At 1:17 p.m., Harold Jennings received a call telling him he could recover his Honda Civic without paying the disputed storage balance while the city reviewed the seizure. The old man was quiet for so long Marcus thought the call had dropped.
"Captain," Jennings finally said, "I've been taking two buses to my cardiologist for eight months."
Marcus looked down at the impound form bearing Voss's signature.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Jennings."
"You're the first person there who's said that."
Marcus did not mistake returning the car for justice. It was only the correction of one ongoing harm. The larger question was how many other people were still paying for the same system. He was about to find out.
The first additional caller came at 1:46 p.m.
His name was Robert Torres, sixty-one, a maintenance supervisor at a packaging plant on the south side. He asked to speak to Marcus personally because he had heard through a neighbor that Harold Jennings was getting his car back. Marcus sent him to Professional Standards instead. Twenty minutes later, Detective Kim appeared in the doorway with a look that told Marcus the call mattered.
"Same amount," she said.
"Five hundred?"
"Exactly."
Torres had been stopped eleven months earlier on Maple Street for allegedly following too closely. Reigns asked questions about his truck, his job, whether he carried cash, and whether he could afford a tow. According to Torres, the officer then lowered his voice and told him five hundred dollars would turn the whole matter into a warning. Torres refused.
Reigns claimed to smell marijuana, ordered him out, searched the truck, found nothing, and ultimately had the vehicle towed for alleged safety defects. The tow cost Torres six hundred and forty dollars before he could recover the truck the next afternoon. His body-camera video had also been unavailable. The complaint had been reviewed by Calvin Voss and closed for insufficient evidence.
The third caller was Patricia Simmons, a widowed school secretary who had paid two hundred dollars in cash after Reigns stopped her for a broken license-plate light. She had never filed a complaint because Reigns told her the payment was an "on-site administrative fee" that saved her from towing and court costs.
"I thought it was something new," she told Kim. "He had a uniform and a badge. Why would I think a police officer was lying about a fee?"
The fourth caller was college student Ethan Liu, who said he had refused to pay three hundred dollars after a stop near the university. His car was towed and he received three citations, two of which were later dismissed in court when the officer failed to appear. The fifth was a restaurant owner named Shonda Price, who remembered Reigns saying, "You can solve this with cash or solve it with a tow truck." By 3:00 p.m., Internal Affairs had seven statements, each independently describing the same basic mechanism.
The amounts varied. Two hundred. Three hundred. Five hundred. But the structure did not.
Minor traffic basis. Quiet demand. Threat of search or impound. Missing video. Escalation if the driver refused. Administrative closure if the victim complained.
Marcus did not need to be the lead investigator to understand what the pattern suggested. What he needed now was to keep the department functioning while that pattern became known inside the building. At 3:18 p.m., Reigns appeared at the door to Marcus's office.
"We need to talk."
"Close the door."
Reigns did, but he remained standing. His face was flushed, and the muscles at the sides of his jaw worked as if he had been chewing on the same argument for an hour.
"You're poisoning this place," he said.
Marcus stayed seated. "Be specific."
"People who've worked here ten, fifteen, twenty years are hearing you're digging through old files, calling civilians, reopening complaints that were already handled. Officers are wondering whether every split-second decision they ever made is going to get second-guessed by a captain who's been here one day."