Page 36 of Out of the Shadows
“How so?”
“He got all these boxes of files—nothing really of value. The furniture was nice, but not worth what he paid for it.”
“Aw, yeah, Unit 238. The unit from hell.”
Margo frowned and raised her eyebrows, silently urging the clerk to continue talking. When he didn’t, she prompted, “What happened?”
“What didn’t happen? First, I have this guy practically bribing me to let him pay the fees on the unit and a thousand bucks for my trouble. We can’t do that. Once the auction is posted, we are legally required to have the auction. I told him to come on Friday and bid with everyone else. Sometimes we only have one or two bidders on a space, and I didn’t expect anyone to want that unit—there wasn’t much in there, and the boxes were clearly file boxes. Didn’t look like they had much value to me.”
“Odd,” Margo said and leaned slightly forward, as if hanging on his every word.
He nodded. “It’s happened before, but no one was ever thatpushy. And then Thursday night there was a break-in. Fortunately, we have motion detectors that are separate from the alarm system. Whoever came disabled the alarm, so they had some skill, but they didn’t know about the motion detectors inside the storage buildings because the office is on a separate system. The alarm is loud, all these bright lights go off. The police came within seven minutes, but whoever broke in was gone.”
“How do you know they were after that unit?”
He shrugged. “I don’t, really, but we have three buildings, right? All climate controlled. They entered the building with Unit 238. I actually didn’t think much about it until Friday during the auction.”
“What happened then?” Margo asked as if he was telling her the most fascinating story she’d ever heard. The more she seemed interested, the chattier he got.
“So, like I said, usually we only have one or two people bidding on each unit. Sometimes a larger group comes if it’s really good stuff—like last year, there was a unit that had a shit-ton of sports memorabilia. Signed baseballs, autographed pictures, sporting equipment. Until Unit 238, that was the largest auction we had, went for over three thousand dollars. But the bidder later sold most of the stuff and made many times more. But for a unit with boxes and a couple pieces of furniture? I expected one, maybe two, and mostly wanting the office furniture.”
“Charlie said he was surprised. I can’t believe he paid that much,” Margo said, urging the guy to tell her what Charlie actually paid, but asking would clue him in that she was making it all up and wasn’t privy to Charlie’s purchase.
“There were two other guys bidding,” the sales clerk said. “But they dropped out after it hit five thousand. Everything is cash, so if you don’t have the cash on hand...” He shrugged. “Your friend Charlie came prepared, loaded everything right then in a U-Haul he’d brought with him. One of the bidders left—he was really pissed—but the other guy, the one in a suit, tried to get your friend to sell him the boxes. I thought he would, because literally the guy offered him five thousand cash for three dozen boxes of what had to be worthless files—and he just smiled and said maybe he would after he went through everything.”
The second clerk piped up then, swiveling around on his stool. “You should have seen that guy flip out,” he said.
“Charlie doesn’t flip out,” Margo said. “He’s pretty even-tempered.” She had no idea, but from what Jack and Logan had said, it was a good guess.
“No, the suit. He got all red in the face and then I heard him offer your friend five thousand cash now, and more later. When I went over because it was getting testy, the guy walked away.”
“Do you have his name?” Margo said. “I mean, do you know why he was so interested in those things? Maybe they used to belong to him?”
“Never saw him before,” the first clerk said, and the second nodded. “Never saw any of those three people bidding on Unit 238. Which is odd, because we get a lot of repeat bidders.”
The office phone started ringing, and Margo thanked him for his time.
Files from a law firm... what was the value? Why were they in the storage unit? Why in default? And why were people so interested in them?
Her cell phone rang when she drove away. It was her mother.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Margo. Where did you find the files?”
“In a garage. They were auctioned off at a self-storage facility,” Margo said. She told her what she’d learned. “So who are these lawyers? Why would they store their files instead of passing them to whoever took over their practice?”
“John Thornton and Vincent Hedge.”
“You know them?”
“I knew John, never met his partner. They handled family law. John died four, nearly five months ago. His partner, who was already semi-retired, shut down the practice.”
“Charlie Barrett paid over five thousand for the contents of their storage unit.”
“That seems high.”
“Very high. Not only that, two others were bidding against him.”
