Free The Runaway Jury by John Grisham

to reach this routine selection without apparent acrimony. He’d seen much worse. One jury, half white and half black, had been unable to elect a foreman. They later brawled over the lunch menu.
    “I trust you’ve read my written instructions,” he continued, then launched into a detailed lecture in which he repeated twice everything he’d already put in print.
    Nicholas Easter sat on the front row, second seatfrom the left. He froze his face into a mask of noncommitment, and as Harkin droned on he began to take in the rest of the players. With little movement of the head, he cut his eyes around the courtroom. The lawyers, packed around their tables like vultures ready to pounce on roadkill, were, without exception, staring unabashedly at the jurors. Surely they’d tire of this, and soon.
    On the second row behind the defense sat Rankin Fitch, his fat face and sinister goatee looking straight into the shoulders of the man in front of him. He was trying to ignore Harkin’s admonitions and pretending to be wholly unconcerned about the jury, but Nicholas knew better. Fitch missed nothing.
    Fourteen months earlier, Nicholas had seen him in the Cimmino courtroom in Allentown, Pennsylvania, looking then much the same as he looked now—thick and shadowy. And he’d seen him on the sidewalk outside the courthouse in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, during the Glavine trial. Two sightings of Fitch were enough. Nicholas knew that Fitch now knew that he’d never attended college at North Texas State. He knew Fitch was more concerned about him than about any of the other jurors, and with very good reason.
    Behind Fitch were two rows of suits, sharply dressed clones with scowling faces, and Nicholas knew these to be the worried boys from Wall Street. According to the morning paper, the market had chosen not to react to the jury’s composition. Pynex was holding steady at eighty bucks a share. He couldn’t help but smile. If he suddenly jumped to his feet and shouted, “I think the plaintiff should getmillions!” the suits would bolt for the door and Pynex would drop ten points by lunch.
    The other three—Trellco, Smith Greer, and ConPack—were also trading evenly.
    On the front rows were little pockets of distressed souls who Nicholas was certain had to be the jury experts. Now that the selecting was done, they moved to the next phase—the watching. It fell to their miserable lot to hear every word of every witness and predict how the jury absorbed the testimony. The strategy was that if a particular witness made a feeble or even damaging impression on the jury, then he or she could be yanked off the stand and sent home. Perhaps another, stronger witness could then be used to repair the damage. Nicholas wasn’t sure about this. He’d read a lot about jury consultants, even attended a seminar in St. Louis where trial lawyers told war stories about big verdicts, but he still wasn’t convinced these “cutting edge” experts were little more than con artists.
    They claimed to evaluate jurors just by watching their bodily reactions, however slight, to what was said. Nicholas managed another smile. What if he stuck his finger up his nose and left it there for five minutes? How would that little expression of body language be interpreted?
    He couldn’t classify the rest of the spectators. No doubt there were a number of reporters, and the usual collection of bored local lawyers and other courthouse regulars. The wife of Herman Grimes sat midway back, beaming with pride in the fact that her husband had been elected to such a lofty position. Judge Harkin stopped his rambling and pointed at Wendall Rohr, who stood slowly, buttoned his plaid jacket while flashing his false teethat the jurors, and strode importantly to the lectern. This was his opening statement, he explained, and in it he would outline his case for the jury. The courtroom was very quiet.
    They would prove that cigarettes cause lung cancer, and, more precisely, that the