Every door that didn't open fast enough got kicked in instead. Stella's craft closet, the hallway linen cabinet, and a locked drawer in the study that turned out to hold nothing but old tax returns and a stack of birthday cards were all searched. None of it mattered to him. He wanted a safe, and until he found one, nothing in this house was safe from him.
"Behind the drywall," he barked, pointing at the hallway wall near the staircase. "People hide safes in walls all the time." Two officers grabbed sledgehammers from the entry team's gear bags. The first swing cracked the plaster wide open, spraying white dust across the hardwood floor.
The second swing went clean through, punching a hole big enough to put an arm through. There was nothing behind it but insulation and old copper pipe. "Try the other wall," Garvey said. Like this was normal.
Like this was just Tuesday. They tried the other wall too. In the kitchen, drawers were pulled out and dumped upside down onto the tile. Silverware, mail, rubber bands, and dead batteries from the junk drawer scattered across the floor like garbage.
A cabinet door was ripped clean off its hinges when it didn't swing open fast enough for the officer checking it. Someone shoved the refrigerator away from the wall hard enough to crack the tile underneath. Officer Laurelai Oliver stood near the front hallway, watching all of it happen, and felt her stomach turn tighter with every crash. She'd checked the address plaque twice now.
Forty-four Somerset. She pulled the warrant paperwork from her vest pocket and read it again just to be sure she wasn't imagining it. Four Somerset Court, not 44. A different house three blocks away.
She looked around at the destruction, the shattered wall, the gutted kitchen, and the broken picture frame still lying on the living room floor where nobody had bothered to move it. She felt sick with the certainty that none of this needed to happen. She should say something. She had said something, sort of, standing near the doorway when the younger officer brought it to Garvey's attention.
But Garvey had shut it down in about four seconds flat. Nobody wanted to be the second person that morning to get that same look from him. So she stayed quiet. The house kept breaking around her.
Garvey worked his way up the stairs, boots heavy on each step, checking the bedrooms next. A dresser got tipped over. A mattress got flipped and slashed along one seam just in case something was sewn inside it. The bathroom mirror was knocked askew when an officer yanked open the cabinet behind it hard enough to crack the hinge.
By the time the sweep reached the master bedroom, the one Stella had been dragged out of only minutes before, there wasn't much left untouched. Clothes had been pulled from the closet and thrown across the floor. A jewelry box had been knocked to the ground, its contents scattered under the bed. A framed photo of Stella's mother lay cracked down the middle and propped crookedly against the baseboard where it had fallen.
Nobody had picked it back up. Oliver stepped into the doorway and looked at all of it. The destruction of a home that had never had anything to do with the warrant taped to Garvey's vest made something in her chest go cold and heavy, like she'd swallowed a stone. This wasn't a search, she thought.
This was just breaking things. Outside, gray light was starting to creep along the edge of the sky. Not sunrise yet, but close. The neighbors on their porches had multiplied.