He picked up his phone and called the department's records supervisor directly, keeping his voice level even as frustration built behind his ribs. The answer he got back was the same two sentences, read aloud this time instead of typed, like the supervisor had rehearsed them. Francis hung up. He sat with that for a while.
Pauler's office had erased the one piece of evidence that would have shown beyond argument exactly what happened inside his house that morning. Without it, the case would come down to his word and Stella's word against a department that had already decided to protect its own. He didn't know yet that the footage wasn't actually gone. Across town, reporter Teresa Anderson had been quietly working her own angle on the story since the morning it broke.
She'd covered Garvey's tactical unit twice before, years apart, both times chasing complaints that had gone nowhere. She recognized the pattern the second she heard the raid on the district attorney's house had been the wrong address. She'd been making calls all week. On Tuesday afternoon, one of them finally connected.
The message came through an encrypted line. No name attached. Just a file and four words. "You will want to see this."
It was the body-cam footage. Every second of it. The breach. The shouting.
Stella on her knees in the grass. Garvey waving off the address correction. The sledgehammers going through drywall that had never needed to be touched. Anderson watched it twice before she believed what she was looking at.
She didn't know it had come from Officer Laurelai Oliver. Oliver had copied the file onto a personal drive in the chaos of that morning and sat on it for days, terrified of what would happen to her career if anyone found out but unwilling to let it disappear either. She'd sent it anonymously, routing it through a source she trusted. She kept her own name as far from it as she could manage.
Anderson published the footage that Thursday evening alongside her article. Within hours, it was everywhere. Local news. Then regional.
Then it was picked up by outlets across the state. The video didn't need much explanation. It spoke for itself. Officers tearing through a family's home.
An officer pointing out the wrong address. Garvey's flat voice saying, "Paperwork's paperwork. Finish the sweep," like the mistake didn't matter at all. Public outrage moved fast.
By Friday morning, the department was facing calls for an independent audit from three different city council members. By Friday afternoon, under mounting pressure, the department announced it was launching an internal review and, as a direct result, suspending the tactical unit's warrant authority until the review was complete. It wasn't an arrest. It wasn't a charge.
But it was the first real visible consequence to land on Garvey since the raid. Francis felt something loosen in his chest when he read the announcement. At headquarters, Garvey read the same announcement standing at his desk, his jaw working back and forth like he was chewing on something he couldn't spit out. "Suspended," he muttered over the paperwork.