Upstairs, the officers removed drawers and dumped their contents onto the bed. Someone pulled open a box holding letters Marcus had sent during deployments. An officer cut the lining of a storage bench without first checking whether it had a removable panel. In the kitchen, a ceramic bowl broke when it fell from a counter, and a lamp was knocked to the floor in the hallway. The sound of objects breaking moved through the house for more than an hour.
Holt occasionally appeared in the doorway and asked whether the team had located the weapons. Each time the answer was no, he told them to continue searching. Angela asked whether he had identified the anonymous informant or independently verified the alleged deliveries. He said the source information was confidential and warned her not to interfere.
"You've searched the same cabinet twice," she observed when an officer returned to the dining room. "It won't contain a larger gun the second time."
The officer looked at Holt, who told him to check the room again. Angela felt a moment of profound exhaustion. The absurdity did not lessen the damage. It only made the cruelty harder to explain without sounding as though she were exaggerating.
At one point an officer demanded that she leave the room while he examined a storage closet. She complied and continued filming from the hall, where she could see only part of the doorway. Later, Diana would tell her that the absence of a continuous recording did not weaken what she had documented; it simply meant they needed the officers' own cameras and the search inventory to establish what happened outside her view. Angela memorized that distinction. She was becoming very careful about separating what she had witnessed from what she merely suspected.
The officers found no weapons trafficking materials. There were no crates, no illegal inventory, no fugitive, and no evidence of a secret weapons business. Holt eventually ordered his people to finish. He did not apologize for the damage. He warned Marcus that interfering with an investigation could lead to further charges, then walked past Angela without looking at the phone in her hand.
Griggs stopped near the broken display case. "Shame about the mess," he said. His voice carried the same taunting amusement Angela remembered from the street. "Maybe next time you'll cooperate the first time."
The last cruiser left after one in the morning. Silence settled over a house that no longer felt like theirs. The front door hung crookedly, the kitchen floor was scattered with broken dishes, and the living room contained more objects on the floor than on the shelves. Angela stood beside the couch with her phone still recording and realized she could not make herself stop. As long as the camera was running, some part of her believed she was still doing something useful.