Stolen Thoughts

by Tim Tigner

  People tended to think of justice as black and white. Right and wrong. Guilty or innocent. What virtually everyone outside the profession failed to realize was that jury trials had little to do with absolutes and much to do with the predispositions of the jurors. Jury members were every bit as diverse, opinionated, and irrational as the public at large. Therefore, getting the “justice” you wanted essentially amounted to performing two tasks better than the competition. The first task was selecting jurors whose predispositions slanted them in your direction. The second was providing them with information that fit their natural view of the world.

  The first was a difficult task under normal circumstances. People tended to hide their biases. They wanted to appear reasonable and fair—both to outsiders and to themselves. But their honest inclinations rang louder than church bells when one could listen in on their counteracting internal monologues and sympathetic, rationalizing explanations.

  Sackler and Slate had dismissed over a dozen potential jurors for cause after drilling down during voir dire with a direction and precision that mystified the candidates and infuriated the prosecution.

  Later in the week, Sackler had methodically stripped the state’s first witness of all credibility by forcing her to clarify exaggerations and white lies. With that on the record, Slate was able to compel her to confess to prior career-enhancing acts that could be considered sexual in nature.

  It was almost too easy.

  Human nature was responsible. People tended to think about the things that worried them. The stuff that might go wrong. All Rogers and his partners had to do was ring the anxiety bell and then listen in as the self-incriminating thoughts poured forth.

  As he settled into his chair, Rogers actually felt bad for the women testifying against Pascal. He’d felt bad for many of RRS&S’s opponents. But justice was not the lawyer’s job. Their mandate was to win—without breaking the law—which was exactly what he and his partners did. There was no law against mind reading. Just ask a jury consultant. They all claimed to be masters at it.

  Rogers’ Scotch appeared, right on cue, but it wasn’t served by a staff member. “I wanted to thank you and your partners for what you’re doing.”

  “And what’s that?” Jim asked.

  “Sticking up for men. Moore and I were watching the news coverage earlier. He tells me you never lose.”

  “We do our homework, and juries tend to reward us for it.”

  The man raised his tumbler. “Here’s to a rewarding jury.”

  “To a rewarding jury,” Jim repeated, before savoring that first sweet sip. “Thank you. I hope you enjoy your evening.”

  “Likewise,” the man said, taking the hint.

  Jim didn’t mean to be antisocial. He was at a social club after all. But he came for the atmosphere, not company. He never had to wait, always got exactly what he wanted, and was rarely disturbed. The club was a buffer between office and home. If he lived across the park rather than just down the street from the office, he might not need the club.

  Of course, then he’d need a cook. And a trainer to burn off the extra calories from her tempting meals. No, this was simpler.

  As he wound down with his whisky and homework, Rogers found himself reading the same paragraph time and again. He was really dragging. No need for cognac tonight. Must be the subconscious stress of the whole Pascal affair. Not the trial, but the lifestyle change that looked likely to follow.

  He’d enjoyed his job until the option to walk away as a future billionaire arose. Then, all of a sudden, the work was a chore and the idea of making only a few million a year was lackluster. How much was enough? The best you could imagine.

  Jim accepted a few more congratulatory remarks and supportive nods as he headed for the door. Not one of Pascal’s supporters would dare to show an ounce of support in public. In fact, most would be loudly voicing their support for the women allied against him if someone put a camera in their face. But here, in private, well, men were honest. In that sense, 3E was like another elite club: the United States Congress.

  Normally, Jim would put on some classical music when he got home. Then sit by the fire and think about his legal docket for the next day or coming week. Do a bit of strategic planning while his mind was at ease and the creative juices were flowing free. But tonight, he was whipped. He might go straight to bed.

  56

  In the Closet

  SKYLAR WAS HAVING all kinds of fun for all kinds of reasons. She was helping the women’s movement, which was always worthwhile. She was helping her new best friend, another perennial winner. She was hindering corrupt lawyers, a time-honored calling. And she was doing it all on a covert mission, her favorite place to be, now that Ironman championships were out of reach.

  Technically, her actions were criminal. Sufficiently felonious to land her behind bars for years—if she screwed up. Morally, however, Skylar knew that her moves were entirely laudable. Praiseworthy enough to merit the hero role in a big budget movie.

  Chase had told her long ago that there was nothing like dancing the line between hero and felon to spike the adrenaline and focus one’s attention. She could now confirm from personal experience that his pronouncement was accurate.

  The mission had kicked off some thirty hours earlier, when Chase gave them a crash course on home incursions and then took them on a three-minute reconnaissance run—into Jim Rogers’ apartment.

  With a raised finger and twinkling eye, Chase said, “There’s one telltale clue that even the pros tend to leave behind after thoroughly searching a car or home. Can you guess what it is?”

  “Footprints on the carpet?” “Smudges in the dust?” They’d guessed.

  “No. They might well leave those behind, but people aren’t likely to notice. The answer is smell.

  “Spies and thieves wear shoe covers and take pictures to ensure that everything looks the same after planting bugs or searching for safes, but—”

  “They leave their stink behind,” Vicky said.

