"DA's Office Faces Conflict of Interest Questions." His chief of staff, Roxanne, stood in the doorway watching it with him. "They're better at this than we gave them credit for," she said quietly. "They've had practice," Francis said.
"This is exactly what they did to Brooks. To the other two families. Make it about them instead of what actually happened." He clicked the television off and sat in the sudden quiet, jaw tight.
"It worked before because nobody with a platform was standing behind those families. It's not going to work this time." Roxanne crossed her arms. "So what do we do?"
Francis was already reaching for his phone. He was already thinking about the engineer's report sitting in a folder on his desk, the demolition invoices, and the photographs Stella had taken of the wreckage before any repairs began. He thought about his wife, still displaced from her own home, still flinching at loud noises since that morning. "They want to talk about conflict of interest," Francis said.
"Fine. Let's give them something harder to argue with than an opinion piece." He looked up at Roxanne, something hard and certain settling into his expression. "Set up a press conference in front of the house."
"I want the cameras standing exactly where those officers were standing when they tore it apart." "When?" "As soon as we can get it together," Francis said. "They gave us a story built on doubt."
"It's time we gave them the receipts." Two days later, cameras lined the sidewalk outside 44 Somerset Court. Francis stood on his own front lawn, the same patch of grass where Stella had knelt with her wrists zip-tied behind her. He looked out at a crowd of reporters that had grown far larger than his office anticipated.
Teresa Anderson stood near the front, notebook ready, having covered enough of this story already to know it wasn't finished. Behind Francis, the house still wore its wounds openly. The plywood covering the broken windows hadn't been removed. The hole in the hallway wall was visible through the open front door.
He'd insisted on it staying exactly as it was for this. Let people see it. Let them stop imagining and start looking. "Three days ago," Francis began, voice steady and carrying clean across the yard, "a story ran suggesting I opened an investigation into this department out of personal revenge."
"That I'm using my office to settle a score." He paused, letting that sit in the air for a moment. "I want to show you exactly what score we're talking about." He held up a folder.
Then he handed pages to Roxanne, who passed copies down the row of reporters. "This is an independent structural engineer's report commissioned by my office and reviewed by two separate contractors. It documents damage to load-bearing walls that no search for a safe or a suspect would ever require." He turned a page.
"Walls opened up in five separate places. A support beam struck hard enough to compromise it structurally. None of it was necessary to execute a warrant, even the correct warrant for the correct house three blocks from here." He let the engineer's findings speak plainly, page by page.