“Did Cisco come back with you?” Lorna asked.
“Yeah, he’s out there checking my car,” I said.
“What happened?”
“Hopefully nothing. But he’s going to sweep it and the whole warehouse. The Masons knew we were at Patel’s house this morning. They claimed to the judge that they were watching him and not me, but I don’t believe it.”
Lorna, instead of being concerned that our opponents might have us under surveillance, thought about Patel. On our way back from Venice, Cisco had filled her in on our discovery of his death.
“That poor man,” she said. “Taking his own life…”
“If he did,” I said.
“What—you think he was murdered?”
“I don’t think anything until the cops confirm. But we are dealing with a company whose whole future is on the line, Lorna. They lose this case, and Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg—none of those guys will want to touch them. That makes it desperate times, and anything is possible. My advice is to look over your shoulder wherever you go until this is finished.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
“It is what it is. Stay close to Cisco.”
“I will.”
“Oh, and how are you doing with McEvoy?”
“Fine. He’s fine. Why? Are you thinking he’s a plant or something? I thought Cisco checked him out.”
“He did, so I’m not thinking anything. But right now, he’s in the cage by himself and is privy to every move we make. I’ll feel a lot better when it’s not a one-way street and he starts producing things we can use. I’m going to go check on him. You can keep the desk.”
I left the office and went through the copper curtain into the cage. McEvoy was at the computer terminal. I was too far away to see what he had on the screen.
“Hey,” he said.
“I saw you in the courtroom,” I said. “You didn’t stay. How’d you know the session wouldn’t continue after chambers?”
“Uh, actually I didn’t. But I wanted to get back to this. I think I might have already found something good.”
He nodded toward the screen.
“I could use something good,” I said. “Show me.”
McEvoy opened a folder on the screen that contained a list of files.
“Okay, so these are some of the emails that were in the discoverydownload,” he said. “They all went out to stakeholders on Project Clair, starting when it was in early development through training and testing. There’s forty-six of them. Most are innocuous and involve scheduling meetings and Zooms and so forth, but some are more important because they carry content about testing and project guardrails.”
“Just tell me you found the smoking gun,” I said.
“Uh, not quite, but maybe the smoking witness. Or at least someone who might take the place of Rikki Patel for you. Someone who might actually be better.”
“Okay. Who?”
McEvoy picked a file on the screen seemingly at random and opened it. It was an email, and I leaned down to read the subject line.
Reminder: PC progress meeting at 1 p.m. in conference room A.
“What’s PC?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure it means Project Clair, but that’s not what matters,” McEvoy said. “The content of the message doesn’t matter either. It’s the mailing list we’re looking at here.”