  “Be it booze or smoke or sweat,” Skylar added, picturing the stereotypical gangster.

  “Exactly.”

  “How do we avoid that, given that we’ll be there for hours?” Skylar asked while resisting the urge to sniff herself.

  “When we go in to identify your hiding place, we’ll snag samples of Rogers’ toiletries for you to shower with before returning for the overnighter.”

  Chase went on to explain that, “The first thing the bodyguard will do when bringing his boy home is search the residence. He’ll know the potential hiding places, the closets, crawl spaces, and gaps beneath beds. He’ll check them all, every time. It will be quick and cursory, but complete.”

  “And the goal of our ‘reconnaissance run’ is to figure out how to avoid detection during that sweep?” Vicky asked.

  “Right again.”

  “And you have a preliminary plan for that, assuming Roger’s apartment has the same layout as ours?” Skylar asked.

  “Correct. There are a couple of good places for a duck blind.”

  Chase didn’t clarify his use of the hunting term until they were upstairs, looking at the long, narrow guest room closet that Rogers used to store winter coats. “This is where you’ll construct it.” He’d taken pictures, confirmed the measurements, and used a knife to carve out a paint sample before adding. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Skylar and Vicky were anticipating entering the closet ‘duck blind’ any minute now. It had been two hours since Chase left them in the eleventh-floor foyer to drug Rogers’ drink at Club 3E. They’d spent the time waiting in the lawyer’s kitchen, that being the place least likely to absorb and reflect telltale signs, given the constant use and confounding sensory barrage that came from cooking and storing food.

  Skylar’s phone buzzed as they were watching news coverage of the Pascal trial on her phone. She put it on speaker so Vicky’s voice-to-text app would work.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s on his way.” />
  “Did he drink it all?”

  “Every drop, and it’s working. He skipped his after-dinner drink.”

  “Good job.”

  “Keep me updated with texts. Love you.”

  Skylar turned to Vicky. “I’ll double-check things here while you set the alarm. Meet you in the closet.”

  They’d used a stretchy fabric to create the duck blind, but since its depth was just eighteen inches, it still required quite an acrobatic act for them to secure it tautly in place from the inside.

  Skylar entered first and suspended herself at the top beside the clothes bar by pressing her back against one wall and her knees and feet against the other. This allowed Vicky to crawl in backwards while eyeballing the scene, ensuring that the hanging coats appeared natural before she pinned the painted fabric to the baseboard. Vicky then straightened up while Skylar straightened down. By the time they heard the door opening and the alarm deactivating, they were nose to nose and holding their breath.

  Vicky stood facing the room with her mind-reading glasses directed toward the door. That would give them advance warning if discovery was imminent—for all the good that would do.

  For her part, Skylar felt like Anne Frank avoiding Nazis as she glanced sideways toward the closet doors, which folded outward from the middle on both sides.

  About twenty seconds after the alarm emitted its deactivation chime, Skylar heard the bodyguard’s footfalls on the hardwood floor, followed by the opening of their closet doors. Light filtered in, but only for a second or two before the doors closed and the footfalls receded.

  Just like that, the initial danger was over.

  Shortly thereafter, she heard the front door close, indicating that the bodyguard had left the apartment to assume the night watch with Sackler’s guy in the foyer.

  “What was he thinking?” Skylar whispered—not toward Vicky’s ear but into her phone.

  “All I got was Nothing there, and nothing there, and—” Vicky whispered back.

  Skylar strained her ears in the dark, hoping to decipher activity as their breathing returned to normal. An opening refrigerator door. A running shower. A creaking bed. She heard nothing. After half an hour of silence, with the cramped standing becoming increasingly uncomfortable, the two infiltrators slowly and silently slipped out of the duck blind, working carefully so as not to pull it from the wall in any place but one bottom corner.

  They weren’t done with it yet.

  After their interrogation session, which the Rohypnol should cause Rogers to forget, they would slip back into the closet and wait for him and his bodyguard to leave in the morning.

  But that wouldn’t be for hours.

  For now, feeling confident that their presence had not been detected, the two lay down in the closet, hoping to catch a few winks before beginning the inquisition that would span the wee hours of the night.

  57

  Nightmare Scenario

  AMONG THE MANY surprising things that Jim Rogers had learned during twenty years of mind reading, perhaps paramount among them was the extent to which brains worked differently. Like everyone, he’d grown up aware that his sense of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste worked pretty much the same as his peers’ senses. Therefore, he’d subconsciously assumed that brains were also very similar.

  He’d been wrong.

  As a mind-reading lawyer, Jim had come to realize that unlike our senses, our brains were as nuanced and varied as the instruments in an orchestra, with some sounding as if played by school kids and others as if wielded by pros. It made him all the more grateful to be living his adult years as a conductor.

  Despite the wide-ranging intellectual dissimilarities, Jim still assumed that some dreams were universal among humans. Nightmares in particular. Prominent among those was waking to find oneself in mortal danger. Therefore, he was confident that everyone would immediately understand the utter terror he experienced when opening his eyes to find his mouth gagged and his head in a bag.

  He started to struggle as the shock set in—only to find that his wrists and ankles were bound.

