He stood and walked to the window of his office. He looked out over the city he'd sworn to protect the same year Garvey had first pinned on his captain's bars. Somewhere out there were three families who'd gone through exactly what Stella had gone through. Kneeling on their own lawns.
Watching strangers tear their homes apart. Nobody had ever answered for it. Nobody had ever even tried. "I want you to reach out to all three of them," Francis said, turning back around.
"Brooks and the other two. Carefully. Let them know their cases are being reopened. Ask if they're willing to talk about what happened."
"Some of them might not want to relive it," Pepper said gently. "I understand that," Francis said. "But if they're willing, their stories change everything." He looked back down at the four folders spread across his desk.
"This isn't just about my house anymore. It's about a department that's been doing this for years and burying it every single time." His eyes moved across Brooks's folder, the two other names he was already starting to memorize, and his own case sitting right alongside them. No different in the department's eyes than any of the others until the moment he'd said his job title out loud on his own front lawn.
That was the difference. That was the only difference. Francis intended to use it. He gathered the folders together, squared the edges, and set them in a neat stack at the corner of his desk.
Not filed away. Not buried. Front and center, where he'd see them every single morning until this was finished. "Four for four," he said again, quiet and certain.
"Now it's a pattern, not an accident. Patterns are a lot harder to hide." The following week, Francis's office filed a formal subpoena demanding the original body-cam footage from every officer present during the raid on Somerset Court. It should have been simple. Body-cam footage was standard evidence.
Francis's office requested it in cases like this all the time. He expected pushback, maybe some delay tactics, but not what actually landed on his desk two days later. A letter from the department's records division, two sentences long. "Footage from the incident in question was corrupted during server upload and cannot be recovered. We regret the inconvenience."
Francis read it twice. Then he set it down flat on his desk and stared at it for a long moment. "Corrupted," he said out loud to no one. "All of it."
"Every single officer's camera at the exact same time." Pepper, standing across from his desk, shook her head slowly. "That's not how the system works. Even if one camera glitched, they wouldn't all fail on the same call."
"I know," Francis said. "That's the point. It's not a technical failure. It's a decision."