“That good, eh?”
“No, I just like pinching myself.” We were done. I pushed myself out of the chair.
“Loser buys dinner,” I said.
“Deal. Someplace with a white tablecloth.”
She didn’t have to agree so quickly.
Bradley John all but pounced on me when I returned to the law firm. He was still young and eager, which I was hoping would rub off on me, at least the “eager” part. Bradley did three years as a county prosecutor in one of the collar counties, which meant he got good experience up front, but he tired of the reverse commute and wanted to work in the same city where he lived. He’d just turned thirty but still did the social-barhopping thing, still viewed his law career as completely in front of him, and overall seemed like a guy who was happy to be part of the team.
He had something to show me and beckoned me to the conference room, the war room. Once there, I picked up the document that Ray Rubinkowski had given me and flipped it over to the back, which had the cryptic handwriting:
AN
NM
??
“You figure who AN and NM are?” I asked.
“Working on it,” he said. “But I did figure out those symbols below the initials. They’re question marks. It means she had a question.”
“That’s first-class work, Bradley. And just for your own knowledge, it
would be very helpful if AN and NM were the initials of the two people who murdered Kathy Rubinkowski.”
“Got it.”
“And if you could get their confessions, too. That’d be great.”
“No problem, Boss. Next on my list.”
Bradley had taken little time becoming comfortable with my sarcasm. It was one of the few endearing qualities he possessed. That and being industrious and talented.
“LabelTek Industries versus Global Harvest International,”
he said, the name of the case that was in the header of the document Kathy Rubinkowski had sent to her parents. Presumably, that told us that Kathy had been preparing answers to written interrogatories related to that lawsuit.
I settled in for an explanation.
“Global Harvest International sells fertilizer and related products to commercial interests,” Bradley said to me. “LabelTek designs labels. They claim that they designed the label for a product that Global Harvest was selling called Glo-Max. It’s some kind of commercial-grade fertilizer. Anyway, they’re claiming Global Harvest took their design and used it and screwed them out of a royalty. So they’re suing, right?”
“The American way.”
“Right. They’re saying they are owed a royalty for every bag of Glo-Max that was sold. They estimate damages in the lawsuit to be in excess of three million dollars. So in this lawsuit, they issue all the standard discovery—interrogatories, requests for production of documents—all that normal bullshit flurry of paper.”
He pointed at the document that Ray Rubinkowski had given me. I flipped it over from the back, with the handwritten initials, to the front, which bore the heading
Exhibit A: Response to Interrogatory #2
.
“So what was interrogatory number two?” I asked.
“LabelTek asked for a list of every company that had purchased Glo-Max fertilizer.”
I looked down at the paper. Sure. This was the response to that question. Forty-seven different companies had purchased Glo-Max fertilizer.
“This is where it gets interesting,” said Bradley. He reached into a box and removed a thick stack of documents attached to a green folder, bound
at the top. This was part of the court file. For cases that are no longer active, the clerk’s office will let licensed attorneys check out a court file for twenty-four hours. But you mess with the order of the documents or remove one and forget to replace it, the Supreme Court gets testy. “I found Global Harvest’s answer to that interrogatory,” he said.
“I have it right here, right? The one Ray Rubinkowski gave to me.”
“Wrong.” Bradley suppressed a smile. He was right—this was getting interesting.
He had a document ready for me. He’d already made copies from the court file and replaced them in the file. He slid it in front of me. It was the entire set of Global Harvest’s responses to the many interrogatories issued by LabelTek. The first page bore the court clerk’s file stamp, which made it official. I leafed through to the back of the document, because I knew the response to interrogatory number two was appended as a separate exhibit due to its length.
“The draft response to interrogatory number two that you got from Mr. Rubinkowski had forty-seven names on it,” said Bradley. “The one they filed had forty-
six
.”
I did a quick check, but Global Harvest’s lawyers had made it easy for me by numbering the list. Sure enough, the response listed forty-six companies, one less than the draft answer that Kathy Rubinkowski had mailed to her father.
