It was waiting on contractors who couldn't start until the insurance paperwork cleared. Francis and Stella were staying with her sister across town, sleeping in a guest room that didn't feel like home and showering with someone else's soap. Francis told himself it was temporary. He told himself that every morning right before he drove to the office and buried himself in the one thing he could actually control.
The review he'd ordered that first afternoon had been running quietly ever since. Two paralegals and a junior attorney were combing through department records, cross-referencing names, addresses, and warrant numbers tied to Garvey's tactical unit going back six years. By Thursday afternoon, they had something. "You need to see this," said Pepper, the junior attorney.
She set three thin folders on Francis's desk like she was laying down evidence in a trial. In a way, she was. Francis opened the first folder. A complaint filed four years earlier from a homeowner named Wilbert Brooks.
Wrong address. Doors broken. No charges filed against the officers involved. Case closed.
Signed off by Chief Diego Pauler. Francis opened the second. A different name. A different street.
Same pattern. Same signature at the bottom. The third folder made his jaw tighten. Same unit, same excuse, same outcome.
"Three complaints," Pepper said. "All in the last six years. All from Black homeowners. All involving Garvey's tactical unit hitting a house that turned out to be the wrong one."
"All closed without a single officer facing discipline." Francis sat back slowly in his chair. The three folders spread across his desk next to his own incident report, the one describing his own front door, his own broken walls, and his own wife zip-tied on their own lawn. Four for four.
"Nobody looked into any of these?" he asked, though he already knew the answer. "Looks like they were reviewed internally and closed within a week each time," Pepper said. "No outside prosecutor ever saw them. They never left the department."
Francis picked up the Brooks file again and read it more carefully. The language matched almost word for word what he expected the report on his own house to eventually say. Address discrepancy. No misconduct identified.
The same phrase recycled like a rubber stamp used to bury four different families' worth of damage. He thought about the young officer on his lawn who tried to flag the wrong address before the sledgehammers came out. He thought about how quickly Garvey had shut him down. It hadn't been the first time somebody in that unit had noticed a mistake and been told to keep going anyway.
It had happened three times before, at least among the incidents anyone had bothered to write down. "This isn't a mistake," Francis said quietly, more to himself than to Pepper. "A mistake happens once. This is a method."