Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  I help up a traffic-cop hand to stop him. “Not your fault. You were still one step ahead of me. I hadn’t even seen it on the docket.”

  “It’s just, you see patent case, you see Cranston & Hemans, you think, ‘Ho hum, here comes another one.’ If I had even realized it was Roland Hemans I would have stopped and looked at it a little more carefully.”

  The moment he said the name “Hemans” it pricked my curiosity. Sensing an opening to learn more about the man, I said, “Oh, have you worked with him before?”

  “He had an appeal with us in Richmond a few years back. I was going to look it up this morning just so I could remember the details a little better. That was . . . six, eight years ago?”

  “What did you think of him?”

  “He was fine, I guess.”

  “I saw pictures of him in Virginia Lawyers Weekly. He looks like he’s huge.”

  “Yeah, he’s a big one, all right.”

  “What else? I’m just trying to get to know the personalities involved here.”

  Jeremy hefted a sigh. “It’s been a while, but . . . I guess you could say he’s pretty aggressive about going after what he wants. I mean, what plaintiff’s lawyer isn’t? And obviously he likes to use the press as a weapon. But I guess you’ve seen that by now.”

  “True,” I said, then paused, because I wasn’t sure how to word the question I really wanted to ask. I came up with: “Based on what you’ve seen of him, do you think he would ever do anything . . . unethical to win a case?”

  Jeremy’s face squeezed as he contemplated the question.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, he’ll push things right up to the line. But he’s also smart enough to never cross it. Are you . . . worried about something in particular?”

  “No, no. Nothing specific. I was just—”

  I stopped myself because Jeremy was biting his lower lip. It was a nervous tic of his.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Something on your mind?”

  There was more lip biting. “Is it okay if I speak honestly with you for a second? Not like judge and career clerk but like Scott and Jeremy?”

  “Of course.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then finally blurted it out:

  “I was wondering if you would recuse yourself from this case.”

  It was such an unusual request and I was so taken aback, I just sat there for a moment. Jeremy had never begged off a case before, never expressed the slightest preference about my caseload one way or another. He took on everything—the big ones, the small ones, the ones you couldn’t even categorize—with the same cheerful determination.

  All I could manage was: “Why?”

  “I just . . . I have a bad feeling about this one.”

  So did I. More than he could ever know.

  “Can you be more specific?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “But is it . . . a conflict of interest you’re worried about?” I pressed. “Or something about the merits of the case or—”

  “No. No.”

  “The publicity, then?”

  “Well, a little. I just . . . I have a bad feeling and . . . Especially after the Skavron ruling and Judge Byers calling, and I . . . There’s talk in the courthouse that Harley-riding pig Michael Jacobs has put Neal Keesee on the warpath against you. Is that . . . is that true?”

  There was no point in denying it. “Yes. But as I told you, I think Byers is going to go to bat for me. So I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

  “Even still, I feel like we need less attention on us, not more. Let’s just give everything with Skavron a chance to blow over before we take on something big like this. No one would think any less of you if you recused yourself. You could say you weren’t comfortable with the science and you felt like another judge would handle it better. There’s a Rule Sixteen on Monday. Now would be the right time to get rid of it, before we’ve gone down the road too much.”

  I leaned back and studied him. It was such an odd request. Clerks didn’t ask judges to recuse themselves from cases because they felt vaguely queasy about the publicity surrounding them.

  He fixed me with a blue-eyed stare: “Please. It would mean a lot to me.”

  “Okay. I’ll think about it,” I lied.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  I smiled at him as he rose from his seat, feeling empty again. Jeremy had been nothing but loyal to me during the four years we had worked together. And I could neither grant his request nor be honest about why.

  As he departed the room, I began composing an e-mail telling him I respected him and valued our working relationship but that I couldn’t shirk what I felt like was my judicial duty. I set the message to go out at 8:37 the next morning.

  That way it would at least look like I had slept on it.

  * * *

  About half an hour later, there was another knock on my door. This time, it was a Joan Smith knock.

  Mrs. Smith was a fastidious lady who never met a blouse she couldn’t button all the way up to her neck. Her husband had left her many years earlier, long before we started working together, and her children were grown and off in other cities. Whenever I asked about her weekend, she usually told me about her pastor’s sermon. If she was in a good mood, you might hear her humming a gospel tune her choir had sung that weekend.

  She had been my judicial assistant since the day I was sworn in, yet she had never once called me by my first name, despite my repeated entreaties that she do so. I think, as far as she was concerned, my first name was “Judge.” I eventually surrendered my efforts to entice her into more familiar address, but I did even the score in my own way: If I was always going to be Judge Sampson, she was going to be Mrs. Smith.

  So I answered her knock with, “Come in, Mrs. Smith.”

  “I just thought you’d want to know there was a filing in Palgraff,” she said. “It’s an emergency motion for preliminary injunction from the plaintiff.”

