Local coverage led with the engineer's findings and Stella's testimony instead of vague conflict-of-interest questions. A columnist who'd questioned Francis's motives days earlier published a follow-up walking it back. Public sentiment, which had wobbled under Garvey's smear, swung hard back in Francis's direction. That night, sitting in Stella's sister's guest room, Francis's phone buzzed with a message from Roxanne.
"Anderson says oversight board members are already talking about formal charges. This might actually be moving." Francis read the message twice. Then he looked over at Stella, who was watching the news replay quietly on her phone beside him.
For the first time since the morning their door came down, it felt like the ground might finally be shifting under the right people. The oversight board meeting was scheduled for the following week. Inside police headquarters, that meant one thing to Captain Roger Garvey. Time was running out to find out who had leaked the footage that started all of this.
He'd been asking around quietly for days. Who had access to the raw files that morning? Who transferred data off department servers around the same time the footage surfaced? It didn't take long.
Officer Laurelai Oliver had been the newest name on his unit for less than a year, and new officers made mistakes. She'd logged into the evidence server that morning under her own credentials at a timestamp that lined up close enough to the leak for Garvey to be certain. He found her alone in the equipment room on Wednesday afternoon, restocking her vest between shifts. He closed the door behind him.
"Funny thing about server logs," Garvey said, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "They keep records of everything. Every login. Every file pulled."
Oliver kept her eyes on the vest in her hands. She focused on the buckles and refused to look up at him. "I don't know what you're talking about, Captain." "Sure you don't."
His voice stayed calm, almost friendly, which somehow made it worse. "Here's the thing, Oliver. You've got what, eight months on this job? Less?"
"You've still got a lot of career left to lose." He took a step closer. "A career that depends a whole lot on people trusting you've got their back when things get complicated."
"Cops who talk to reporters instead of their own department don't exactly build that kind of trust. Word travels." "I never talked to a reporter," Oliver said, which was technically true. She'd sent the file through an anonymous line.
She hadn't spoken a single word to Anderson directly. "Doesn't matter how it happened," Garvey said. "Matters what people believe happened. Right now, a lot of people in this building believe it was you."