Glances slid away instead of meeting his eyes. He didn't need to hear the whole thing to know where it was coming from. Petrov hadn't wasted any time. Mackie thought about confronting it head-on.
Standing up at the next roll call and telling every officer in that room exactly what happened on his driveway. But he stopped himself. Not out of fear. Out of strategy.
A man defending himself sounded desperate. A man gathering proof sounded dangerous. Mackie intended to be the second kind. That afternoon, alone in his new office with the door shut, he opened the personnel database.
He typed in one name. Petrov, Denver. The file loaded slowly, the way old systems always did. Mackie sat back and waited.
He drummed his fingers once against the desk before the records filled the screen. He read carefully. Line by line. No shortcuts.
Ten years on the force. Average performance reviews. Nothing special. Nothing terrible.
Then, buried three pages down, two entries made Mackie go still. Citizen complaint: excessive force during traffic stop, filed four years earlier. Status: resolved, no action taken. Citizen complaint: improper conduct, racial bias alleged, filed two years earlier.
Status: resolved, no action taken. Mackie leaned closer to the screen and read the resolution notes attached to each. Both were thin. A few lines each.
Vague language about insufficient evidence and conflicting accounts. No mention of witness interviews. No mention of any real investigation at all. Two complaints.
Two dismissals. Two men or women somewhere in this city who had lived through exactly what Mackie had lived through on his own driveway and who had been told, in so many words, that it didn't matter enough to look into. This wasn't one bad morning. This was a pattern.
Somebody along the way had made sure it never went any further than a filing cabinet. Mackie copied the file details into a private notebook, writing by hand instead of trusting a screen he didn't fully understand yet. Names. Dates.
Case numbers. He wanted a record that existed outside any system Petrov or anyone protecting Petrov might be able to touch. He thought about the officers who signed off on those resolutions. Somebody had reviewed those complaints and decided they weren't worth pursuing.
Somebody had made Petrov's problem disappear. Not once, but twice. If that person was still around, still holding power in this department, then Mackie wasn't just dealing with one dishonest officer anymore. He closed the file and sat back.
He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, letting the weight of it settle. That evening, he came home to find Darlene in the kitchen, dinner half made, the smell of garlic filling the air. She took one look at his face and set down the knife she was holding. "What happened?"
Mackie pulled out a chair and sat down heavily, rubbing a hand over his jaw. "Petrov's got two prior complaints, both buried. Both dismissed without any real investigation, near as I can tell." Darlene leaned against the counter, arms crossed.