Archambault had seen Dana huddle up with Lee Pen-Garrett in an isolated corner of the cafeteria, and mentioned as much to McSheffrey. Sheff was not impressed. Nothing good could come of this. Little Puppy was becoming a nuisance. Lee was probably telling Dana to just continue throwing garbage into the trial just to confuse the jury.
“Order in the court,” bellowed the clerk.
Inspector Inderjit “Indy” Singh was on the stand. He had concluded his testimony in chief the previous day.
“Cross-examination, Ms. Wittenberg?”
“Yes m’lord,” said Dana, the quiver back in her voice, and her tongue again feeling like sand. She had the thirty-seven binders, each one containing references to the thirty-seven undisclosed documents that Turbee’s skill and supercomputers had identified. She had a total of fifteen sets of copies— twelve for the jury, one for the witness, one for the judge, one for McSheffrey, et al., and one for herself. This represented 555 binders, which, with one-inch spines, was almost fifty feet of binders. Blankstein deFijter had refused to assist, calling the venture idiotic. She bound them herself the night before and had Chris and one of the sheriffs line them up against one wall of the courtroom. She’d also scripted the questions she was planning to ask Inspector Singh. Judge Mordecai just shook his head when he saw the volume of material that had been dragged into court.
Of course, Dana being Dana, one of the volumes on counsel table slipped out of the bundle she was carrying under her arm, and when she reached to pick it up, all other fifteen volumes and then her computer fell to the floor.
The bottom assembly of the computer detached, and various bits of electronic pieces rolled across the floor. There were snickers from the jury and smirks from the prosecutors. Judge Mordecai rolled his eyes.
“Wittenberg, will you cut with the theatrics and just start your crossexamination? We’re too busy to have you crawl around the floor looking for whatever you just dropped there.”
“Yes, of course, my lord,” she responded, sounding somewhat muffled from underneath the counsel table.
It took a few more minutes for Dana to reassemble the injured volume and hand it up to the clerk, with Judge Mordecai drumming his fingers against the bench nonstop. It was 10:10 before things were rolling again.
“Mr. Singh,” Dana began, handing the first binder to the witness, “can you tell us what these seventeen documents are?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Indy carefully. “These are emails and memoranda that I had prepared during the course of the development of the case.”
“Do you see the number on top of each page?”
“Yes: MC16-26885.”
“What does that number mean?”
“The ‘MC’ means that the file was handled by our major crimes unit. The ‘16’ represents the year the file was opened, and the ‘26885’ represents the number of the file that was opened that year. For instance, the file that was opened before this one would be 26884, and the file opened after this file would be 26886.”
“That’s not the complete file, is it?”
Indy looked at the pages closely. “I’m just not sure, ma’am. I have managed thousands of files and I just can’t tell.”
“Well where’s the rest of the file?”
McSheffrey stood up and objected. “We gave her forty-nine boxes of documents. She found a few that she now alleges are apparently missing. The inspector can’t say if anything is missing. So how can she? Yesterday this court made a ruling. Ms. Wittenberg was to provide an affidavit of the research and work she did to review these boxes of documents and tell this court in such an affidavit that such documents have not been found, either in those boxes or in the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that she received before all of this. She has not done that. Now she is trying to perpetuate the myth in front of the jury that the prosecution is attempting to hide documents. Now she is suggesting that documents have been deliberately withheld. We have not done that.
Certainly, with a hundred thousand documents, discovery of documents cannot be flawless. But we have done everything possible to accommodate our very learned friend, and she is now just stalling for time, and, frankly, being ridiculous. She says documents were withheld. But she refuses to swear an affidavit.
“In any event,” McSheffrey continued, “Blankstein deFijter had ample opportunity to explore this in the discovery process of the case. As you may recall, they brought on endless applications on basically useless points. They could certainly have raised this issue then. It is a little late in the day to be raising these points now. The jury is doing a great service here. It is so wrong to unnecessarily delay them.” Jurors were nodding.
Judge Mordecai took off his glasses and looked at Dana. “What about that, Ms. Wittenberg?”
“That might be so, Judge, but, but . . .” she petered out, knowing full well every detail of the pretrial battle that Blankstein deFijter had waged. She had prepared all the documentation.
“Ms. Wittenberg, your firm has taken this through a preliminary inquiry that went for months and months, an inquiry where this particular witness was questioned extensively. Your firm has brought on disclosure motions before, during, and after the prelim. Now you’re doing this in the second week of trial? All you have to do is swear an affidavit that you truly do not have the allegedly missing thirty-seven documents, and how you came to that conclusion, and you have not done that. You are playing games here. We’ve already lost a day and a half of this trial by this pestering over documents that probably do not exist, or do exist and you simply can’t find. I order you to carry on,” Judge Mordecai commanded.
At that moment, all Dana could think about were the words of Lee PenGarrett: “Stick with it, Dana. Stick with it. There’s a tiny crack in the prosecution. I want you to hit that crack with a
