James called discovery the part of a case where both sides have to show their cards. I liked that phrase. It made the process sound orderly. It made it sound as if everyone would lay their papers on the table at the same time, and the truth would be the card left standing at the end. What I learned, over the next few months, was that discovery was slower than that. It was letters, and deadlines, and objections, and more letters. It was waiting for answers that arrived in boxes.
The first request went to Harlow & Grey. James asked for the security video from the afternoon I was in the store. He asked for the fitting-room records, if any existed. He asked for the store's written loss-prevention protocol, and for training records showing who had been taught that protocol. He asked for the incident report, for the 911 recording, for emails and messages about that afternoon, and for any record of prior complaints about how customers had been treated.
The store's lawyer answered with objections. He said some of the requests were too broad. He said some of the records did not exist. He said the video had been recorded over in the ordinary course of business. He said the store had no obligation to produce employee emails that had nothing to do with me.
James had expected that too. He filed a motion, which is a formal request asking the judge to order the store to produce what it was withholding. I did not attend the hearing. James called me afterward and said the judge had ordered the store to produce most of what we had asked for, with limits. The store would have thirty days. The video, if it still existed in any form, had to be preserved. The incident report, if one had been written, had to be produced.
Thirty days passed. A box arrived at James's office. Inside were copies of the store's loss-prevention policy, a few pages of training materials, and a one-page incident report that said almost nothing. The policy said employees should not accuse customers without direct observation. It said employees should not search bags without consent. It said employees should call a manager. It said a manager should assess the situation before calling police. On paper, it sounded careful. On paper, it sounded like the kind of policy that would have protected me.
The training materials were thinner. There was a sign-in sheet from a meeting two years earlier and a handout about greeting customers and watching the floor. There was nothing that explained what an employee should do when another customer demanded a bag search, or what a manager should do when a customer called 911 after being told not to confront someone.
The incident report was the most disappointing. It listed the date, the time, and the names of Rachel and Lily. It said a customer had reported a possible theft. It said police had arrived. It said no merchandise was missing. It did not say who had called 911. It did not say what Susan had said. It did not say what I had said. It read as if someone had written it to say as little as possible while still being able to call it a report.
James was not surprised. He said the first production in a case was often incomplete. We would ask again, more narrowly, for the schedule, any notes Rachel had kept, and communications between Rachel and Victor Harlow in the week after the incident.
I asked him whether this was normal. He said yes. Discovery was not one request. It was a conversation, conducted in formal letters, in which one side kept asking and the other kept deciding how much to reveal.
The second round took longer. The store produced the schedule. It produced a short email from Rachel to Victor, dated two days after the incident, saying a customer had called police during a fitting-room dispute and that no merchandise had been found missing. It produced a longer email from Victor to the store's lawyer, asking how to respond if a reporter called. It did not produce any notes from Rachel. It did not produce any messages from Susan.
James asked for the 911 recording from the city, rather than from the store. That arrived faster. I listened to it with David in James's office. Hearing Susan's voice again made my hands tighten. She sounded certain. She sounded as if she were describing something she had watched closely. She said a woman had taken three garments into a fitting room and come out with two. She asked for police to come. The dispatcher asked if the store had requested police. Susan said the store was handling it, but she wanted police anyway.
That recording mattered. It proved what the store's letter had tried to blur: the police had not been called by the store. They had been called by Susan, after Rachel had told her not to confront me.
James also subpoenaed the police records. Officer Webb's report was brief and factual. It said he and Officer Patel had responded to a call about a possible theft, had spoken to me at the register, and had checked the fitting room and found the third garment behind the fitting-room desk. No arrest had been made. No merchandise had been taken. It was the first document I had seen that matched what I remembered.
By the end of that phase, we had a stack of paper that told two stories. The store's papers said it had followed a careful policy. The police papers said nothing had been stolen. The 911 recording said Susan had called on her own. What we did not yet have was anything that explained why the store had been so quick to say nothing had gone wrong.
James said discovery was not over. He said we would ask for more. He said the store's internal communications might still hold something. I did not know what he expected to find. I thought we were looking for a missing video, or a fuller report. I did not yet understand that we were about to find something much larger, something the store had never intended to show anyone.