Second Sight by George D Shuman

loss trials. It was the weight-loss miracle of the twenty-first century and it was going to fly off the shelves.
    Case knew how badly he needed that FDA approval. It had been years since they’d had a mega drug on any market, and if the government pulled their defense contract, they were at the mercy of any new legal disaster that might come their way. Alixador was going to hit the market just in time to save him.
    Case had personally handled settlements in more than thirty percent of Case and Kimble’s legal cases over the past five years, doing everything in his power to keep Case and Kimble’s name clean until their new diet phenomenon hit the market.
    Just one more year, he thought, one more home run, and he would cash in options and bonuses and quietly slip away.
    The engine of a John Deere tractor was popping on a distant hill. The sweet smell of cut hay lay heavy on the morning air. Ed Case watched steam rise on the dew-covered lawn behind his Lancaster, Pennsylvania, estate. The sun was large and pink and not an hour above the horizon.
    He toggled his wheelchair in a half circle, making his way through a maze of ornate statues and urns. A servant was setting china on the patio for morning coffee. A young blond woman was doing laps in the pool.
    Case’s eyes searched fields of clover; he looked deep in thought, as if he were thinking about another time, another place.
    “What’s with this kid and the Regeral research?” Case coughed into a handkerchief balled in his left hand.
    “First-year law student at Boston College,” the young blond man walking next to him said. “He wants to get out in front of the game. Skip the hard work and get rich quick.”
    “Is he anybody?”
    “Does he have connections, do you mean?”
    “The kind of connections that matter,” the old man said emphatically. “Family, friends, mentors, anyone? Anyone that could make a stink?”
    “His father is an attorney in Boston. Corporate law. Divorced for the last ten years.”
    “How does he get his clients?”
    “Teen websites, and hundreds of them. He leaves posts on blogs to suggest kids could get money if they took Regeral as children for attention deficit disorder and suffered side effects.”
    “Side effects,” Case said flatly.
    “Self-harm, loss of memory, failure to achieve, difficulty with authority, you know. The kind of stuff every kid suffers from. You can imagine the responses he’s getting.”
    “How did we get onto him?”
    “He sent a letter to our attorneys on his father’s stationery. Quite an old partnership, State Street in Boston, you know the type. It was enough to concern one of them, but it took me all of an hour to figure out who sent it.”
    “Kids.” The doctor snorted. “So it was blackmail?” He looked up at the younger man.
    “His version, but rather pathetic.”
    “Who else knows about the letter?”
    “Charles in legal. No one else.”
    Case stopped the wheelchair short of the patio, watching the woman climb from the pool. A servant met her with a bath towel that she slowly wrapped around her bikini.
    “You’ll have no problem getting next to him.”
    “Like taking candy from a baby.”
    “I want the records first,” Case said abruptly.
    “Understood.”
    Case looked up at the man next to him. Troy Weir was thirty-two, handsome, charismatic, brilliant, sociopathic. Case’s only stepson from his marriage to Marlo Weir, a soap opera star who managed to traverse almost five decades before dying of alcoholism at age forty-six, Troy had been a troubled youth, in and out of jails and treatment centers since he was fourteen years old.
    It had started out as fistfights at school, but then there was a sexual assault charge and then another, and soon Troy faced rape charges in the California juvenile system. Frankly, Case’s stepson had all the common traits of a sociopath; chameleon-like, manipulative, charming, inwardly hostile with a sense of entitlement. Case could see the boy’s