't know was whether that was a good or a bad thing.
The telephone rang.
“Mr. Seeley?”
“Yes.”
“This is Lily Warren.”