  While the initial experience already topped his list of life’s worst moments, it quickly got worse.

  “If you make any noise, I’ll take out your eyes.” The voice was a whisper, emanating just inches from his ear. Something sharp then dragged across his forehead, stopping in the socket beneath his right eyebrow. “Are we clear?”

  Jim wasn’t about to nod his head, and he couldn’t speak with the sock or whatever it was in his mouth, so he just grunted, trying to sound agreeable.

  The rope holding his gag in place was released, then a hand slipped beneath the bag and pulled the sock out. There were at least two people in his bedroom, judging by the number of hands at work. At least one was a woman. She asked, “What’s your strategy for discrediting Beth Barrymore?”

  It took Jim a moment to process the question. Despite the shock, his mind was still slow with the fog of sleep. Beth Barrymore? The Pascal trial!

  With tens of millions of dollars at stake in forthcoming civil suits, and the case against the billionaire CEO collapsing live on national television, the opposition was getting aggressive. Even so, threatening murder and committing it were entirely different matters. They were likely bluffing. As a lawyer, Rogers was well acquainted with that tactic. “I’m not a member of Pascal’s defense team. I do civil law. That’s criminal. You need to ask Sackler or Slate. Not that I’m suggesting you do.”

  The reply was fast and forceful. “We know you’re in the loop. We wouldn’t have picked you otherwise. Best of all, since you’re not assigned to the case, your mutilation or death won’t impact the trial. Now, tell me the strategy for discrediting Beth Barrymore!”

  There was no predeveloped strategy. Not a detailed one. His colleagues’ quick minds didn’t require those. The only prep they needed were the starter questions that would lead Beth’s thoughts toward her vulnerabilities. “We do a lot of background research, then work by intuition. That’s the strategy. If you study transcripts of our trials, you’ll see that’s true.”

  The voice kept probing trial tactics without lowering the knife. Rogers remained oddly calm throughout. Perhaps decades of doing battle in court had hardened his nerves, he thought with pride.

  Eventually, miraculously, they moved on to Louise O’Brian, another of the state’s primary witnesses. Surviving round one gave him hope. And a bit of bravado. “Can I have some water?”

  In answer, a bottle worked its way under the bag. It tilted upward once he locked his lips around it. Either they had it on standby for him, or they were sharing their own supply. “Thank you.”

  The whispering woman drilled down on Louise for a while, then hit him with a non sequitur from out of the blue. “How many people have you killed?”

  Blackmail! They were going to get a confession and then coerce him into sabotaging the trial. “Nobody,” he blurted. “I’m not a murderer.” I hire assassins for that.

  “But you give the orders.”

  “No, I don’t.” Trent handles that.

  “Don’t get cute. We know about Trent.”

  An easy deduction. Keller’s name wasn’t on the letterhead, but he was listed in the partnership documents and tax filings. “We’re lawyers, not killers.”

  “You lawyers may not pull the trigger, but you hire people who do.”

  You can bet I’ll be sending Fredo Blanco for you when he’s done with Cassandra. “Nonsense! We’ve never paid to have anyone killed.” Technically, that was true. While Cassandra’s partner had died, his death wasn’t part of the contract.

  “Really? Do you swear—on your eyes?”

  58

  The Trap

  SKYLAR HAD NEVER been so fascinated in all her life. Before that evening with Jim Rogers, her experience with Vicky’s mind reading appliance had been limited to a brief courtesy trial on the Vitamin Sea. But tonight, wearing her own pair of specially polarized lenses, Skylar was enjoying the
full mind-reading experience alongside her friend.

  It wasn’t just watching the disconnect between the wily, drugged lawyer’s thoughts and words that she found fascinating, but the skill with which Vicky coaxed them from him. Skylar didn’t know if that was a natural gift or something Vicky had picked up as a psychic, but her subtle nudges and subliminal provocations were spellbinding to observe.

  Vicky repeated her last question while Rogers’ mind raced and his panic surged. “Do you swear on your eyes?”

  Jim took a deep breath. Please, Lord, don’t let them take my eyes. “I do.”

  Skylar wobbled the pencil tip she had poised like a dagger against his right eye.

  “Noted,” Vicky said ambiguously before hitting him with another mental punch while he was still off balance. “How much is Pascal paying you?”

  Billions—if his idea pans out. I’ll use my share to track you down and pry your eyes from your skulls with a rusty spoon. “He’s paying our standard rates, which we draw from a five-million-dollar retainer.”

  “I’m not talking about the contract. I’m referring to the kicker.”

  Surely they didn’t know about that? Pascal claimed that he hadn’t told anyone how he planned to use the mind-reading technology. No, they didn’t know. Couldn’t know. This had to be a fishing expedition. A hunt based on extensive research into the man and his methods. Or— That was it! They’d found an inside source who knew that Pascal had lots of secret deals and collaborations with bonus payments or “kickers” as she called them. Someone had sold the CEO out. Or betrayed him out of spite. A secretary who’d baked his potato, perhaps. Or a programmer he’d passed over for promotion. “There is no kicker.” Just a promise.

  “You don’t have another deal with Pascal?”

  “No. Absolutely not.” We only have an understanding.