“And you’re going to tell me which one was missing,” I said.
Bradley nodded. “It was a company called Summerset Farms Incorporated. It was number thirty-eight on the draft response Kathy sent her parents. It doesn’t appear in the final version filed in court.”
Okay. That might be something. Or it might be nothing. Global Harvest didn’t list Summerset Farms as one of the purchasers. So what?
“Who is Summerset Farms?” I asked.
“There isn’t much online about them. Looks like they’re a local company that grows wheat and makes a granola and a cereal they sell locally.”
“Okay. Is that it?” I asked.
“Nope.” He shook his head vigorously, full of pride in his discovery. He slid another document in front of me. “Here is a subpoena that LabelTek issued to Summerset Farms.”
I looked it over. It was a subpoena duces tecum, meaning a subpoena
for records only and not for a personal appearance. It requested “copies of any and all contracts, invoices, shipping orders, correspondence, and any other like documents pertaining to the purchase of Glo-Max 2. 0 Fertilizer from Global Harvest International or its subsidiaries or agents.” It also requested the name of the individual at Summerset Farms “most knowledgeable about any transactions involving Glo-Max.”
A lot of legalese, but I got the drift. “Somehow,” I said, “the lawyers at LabelTek had reason to know about Summerset Farms, even though Global Harvest didn’t mention them.”
“Right, and it took me a day to figure out how.” Bradley was enjoying himself. The thrill of a discovery, a breakthrough, which I certainly hoped this was.
“The sale of certain fertilizers are governed by state and federal regulations. I’m not going to pretend to know the full extent, but I do know that our state’s Department of Agriculture, maybe in concert with the feds, maybe separate—”
“Bradley, cut to it.”
“Okay. The state agriculture department requires that companies report sales of certain kinds of fertilizer. The state tracks the sales and movement.”
“So if someone looked it up, they could see that Global Harvest sold Glo-Max fertilizer to Summerset Farms.”
“Something like that,” Bradley said. “The database doesn’t include all the information. You don’t know for sure which brand of fertilizer was purchased from reading the public portion of the database. But you can see that Summerset Farms is listed as a purchaser, yeah.”
Bradley showed me another document. Another subpoena. This one was issued to the state Department of Agriculture.
“Same day that LabelTek subpoenaed Summerset Farms,” he said, “January fifth, they also sent a subpoena to the state Department of Agriculture.”
Right. Same date, January 5. Same basic information requested. They wanted to know if the state had any records of Summerset Farms purchasing the Glo-Max product.
“Okay,” I said. “The lawyers for LabelTek weren’t going to trust their opponents in litigation to list all their customers. I mean, the more sales
Global Harvest made, the more money LabelTek can claim as royalties, right? So they subpoenaed Summerset Farms and the Department of Agriculture. That makes sense. That’s what I would have done. Take a shot. See what you find.”
“Right,” said Bradley.
“And—what did they find?”
A wide grin spread across Bradley’s face. “Nothing,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll bite. Why did they find nothing, Bradley?”
He slid another document in front of me. The caption read, “Motion for Voluntary Dismissal and for a Good-Faith Finding.”
I was no expert in civil litigation, but I knew what a voluntary dismissal was—it meant the lawsuit was being dropped. I was vaguely aware, through Shauna, that settlements had to be approved by the court. The court had to find that the settlement was made in “good faith.”
Okay, fine—the parties settled. Civil lawsuits settle far more often than they go to trial. That’s one of the myriad reasons I loathe civil litigation.
“Check the date,” Bradley said.
The motion for voluntary dismissal was filed on January 8.
“Interesting,” I said.
“Three days after the subpoenas were issued,” said Bradley. “And that includes the time to actually reach a settlement. Look at the signed settlement agreement. The date is January seventh.”
He was right. The settlement was signed on January 7 by someone named Randall M. Manning, CEO and president of Global Harvest International.
