But cameras didn't care whose behavior they captured. They recorded everyone. Officers on patrol, officers in hallways, officers sitting behind desks giving orders they thought no one would ever be able to prove, including Osmar's own office just down that same hallway, wired the same as every other room in this building. Alice carried her box out to her car, set it down in the trunk, and sat behind the wheel for a long moment before starting the engine. She wasn't finished.
Not even close. She just needed to find out exactly what those cameras had already caught. 2 days into her suspension, Alice sat in a small coffee shop on the edge of the city, far from the precinct and anyone who might recognize her. She wrapped both hands around a cup she hadn't touched, staring out the window at nothing in particular. The bell above the door rang.
Lieutenant Logan Fenwick walked in, spotted her, and slid into the booth across from her without wasting time on small talk. "I found it," he said. Alice sat up straighter. "Found what? " "The metadata," Fenwick said, pulling a folded stack of papers from his jacket and laying them flat on the table from the old server backup. Your original complaint, the one that vanished from the system 6 years ago.
Alice pulled the papers toward her, scanning them fast. There it was in black and white. The case number she'd carried in her notebook for 6 years, the date, the timestamp, her name, and the details of what happened in that breakroom, exactly as she'd told Fenwick the day she filed it. And beneath that, a second time stamp. A deletion log buried in the server's backup history showing exactly when the file had been removed from the active system and which administrative account had done it.
This is real, Alice said quietly. This is proof. It's more than proof of the deletion, Fenwick said. It shows your complaint was formally logged, formally reviewed, and then illegally removed from department records. That's not just an ignored HR complaint anymore, Vincent.
That's evidence tampering. That's obstruction. Somebody could go to prison for this. Alice looked up from the papers. Whose account deleted it?
Fenwick met her eyes. Administrative access tied directly to the deputy chief's login credentials. Osmar's account. Alice sat back slowly, letting that settle into her chest. She had suspected it for weeks, ever since she found those other two women's files buried under the same handling, closed by the same person.
But seeing it laid out in cold, undeniable data was different. This wasn't suspicion anymore. This was proof. She's been protecting Corbin this whole time, Alice said. Not just 6 years ago.
She's the one who made the video inadmissible. She's the one who reinstated Corbin. She's the one who opened this fake evidence tampering review against me. And now we can prove she buried your original complaint herself," Fenwick said. "Which means every excuse she's used to protect Corbin and bury you falls apart. " If she manipulated evidence rules to protect herself once, a commission is going to want to know how many other times she's done exactly the same thing.