  I felt a jolt the moment she said “Palgraff” but tried not to show my alarm. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Would you like me to print it out for you?”

  “No, I’ll just read it on-screen. But thank you.”

  She left without another word, closing the door behind her.

  Since this was an emergency filing, I would be expected to respond within hours. My first instinct was to call in Jeremy, because I almost always consulted him about this sort of thing. But I couldn’t now. He would use this as another reason why I should shove the entire case off on another judge.

  I was on my own to ponder how it fit into the larger picture and what it told me about the strategy being pursued by the plaintiff.

  The timing was certainly curious. Hemans could have easily filed for a preliminary injunction when he submitted his original complaint.

  Instead, he waited. Perhaps it was an attempt to ratchet up the pressure for a settlement. His first move had been to file the complaint. His next was to leak it to the newspapers. Now here was another arrow from his quiver: the request for injunctive relief. If it was successful, it would send the stock tumbling even further, bringing Barnaby Roberts into more shareholders’ crosshairs.

  All of which suggested Hemans might not be responsible for the kidnapping. Why attempt to force a settlement when you knew you had the judge dancing at the end of your marionette strings?

  What I didn’t fully understand was why ApotheGen hadn’t already settled. Why not just dangle fifty million bucks in front of Denny Palgraff’s face and be done with this? Because, really, to a Fortune 500 company like ApotheGen, fifty million dollars was little more than a third-quarter write-off that would be forgotten by Christmastime.

  And yet that hadn’t happened. Perhaps because a few select people at ApotheGen knew they had the ju
dge firmly under their control.

  As I scanned the document, I saw Barnaby Roberts had, perhaps unwittingly, supplied Hemans with some of his fodder. One of the claims contained a portion of the CEO’s quote from the Journal: “We are not going to let one man’s frivolous fantasy stop us from bringing this lifesaving product to the marketplace.”

  That was the basis for requiring emergency relief: The defendant, by his own admission, fully intended to continue infringing on the plaintiff’s patent.

  By granting a preliminary injunction, a judge is saying there is some probability of success on the merits of the case. It’s a tip of the hand from the judge, a sign to all parties that the plaintiff has a fairly valid claim.

  I was just getting wound up to go through all the case filings—and actually consider those merits—when I stopped myself. I had a duty as a judge, yes.

  But my duty as a father was far greater.

  The last thing I wanted to do was grant the injunction. Without knowing which side had Emma, I had to stick with the basic assumption that ruling for the plaintiff would make ApotheGen more likely to settle. And a settlement would render the judge—and therefore the judge’s child—a moot point.

  There was no point in pondering the matter further. With clear eyes and steady hands, I began crafting my denial of Roland Hemans’s request.

  I was nearing completion when I felt my phone buzz. It was the 900 number:

  Grant the motion for an injunction at exactly 3 p.m. or someone is going to get stabbed in the eyeball.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The younger brother had been stuck at level 28 for several hours. And now, having broken through to level 29, he was lost in the challenge of conquering a new foe.

  It was after lunchtime when the older brother walked into the kitchen and, his hands on his hips, peered down with a scowl.

  “Has it been too quiet in there?” he asked.

  “She’s probably sleeping,” the younger murmured.

  “When is the last time you heard from her?”

  “Maybe an hour,” he lied. It had been several. “She was crying for a while. But it finally stopped.”

  The older brother looked toward the door to the little girl’s bedroom. “We should check on her.”

  Neither man moved.

  Finally, the older brother, shaking his head, walked over to the door. He thumbed the lock, which had been switched to his side—its goal being not to keep people out of the bedroom but to keep the occupant in. He swung the door open.

  The room was dark, as usual. He didn’t see the little girl anywhere. He knew she couldn’t escape. There were only two ways out: the door, which was locked, and the window, which was painted shut. Besides, if the window had opened, the alarm would have sounded.

  Then he heard something. A soft wheezing sound. Coming from the other side of the bed.

  The older brother illuminated the flashlight on his phone and crossed the room in three long strides. The little girl was flat on the floor. Her face was red and blotchy. Her eyes were swollen almost entirely shut.

  He called out to his younger brother, who soon joined him in gawking at her.

  “What did you do to her?” the older asked.

  “Nothing. It was probably that,” he said, pointing to the peanut butter sandwich, still on the dresser but not untouched. The crusts had been torn off. He added, unnecessarily, “I think she’s allergic.”

  The older brother bent down over the girl and listened to her labored breathing.

  “She needs a doctor,” the younger said.

  “Not a chance.”

  “But what if—”

  “If she lives, she lives.”

  “If she dies?”

  “It won’t change things. We can still offer proof of life.”

