‘And why did he ask you to go and meet with the Merlows?’
‘To make certain that they were all right.’
‘Because Melanie Vega had been murdered that night?’
‘That’s right,’ she says.
‘Your honor, this is getting us nowhere.’ Cassidy is tromping around in front of her table now. ‘I still don’t see any of this as relevant. These people, the Merlows, did they see something or not? I mean, they’re either witnesses or they aren’t. If they’re witnesses, let’s put ’em on; if they’re not, let’s move on.’
Cassidy is getting a lot of support from Lama, head nodding like ‘right on.’ She still doesn’t get it.
‘If I could ask one more question, your honor, maybe I could clarify.’
He gives me a nod.
‘Ms. Colby, why did the federal government move George and Kathy Merlow in the middle of the night, on the very evening that Melanie Vega was murdered?’
‘Because we had reason to believe that Mrs. Vega had been murdered by mistake, that the intended victim was Kathy Merlow.’
As Dana says this, it sweeps like a tornado over the press rows at the front of the courtroom.
The pool camera at the back of the courtroom is whirring, its videotape capturing this. I can sense a transformation, from the local to the national angle as some of the gray heads in the press rows turn to each other and look, wide-eyed, wondering at the implications of all of this.
Cassidy is protesting that we have injected elements of evidence that were beyond discovery. She actually moves to strike all of Dana’s testimony on grounds that it cannot be verified.
‘Records of federally protected witnesses are sealed,’ she says. ‘What documentation do we have for any of this? How can the state possibly verify it?’
The fact that Dana has torched her career by these admissions seems to offer little proof of veracity, as least to Morgan Cassidy.
‘I might be able to help with that,’ I tell her. ‘Documentation,’ I say.
Cassidy’s mouth is a gaping hole, a cavern of silence as I offer this. It is clearly not what she wanted. Before she can speak I’m back from the counsel table with a stapled sheaf of papers handed to me by Harry. He’s passing out copies, one set to the clerk and another to Lama at the counsel table, where he is joined by Cassidy.
I show this document to Dana and she identifies it — a list of federally protected witnesses on a computer-generated form, something used by Justice and electronically sent over secure channels to field offices around the country. She asks me where I got this. I do not tell her. It came from a gracious editor at a newspaper in Lexington, Kentucky. What finally brought me to my senses was the news article read to me by Harry months before, the piece about the botched computer sale by the Department of Justice, the weak magnet used to erase the computer hard discs, and the eventual sale of these computers, still containing their highly confidential information, to the public. It was the news article that Harry hung on the bulletin board of the dayroom at the county jail, the one warning snitches to beware.
‘Your department had reason to believe that the Merlows were compromised, didn’t they?’
‘We had reason to believe that a number of relocated witnesses had been compromised.’
‘Why?’
She confirms the almost laughable folly with the computers. How Justice and the FBI tried to buy them back, even raided some homes and businesses, using warrants, to confiscate some of the equipment. I can tell this gets Harry’s ire, all the juices of the original story repackaged and concentrated. In the end the information was too far disseminated for the government to unring this particular gong. So they set about trying to relocate the witnesses, new identities on a priority basis, those believed to be most in danger first.
‘But they didn’t get to the Merlows right away, did they?’
‘No.’
‘Not until after Melanie Vega was murdered?’ I say.
‘That’s right.’
‘Ms. Colby, I want you to think very carefully. I’m going to ask you one final question, and I want you to answer clearly for the court. What did the Department of Justice discover after the murder of Melanie Vega that so upset them, that caused them to conceal this information, to withhold it from an attorney defending his client on charges in connection with that murder? Tell us,’ I say, ‘what was it that they found in those compromised computer records?’
Everything I have done, the entire foundation I have laid up to this point, has led to this question.
Dana sits poised in the box, the only person in the courtroom besides Harry and myself who knew that this moment would come.
‘They discovered…’ Her voice cracks a bit. ‘They discovered that the street address, the new street address on the computer records for Kathy Merlow, was wrong,’ she says. ‘A typographical error.’
‘Whose address was it?’
‘It belonged to Jack and Melanie Vega.’
There is a palpable roar that echoes through the courtroom, an audible wave of indignation that rolls through the public areas of this room — the thought that those charged with justice would conceal such an outrage. An innocent citizen dead, another on trial for her murder, when the barons of bureaucracy in Washington have known the truth for many months. Reporters are out of their chairs heading for the cameras in the hallway outside, visions of the lead on ‘Headline News.’
Woodruff is fanning pages of the computer document on the bench. When he finds it, he looks at me from on high, a glazed expression. His glasses fairly slide to the end of his nose before they drop off, where he catches them on the rebound off the blotter on the bench. He sinks back into the tufted leather of his chair. Melanie Vega and her child were murdered because a clerk in the bowels of the bureaucracy in Washington made a typographical error.
At this moment, the expression on Woodruff’s face is a hybrid between wonder and fury.
I can only surmise how high this thing goes. There is no doubt in my mind that Cabinet members in Washington will be ducking for cover by nightfall, an attorney general doing mea culpas, insisting that the buck stops at her desk, while she casts for underlings to throw onto the pyres of sacrifice, to appease the gods of politics. It is a scenario we have seen before, staged in other scandals.
As I look at her, drained and worn in the witness box, there is not a doubt in my mind that Dana will figure high on their list of victims. Her dreams of judicial glory are wafting on the winds, like the odors of carbonized wood in the wake of a wildfire.
Woodruff is banging his gavel on the bench, trying to bring the place back to order.
Cassidy is trying to holler some objection or a plea from her counsel table, but cannot be heard. Finally the judge’s voice breaks over the din. ‘There will be order or I will clear the room,’ he says. ‘Mr. Bailiff, have those people sit down or tell them to leave.’
It takes nearly a minute for what passes as order to be restored, a restless vapor of electricity floating just above our heads.
‘Your honor, we, the state, knew nothing about this.’
Cassidy’s protestations from the counsel table.
‘Speak for yourself,’ says Dana.
For the first time this morning I am surprised by the words that pass from Dana’s lips.
‘I cannot prove that you knew,’ Dana says. ‘But your investigator sure as hell did.’
What is clear is that Dana is not going down on this alone.
With this Cassidy is floored, looking at Lama with a face of betrayal. If it were anyone else she would not believe it, but with Jimmy’s track record to date, instinct tells Morgan not to jump to his defense too quickly.
‘Please explain that?’ I say. Dana is still my witness.
‘I mean that as liaison to the FBI in the postal bombing case, Lieutenant Lama was informed that the victim, Mrs. Reed, was a friend of Kathy Merlow, and that Mrs. Merlow was a federally protected witness.’