"Being pulled now."
Marcus looked through the office window toward the operations floor. Reigns sat at a desk doing administrative paperwork. Voss stood nearby speaking with two patrol officers. Nothing about the scene looked dramatic.
That was the problem with institutional corruption. Most of it wore ordinary clothes. At 10:38, Detective Kim returned with the first audio assessment.
"Recorder is clean," she said. "No indication of editing. Continuous file from before the stop through your arrival at headquarters parking lot."
Marcus nodded once.
"The demand is clear?"
"Very."
"What about the patrol vehicle?"
"Partial. Reigns moved out of effective microphone range for several exchanges. But the system caught enough to establish that you repeatedly asked the legal basis for the detention and stated you did not consent to a search. It also captured him telling Voss you were refusing lawful orders before Voss arrived."
"Body camera?"
Kim's expression changed.
"The unit is not broken. Battery health is normal. Storage normal. No hardware fault codes. The video stops because the manual power control was used."
Marcus leaned back slowly.
"Can you prove who pressed it?"
"The system log proves manual shutdown at 05:41:12 and manual restart at 06:19:06. It doesn't identify a finger. But the camera was mounted on Reigns the whole time."
"Any prior manual shutdowns?"
"That's the part you need to hear."
Kim placed a preliminary report on his desk. Thirty-seven unexplained recording interruptions during traffic encounters in six months. Thirty-one occurred while Reigns was primary officer. Twenty-six involved searches, impounds, or disputes about citations. Marcus stared at the numbers.
"Does Voss know you pulled this?"
"No."
"Keep it that way until the evidence is duplicated and access-restricted."
"Already done."
At 11:02, a call came to the captain's office from a man named Harold Jennings. He was seventy-three years old and sounded as if he expected to be disappointed.
"Captain Ellison?"
"Yes."