  The younger brother seemed confused, so the older added, “You can cut the fingers off a dead child just the same as you can a live one.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  It was getting hard to keep my thoughts straight, and this latest dictate had only disoriented me further. Whoever had my daughter already knew they were going to get the end ruling they desired. Why bother granting an injunction? Why manipulate any of the intermediate steps between now and the Markman determination?

  As I typed up the new decision, I felt like my head wasn’t quite attached to my shoulders. I finished with about an hour to spare before I had to file and, with a desire to ground myself in something that felt more real than this game of legal ping-pong I was trying to play with myself, I called Alison.

  “Hey,” she said, in a hushed tone that told me she was likely somewhere in public.

  “Hey. I was just calling to check in. How’s it going?”

  “Good,” she said, then hastened to correct herself: “I mean, you know.”

  “Yeah. Believe me.”

  “We’re just at the Living Museum.”

  “How’s Sammy doing?”

  “He’s fine,” she said.

  “That’s good. Can I say hi to him real quick?”

  “Uh, you could, but I actually don’t know where he is right now.”

  “What do you m—”

  “Relax,” she said quickly. “He’s with Jenny and Karen. I’m just in that little cafeteria by the entrance, grabbing some coffee.”

  “Oh, okay. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Are you in a spot where you can talk?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  She didn’t know about Palgraff vs. ApotheGen yet. So, over the next fifteen minutes or so, I filled her in. She listened well and asked questions, only some of which I could answer. She clearly wasn’t giving up on the notion that Justina had something to do with it. But, at the same time, she didn’t dispute the notion that Roland Hemans was also a highly likely suspect.

  I finished by telling her about the injunction, though I left out any mention of eyeball stabbing. It was bad enough one of us had to know about that.

  “So you’re going to file your response at three?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It’s already written,” I assured her. “I’ll just be watching the clock between now and then.”

  “There’s a group of moms who just walked in,” she said, lowering her tone even further. “I have to go.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Love you.”

  In a louder, false-cheerful voice, she finished the conversation with: “Love you too, honey. See you at home tonight.”

  As promised, I kept scrupulous tabs on the clock for the remainder of the hour. The moment my phone’s screen changed from 2:59 to 3:00, I sent the motion to the clerk’s office.

  No more than fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Smith alerted me that Steve Politi at HedgeofReason was calling. I told her I would, of course, have no comment. But before I left the courthouse that afternoon, I logged on to HedgeofReason.com to learn what I was supposedly thinking about the Palgraff case.

  Sure enough, the lead item was headlined: JUDGE SLAMS APOG IN PATENT LAWSUIT.

  “As you first read here on HedgeofReason, the judge in the blockbuster Palgraff vs. ApotheGen case has it out for the defendant,” it began. “And now we have the proof: Federal District Court Judge Scott Sampson has granted Palgraff’s request for a preliminary injunction. It’s another sign pointing in the direction of the plaintiff, and that could end up costing ApotheGen billions. With a B. Yes, kids, it is time to sell, sell, sell!”

  So there it was again. Steve Politi asserting I was pro-plaintiff, something he couldn’t possibly know, since I didn’t know it myself.

  I considered the possibility that Politi really did have a source, someone who was close to me, someone who could convince Politi I was whispering in his or her ear. But who could that possibly be?

  Jeremy? It couldn’t be. Jeremy wanted me to d
rop the case altogether.

  Mrs. Smith? I couldn’t begin to fathom her motive.

  One of the law clerks? That seemed unlikely. What reporter would believe a lowly law clerk had access to a judge’s inner thoughts?

  It left me with the same conclusion I had reached before—that this source was Politi’s own invention—and the same indignant burn that not only was this charlatan misrepresenting me, but everyone in the free world seemed to be believing him.

  The UPDATE! confirmed it. ApotheGen stock had slid another three dollars and seventy cents. This was on top of losses it had already suffered. All told, it was down more than twelve dollars from its fifty-two-week high, which was posted shortly before the lawsuit became public.

  There were 578 comments on the post. I looked at only the first few. They were by users thanking Steve Politi for his quick and incisive reporting and bragging that they had either gotten out before the slide or had contracts for short sales that were growing more valuable by the day.

  I shut off my screen, disgusted, and snarled a few choice words at Politi and his readership. It felt like they were feasting on misery—mine and others’. For every investor making free money off these fake revelations, there was someone being cheated.

  On my way out of my chambers, I mumbled my good-bye to Mrs. Smith. At the exit to the building, I skipped the mindless football talk I would have normally exchanged with Ben Gardner and got my car pointed in the direction of the farm.

  * * *

  I was just past the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, still slogging through a halting procession on Interstate 64, when my phone rang. It gave me a start, and I was relieved when I saw FRANKLIN.

  “Good afternoon, Senator.”

  “Good afternoon, Judge,” he returned. “Am I interfering with important judicial matters?”

  “Not unless I’ve started hearing cases on Interstate Sixty-four.”

  “Ah, good, good . . . Heck of a story in the Journal today.”