Then pushed back again. Robert filed complaint after complaint about the bottleneck, frustrated and unable to understand where the resistance was coming from. Mackie felt it too. Every time he checked in on the review's progress, he got the same vague answer.
Still processing. Still under review. Should have something soon. Nothing ever moved.
He didn't yet know Hollander's name was attached to any of it. He only knew something in the system had closed around the investigation like a fist. Quiet. Deliberate.
That night, alone in her office long after everyone else had gone home, Hollander opened an old email account she rarely touched anymore. She scrolled back four years. Then two. Until she found the threads.
Her own words typed out in black and white, recommending both of Petrov's complaints be closed without further action. Her cursor hovered over the delete button. She thought about her daughter. About the mortgage on the house she'd bought the year she made chief.
About the ceremony where the mayor had pinned her badge and called her the future of the department. She clicked delete. Both threads vanished, one after the other, gone from the account as if they'd never existed at all. But somewhere on a backup server she'd forgotten about, one the department's IT policy required for every official account, the emails remained untouched.
Waiting. Robert didn't give up easily. That wasn't in her nature. When the body-camera requests kept disappearing into delay after delay, she stopped asking politely.
She started demanding answers on paper, forcing every stall tactic into writing and building a trail of her own that couldn't be quietly buried the way the rest of this seemed to be getting buried. It was that stubbornness that finally cracked something open. Digging through the records that did come through, Robert noticed a mismatch that nobody had caught before. Petrov's radio log, timestamped the morning of the incident, said, "Subject resisted. Verbal command used to gain compliance."
But his official written report, filed two full days later, told a slightly different story. One that mentioned a physical altercation attempt and aggressive posturing that didn't appear anywhere in the radio log at all. Two accounts. Two days apart.
Two different stories from the same officer about the same six minutes. Robert brought the discrepancy straight to Hollander's desk, laying both documents side by side. "These don't match, Chief. Not even close."
"Either he lied on the radio or he lied in the report. Either way, that's a problem I can't sit on anymore." Hollander stared down at the papers for a long moment. She'd been slow-walking this review for over a week now.
Burying it under procedure and delay. But a documented contradiction like this, sitting in Robert's hands, already written up and already timestamped, wasn't something she could make disappear without raising exactly the kind of suspicion she was trying to avoid. She made a decision. Choosing the smaller fire over the larger one.
"Suspend him," Hollander said. "Pending full review." The order came down that same afternoon. Mackie was in his office when word reached him.
Not from Hollander directly, but from a sergeant who stuck his head in the doorway, unable to keep the news to himself. "Captain, you're not going to believe this. They're pulling Petrov's badge right now. Whole shift's watching."