Steve leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on his belly. “I suppose. But why would Joe never mention it to me? I mean, we were together for almost twenty years. You swap a hell of a lot of stories when you are in a small office together for that long. In many ways, I felt like I knew him even better than I knew Cindy. But Joe never said a single word about a settlement like that.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Do you know someone named Ethan Tucker?”
He shook his head. “Who is he?”
“He wired the money that Joe invested in my company.”
“You know, I still share a storage unit with Joe where we kept all of our old boxes of case files. Joe had plenty of boxes in there from before we ever formed our firm together. If there’s something to this case settlement, I bet it would be in there somewhere. If you want, I can give you the security codes. You’re welcome to go check it out for yourself.”
“Thanks. I will.”
I left Steve’s office more troubled than when I’d entered. Why wouldn’t Joe have mentioned a settlement that substantial to his law partner of twenty years? Lawyers were known for bragging about their big wins. Although Joe was humbler than most, it still seemed like something that would come up at some point. And why was Carol completely oblivious to the whole thing? If Joe had won a case that big early in his career—one that resulted in him pocketing a whopping $5 million or more—wouldn’t he have celebrated the win with his wife? I wondered if that meant the case predated their marriage. Even so, wouldn’t Joe have said something to Carol if he’d won a case that put millions in the bank before they were married? But he didn’t.
I could feel my anxiety steadily growing.
Maybe I’d find something in the storage unit.
Headed down the elevator with a small crowd of others, I began searching Google on my phone to see if anything might pop up online in relation to Joe Dobson and a big case settlement. It was a shot in the dark if the case was from before he had his firm with Steve. There were little news snippets here and there about cases involving Joe, but most of them were much more recent and on a small scale. Nothing at all jumped out about a multimillion-dollar settlement.
When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, I mindlessly walked out with the others, my face still planted in my phone. As I turned a corner, I bumped into someone coming from the opposite direction. It wasn’t a hard bump but enough to make me look up and immediately begin to apologize. The other party did the same. A brief “Sorry, sorry” exchange. But then I did a double take as the man moved past me. He was probably in his midfifties, bald with a brown mustache, wearing a tan, short-sleeve button-down shirt and jeans. He was the same guy with the navy tattoo on his wrist who had been inside the elevator with me this morning when I was going to see Craig Kinney. I watched him as he entered an elevator with a group of others. When he turned around, his eyes were directly on me. And they remained locked on me until the elevator doors completely shut.
Something told me it wasn’t a coincidence.
FOURTEEN
The storage unit was on the second floor of a nice facility just a few miles outside of downtown. I punched in the security codes Steve had given me to access the property gate and the building, then found a red metal garage-style door marked 213 halfway down a long hallway. After plugging in the numbers on the lock, I pulled the garage door all the way up and peered inside. The unit was probably ten feet by fifteen feet. As Steve had said, it was filled with stacks of old legal boxes. There were probably more than a hundred. I shook my head. Lawyers could create a lot of paperwork.
Thankfully, they’d left a walkway in the middle of the unit to access whichever box they needed. Those stacked in the very front were a crisper white and clearly from their most recent cases. All of them had black marker written on the outside identifying them by case name and date, and tagging them with either Steve’s or Joe’s name. Based on my conversation with Steve, I figured there was no real reason to search any of the boxes dated from their time working together. So I moved all the way to the back of the unit, where I found the oldest boxes. About twenty of them were stacked up against the back wall. They were well worn, some smashed in slightly on one corner or another, and a few were stained from either coffee or other unidentified liquids. Most of these boxes were also marked on the outside with case information.
I pulled a box from the top, set it on the floor, and lifted off the lid. It was stuffed with manila folders. I yanked one out and opened it. Joe’s name was on all the paperwork. I knew he had worked on his own for a while before forming his firm with Steve. The dates showed that the case was from more than thirty years ago. Was it necessary to keep legal paperwork forever? I skimmed that particular file and then pulled out another one. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for—I wasn’t a lawyer, after all—but I figured something might stand out to me if Joe had landed a case with a huge potential settlement.