Jack studied Mrs. Carter's letters.
"This is stronger than gossip. It's an identifiable resident, a sequence of official contacts, and a developer following those contacts with pressure to sell." He turned to Marcus. "Would Mrs. Carter speak on the record?"
"If she agrees," Marcus said. "I'm not volunteering her for a public fight without asking."
Jack nodded approvingly. "Good. She needs to control her part of this. Somebody has already spent months trying to take that away."
Daniel opened a corporate registry search. Vision Heights Development had initially appeared to be a regional construction company backed by several private investors. But it was controlled through Crown Properties, which in turn was affiliated with Phoenix Ventures. The names were ordinary enough to disappear into a financial filing, and the structure was not automatically illegal. It did make the ultimate beneficial owners harder for neighbors to recognize from the letters they received.
One listed director of Phoenix Ventures was James Holt, Captain Darren Holt's brother-in-law. Marcus stared at the name for a moment before asking Daniel whether it had been independently confirmed. Daniel showed him a public incorporation filing and a separate address record. Jack reminded them that being related to an investor was not proof that the captain had taken a bribe, but the relationship was material enough to investigate.
"We need a transaction," Jack said. "A benefit. A payment. An instruction. Something more than family and bad timing."
A woman in a plain dark jacket appeared near the conference room door. She had been standing there long enough to hear the last sentence. Daniel stood and introduced Detective Rosa Delgado, a police investigator whose work had increasingly brought her into conflict with Captain Holt's command. Delgado looked exhausted, but she did not have the hesitant manner of someone who had come merely to speculate.
"I can't give you protected department files in a newspaper office," she said immediately. "And I won't. But I can tell you there are complaints that deserve a real inquiry, and I can point you toward people who tried to report them."
She described how citizen complaints about Holt's unit had repeatedly been classified as unfounded before complainants were interviewed. She had raised concerns about one warrant application and been reassigned to a backlog of minor theft cases. A younger officer who questioned a traffic stop had lost his preferred shift. Each event had a plausible official explanation, which made the full pattern difficult to challenge from inside.
"There are body-camera recordings that should have been retained," Delgado said. "Some files don't appear in the ordinary search results anymore. I don't know whether that's misconduct, bad administration, or a retention problem. I know an independent examiner should be able to find out."
Marcus leaned forward. "Can you get them?"