"All of it together, before anyone in that building has a chance to bury it the way they buried everything else." Stella looked at him steadily. "You're going public with all of it." "Tomorrow," Francis said.
"Before Archer has time to quietly let this one disappear too." He spent the rest of the night at the kitchen counter of Stella's sister's house, sorting the notebook alongside the engineer's report, the recovered footage, and copies of the three old complaints. He built a single package meant to leave no room for the case to be buried a fourth time. By two in the morning, the folder sat finished in front of him.
Thick and undeniable. Stella stood in the doorway watching him work. Exhaustion was written across both their faces, but something steadier sat underneath it. "This isn't over," Francis told her, sliding the last page into place.
"It's just starting for real." By eight the next morning, Roxanne had made the calls Francis asked her to make. Reporters were already gathering on the steps outside City Hall when he arrived, the finished folder tucked under his arm like something he wasn't willing to let out of his grip. He hadn't slept more than two hours.
It didn't show. He walked to the podium Roxanne had set up. Stella stood just behind his shoulder. Francis looked out at a crowd that had grown even larger than the one on his own front lawn two weeks earlier.
Teresa Anderson stood near the front again. A camera crew was beside her, ready to broadcast live. "Two weeks ago," Francis began, "my house was destroyed by officers executing a warrant for an address that wasn't mine." His voice carried across the crowd.
"Since then, I've been accused of using my office for personal revenge, and my own oversight board voted to strip me of any role in this case because of that accusation." He held up the folder. "I'm here to show you why that accusation was always false." He opened it.
He began laying out its contents page by page for every camera in the crowd. "This is a notebook I started keeping 11 years ago, when the first complaint against Captain Roger Garvey's unit crossed my desk as a junior prosecutor." He held up several pages.
"It documents a pattern. Three prior raids. Three wrong addresses. Three families left with nothing."
"All buried by the department without charges. I began tracking this more than a decade before it ever happened to my own home. This isn't revenge." He looked directly at the cameras.
"This is a record I kept because somebody had to, back when I had no power to stop it." He handed copies to Anderson and the rest of the press, watching the pages move down the line of reporters. "Alongside this, we have the original body-cam footage from the raid on my house, recovered after the department claimed it was corrupted."