She set the folder down, looked across the faces in the room, and said, "Good morning. I'm Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Monica Shepard. I've been assigned to oversee this task force and its reporting standards." Her eyes moved across the second row and stopped just long enough on Copeland to let recognition do its work.
"Some of you I'm meeting for the first time," she added. "One of you I met on Saturday." Copeland's hand jerked, and his coffee cup rolled off his knee, spilling hot coffee down the front of his trousers. He barely reacted to the heat. Fowler looked down so quickly that the movement caught the attention of the man seated behind him, while the rest of the room exchanged bewildered glances. At the back, Beexley stared straight ahead with the expression of a man waiting for an unpleasant meeting to become worse.
Monica did not linger over their discomfort. She opened her folder and walked the team through four active warrants, confirming assignments, risk assessments, supervising officers, and the agencies responsible for each case. Her tone was measured, with no suggestion that she intended to embarrass anyone. Then she moved to documentation procedures and explained that the reported arrest figures for the previous eighteen months had made accuracy a priority. She wanted serial numbers, plate numbers, addresses, warrant confirmations, and every significant discovery read aloud on body camera and verified in writing before reports were finalized.
"A number doesn't become accurate because we type it twice," she told them. "We check it against the source, and we preserve the source so somebody else can check us." She explained why a small mistake in an evidence log could destroy a good prosecution, why the absence of a recording created uncertainty, and why officers should describe actions rather than invent motives for people they had detained. Her words were general enough to apply to every person in the room, but Copeland sat rigidly as though each sentence had been addressed only to him. When she asked for questions, nobody raised a hand.
After the briefing, chairs scraped against the floor and officers filed into the corridor. Copeland remained seated until the room had nearly emptied, the damp coffee stain darkening his trousers. Then he approached the podium with an awkward attempt at the confident expression Monica had seen on Saturday. "Ma'am," he said, "about this weekend." Monica closed the folder and waited for him to finish.
"I didn't know who you were," he said. Monica answered that she understood perfectly. "I asked you for identification," he insisted, but she reminded him that he had simultaneously forbidden her to retrieve it. He opened his mouth and closed it again, searching for a way to make the two instructions sound compatible. She told him that the events on Larkspur Bend would be handled through appropriate investigative channels and that his assignments for the morning remained posted on the board.