“And factor in that it takes at least a few conversations to reach a settlement,” I said. “And then draw up the papers.”
Bradley was nodding enthusiastically. “That means they settled the lawsuit almost immediately upon seeing those subpoenas.”
Okay, but we were still missing something. I hadn’t read these documents, but Bradley obviously had.
“How much was the settlement?” I asked.
This kid couldn’t stop grinning. “Remember I said that LabelTek estimated damages at three mil?”
“I do.”
“They settled for
four
million, plus over a hundred thousand in attorneys’ fees.”
“Wow.” I got up from my chair and started pacing. I wished I had my football. “So Kathy Rubinkowski, preparing draft answers to written discovery in the lawsuit, makes a list of Glo-Max purchasers that includes Summerset Farms. Then somebody, ultimately, removes Summerset from that list. Then the enterprising lawyers representing LabelTek check the state database, take a shot, and issue subpoenas to Summerset and the Department of Agriculture.”
“Yep.”
“And basically before sundown the next day, Global Harvest has completely laid down. Not only do they settle, but they settle for
more
than LabelTek was requesting, and they pay their attorneys’ fees. That’s got to be the first time in recorded history that a case settled by giving the plaintiff every dollar they asked for,
plus
an additional third,
plus
fees.”
“And the case had only just begun,” said Bradley. “They hadn’t even taken depositions yet. It’s not like a witness turned on them or something. This is totally bizarre.”
“You forgot the best part,” I said. “Kathy Rubinkowski was murdered on January thirteenth.”
Bradley kicked up his feet onto the conference room table, his performance completed.
“You believe in coincidences, Boss?”
My young associate deserved a gold star. He’d found a thread. Now we had about two weeks to see how hard we could pull on it.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I said. “But I do believe in cover-ups.”
The law firm of Dembrow, Lane, and McCabe was twenty lawyers, covering the gambit for its corporate clients. They had a bankruptcy practice and an intellectual property group, but their bread and butter was serving the everyday needs of large companies, from labor and employment to regulatory compliance to transactional work to litigation.
A quick Google search told me that the firm laid off ten lawyers, a third of their workforce, just over a year ago. Corporate law firms rose and fell with the fate of their clients, and therefore with the economy. Some of these midsize firms were successfully using the economic downturn as a marketing tool—
big-firm representation at a small-firm price
, that kind of thing—but apparently not so for Dembrow, Lane.
Their offices were what you’d expect, designed to impress but not impressive. The conference room to which they led us on the thirty-second floor had a view of the commercial district, which was buzzing on a Friday morning.
I was alone. I’d thought about bringing along Bradley John, who had uncovered this information two days ago. And it would have been nice to have Shauna here, who can read people with the best of them. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was better just the two of us.
Bruce McCabe entered the conference room at nine forty-five—fifteen minutes late—without apology. He was about six feet tall and a little soft in the midsection. He had a high-and-tight haircut and dark, deep-set eyes. I knew from the bio on his firm’s website that McCabe started in the
military, serving in the JAG Corps, before he moved to the private sector some twenty years ago. What the bio didn’t say, but what I caught as a vibe from the moment he entered the room, was that Bruce McCabe was a humorless man, with an intensity bordering on anger.
He made a point of checking his watch before he even offered his hand to me. “My morning is full,” he said. “I made some time for you but not much.”
“I appreciate you doing that,” I said.
“You didn’t exactly ask nicely.”
That was true. When I couldn’t even get him on the phone, I threatened his secretary with a subpoena. Then I repeated the threat to him. It was an empty threat, in fact. A subpoena would have tipped the prosecution to my strategy. My case wasn’t all that good on innocence, so I needed to at least keep the element of surprise. But he didn’t know that. The subpoena threat got his attention. That told me something, right there.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said.
“I represent Tom Stoller, the man charged with Kathy Rubinkowski’s murder.”
“You said that on the phone.”
“We have some questions about her death.”
“You said that on the phone, too. Are you going to tell me something new?”