Pearsall's secretary, assigned to Seeley for the duration of the trial, came into the conference room while he was rechecking the witness list to locate a misplaced deposition binder. Christina Hoff couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, young to have worked for a partner as senior as Pearsall, and in her neat skirt and oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was mostly elbows and knees. She had shown him around the firm's five floors of offices when he arrived earlier in the morning, and although she had touched up her makeup, it still failed to mask the bleariness in her eyes, from fatigue, Seeley thought, or grief.

“I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She had a nice voice.

“Should I call you Christina or Tina?”

“Tina. How'd you know?”

She was almost six feet tall, just an inch or two shorter than Seeley, and he guessed that, as a gawky adolescent, the shortened name might have helped inch her toward invisibility. There was a vulnerability about her that, along with the earnestness, seemed out of place amidst the hard polished surfaces of the conference room.

Seeley said, “Have you seen the deposition binder for Lily Warren?” Warren was a St. Gall vaccine researcher, and she should have been deposed along with the others on St. Gall's witness list. But the binder was missing. The last transcripts Seeley reviewed in Buffalo had traveled on the plane with him as freight and were now back on the conference-room shelf with the others. He had called Mrs. Rosziak, but she said he hadn't left any Vaxtek papers in the office.