Francis moved toward the staircase, stepping carefully around the caution tape, and knelt near the small closet tucked beneath it. He reached past a stack of old shoe boxes and ran his hand along the wall until his fingers found the edge of a small fireproof lockbox bolted into the floor joist, untouched by the search. Whatever the officers had been looking for, they'd never thought to look there. It didn't look like a hiding place.
It looked like clutter. He didn't open it. Not yet. He just rested his hand on top of it for a moment, feeling the cool metal.
Something settled behind his eyes. Not comfort exactly. The beginning of a plan he couldn't fully see the shape of yet. Stella watched him from the couch.
"What is that?" "Something I've kept a long time," Francis said. "It's not important right now." He stood back up and walked over to her.
He sat down beside her among the wreckage of their living room. For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Outside, a neighbor's dog was barking at something. The sound of a car passing slowly on the street drifted through the broken front window.
"What are you going to do?" Stella finally asked. Francis looked around the room at the shattered glass, the gutted walls, and the family photo with the crack running through it like a scar. He thought about the look on Garvey's face on the front lawn. The way it had drained the second Francis said his job title out loud.
He thought about how fast that fear had turned into silence, into officers scrambling to take the cuffs off him, like his badge mattered more than what had actually happened to his house. "They tore my house apart looking for something illegal," he said slowly. "Something that was never here to begin with." His voice became steadier.
"In the process, they handed my office a case with the district attorney himself as the victim. Now they're going to have to explain publicly why they don't think that changes anything." Stella reached over and took his hand, the first time either of them had touched since officers had zip-tied her that morning. "You're really going to do this?" she said.
It wasn't a question. "I don't have a choice," Francis said. "If I let this go, they'll do it to the next family and the family after that."
"Nobody will stop them because nobody with any power ever gets hit." He squeezed her hand once. "I got hit. That's not luck."
"That's an opportunity, and I'm not wasting it." He reached for his phone, still cracked in one corner from where it had hit the ground that morning, and dialed his office. Stella watched him stand. She watched the exhaustion in his shoulders straighten into something harder.
Something that looked a lot more like the man who'd built a career refusing to let power go unchecked. "Pull every file on Captain Roger Garvey's unit," Francis said into the phone, his voice carrying clean through the ruined house. "Today." Three days passed since the raid, and the house on Somerset Court still sat behind caution tape.