David Ellis - The Wrong Man

She nodded. “Ray faxed me a copy back when he received it.”

“Good enough. And I trust there are no other documents you’ve brazenly withheld?”

“Not that I can think of at the moment.” Wendy watched me for a time, then her smirk slowly disappeared. “You’re not going to ask for an extension based on this-this innocuous piece of written discovery?”

“No,” I said.

Her posture softened. She looked up at me again. “So-how are you doing these days? You got your feet back under you?”

“Sometimes I pinch myself,” I said.

“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.”