Once Judge Mordecai had shuffled his ample frame behind the bench, Dana stood up.
“What do you want now, Ms. Wittenberg?” he grumbled. “Please no bullshit at the beginning of the court week.”
“I move that the prosecution of this case be struck and Mr. Lestage be free to be on his way,” said Dana, again trying to hide the slight quiver in her voice and her shaking hands.
“Wittenberg, I said no bullshit first thing in the morning,” the judge reiterated. “What you just said, even on a severely constrictive reading of the word, would in fact be bullshit.”
“It isn’t, m’lord. I can prove it.”
“Well, hustle with it.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course, sir. It started this way. On Friday evening, around suppertime, Messieurs Danson and McGhee came to my home and dropped off forty-nine banker’s boxes crammed full of documents. There was no order or rhyme or reason to them. In fact, the documents looked like they had deliberately been shuffled—”
“I object to the innuendo,” said Scheff, rising. “We don’t fiddle with documents in that way. They may have appeared shuffled to my learned friend over here, but they weren’t. We considered your order on Friday and in a very short time frame, with many people working, we had the documents together, and Danson and McGhee delivered them personally to her home. At her home, some kind of monster dog attacked them. We’re not trying to make things difficult for her. We are trying to assist in whichever way possible. My very learned friend is sounding a bit paranoid, actually.”
The judge said nothing, but simply directed his gaze back to Dana. “What do you have?”
“I have assembled thirty-seven binders of documents,” Dana replied. “Under each tab there are between five and ten subdocuments. Each of those subdocuments refers to a document that has not been produced. And as you can tell from the subdocuments, those unproduced documents contain important information pertinent to this case. Those documents must exist, and have simply been removed from the forty-nine bankers boxes that we received. It’s the drown-them-with-paper-but-give-them-nothing-of-consequence type of defense. They knew I would work the entire weekend to put this together, and with this trial going, they never anticipated that I would expose what has happened.”
Sheff stood up again. “That is a travesty. That is an unethical comment made without proof, to prejudice the jury and just plain muck up the trial. Dismiss the application, m’lord.”
Wittenberg was feeling a little stronger. “The answer is simple, Judge,” she said. “If I am wrong, if I missed documents in the 100,000 sheets I received and analyzed in three days, then I apologize. That is possible. If I am, let him produce the documents that I say are missing and they say are not, and if I missed them, well, I apologize. But let’s see what they have.”
“A reasonable point, Mr. McSheffrey,” said the judge. “If Ms. Wittenberg missed something, show her the missing documents. If not, if those documents are really around, and these letters under these tabs seems to suggest that they certainly exist, you had better produce them, immediately, to Ms. Wittenberg. Now, are we ready to continue the trial?”
McSheffrey did not rise to the position of being lead prosecutor on the most serious conspiracy to commit murder case in Canadian—in fact, one might say, world—history by being slow on his feet. Things were seriously amiss here. Dana was sharper than she appeared. Sheff had known from the outset of the proceedings that she was clever and industrious. But it would have taken a platoon of paper hounds a month of microexamination to pick out the missing documents. That she was in fact correct, and that this was known to Sheff, was quite beside the point.
“M’lord, with the greatest of respect, I do not agree with the correctness of learned friend’s assertion. I can advise the court and I can provide affidavits from members of the RCMP that they provided everything that could possibly be relevant to my offices forthwith, that we copied it, and that nothing was held back. Could my learned friend provide an affidavit showing what, in fact, she did to argue that the alleged missing documents are indeed missing? She could not possibly have gone through 100,000 documents on a three-day weekend. The documents that she says are missing she has somewhere in those forty-nine boxes. She has just missed them.”
McSheffrey was highly skilled at the art of document nonproduction and well experienced in courtroom victories by document obfuscation. He could and would indeed provide affidavits from twenty loyal RCMP officers and junior Crown staffers, all of whom would swear that they copied everything, disclosed everything, and held back nothing. He simply would not swear an affidavit himself, nor would he have a certain key senior officer swear any affidavit—no one would ever detect that slight wrinkle. But Dana was working on her own, or was she? Penn-Garrett might know the law inside and out, but he no longer had the stuff within him to sort through 100,000 pages of documents. And what was this bullshit little Trojan troglodyte that kept appearing on her computer screen? And those apparent haywire messages? And how could she, a very junior lawyer, possibly know about the existence of TTIC at all and its apparent connection to this case? It was time to set lose the hounds to see what could be retrieved.
“I can assure this court,” said Dana, shading the reality just a touch, “as an officer of this court, that the documentation has been reviewed with scrupulous care to my satisfaction, and that the documents that I have stated are missing in those thirty-seven binders are, in fact,
