Jordan nodded. "My captain says the same thing about equipment checks. The day you skip one is the day something goes wrong."
Alicia heard him and smiled. "I've been saying it to you every Monday for two years."
"I know, Chief. Hearing it from an FBI agent makes it sound more dramatic."
For the first time in a long while, Simone laughed without thinking about the case. The sound surprised her enough that she glanced away toward the field. Watching the firefighters resume their work, she remembered Charles Carter's stories about the people he had helped, most of whom never learned his full name. Public service, when performed well, rarely produced a dramatic ending. Someone received the right equipment, an ambulance arrived, a report was accurate, and a family got another ordinary day together.
The sheriff's department faced a harder recovery. Residents were no longer willing to accept that a complaint had been addressed simply because an officer said it had. The county invited an outside team to review search policies, evidence handling, supervisory reporting, and earlier complaints involving Mercer. Some complaints proved unsupported when examined against available records. Others revealed patterns of discouraging people from filing reports or closing inquiries without a documented explanation. The review took months and did not provide the simple satisfaction of declaring every officer either corrupt or blameless.
At a public meeting in the county library, residents lined up to speak. A retired teacher described being told to forget about a complaint because the deputy involved was a friend of Mercer's. A small-business owner said she had always been treated well by the department and worried that good deputies would be punished for one leader's actions. A father whose teenage son had been stopped several times without receiving a citation asked why the department had never explained the basis for those encounters. The room grew tense as people realized they were not all talking about the same experience.
The interim sheriff listened before offering answers. He did not promise that every complaint would lead to discipline or that policy changes would solve prejudice overnight. He explained the outside review, the new reporting channels, and the plan to preserve camera recordings under procedures that limited unauthorized changes. Some people applauded; others remained skeptical. Both reactions were reasonable, Simone thought when she read the meeting summary. Public trust could not be restored simply by announcing that trust ought to return.
Price attended the meeting in civilian clothes and sat near the back. He had been asked not to discuss his testimony while the case was active, but he wanted to hear what residents had experienced. A woman seated beside him said she recognized his face from news coverage and thanked him for speaking up. He told her he wished he had done so sooner. She answered that wishing was understandable, but what mattered now was whether he would keep listening after the cameras left.