Nia almost smiled. It was the most reassuring sentence she had heard all week. Meera studied images of the bag from the municipal property room and pointed out overlapping compression marks along the seal and irregular residue near a corner. She explained that these observations were consistent with reopening and handling, but would need comparison testing and access to the original packaging before she could say more. She also noted a mismatch between the recorded time of sealing and an image embedded in the police inventory. Something about the sequence was wrong.
“What can you testify to today?” Alyssa asked.
“That there are unresolved questions in the evidence handling,” Meera answered. “That an independent examination is necessary. No more.”
“And if the department refuses?”
“Then their refusal becomes a fact of its own, and the court decides what it means.”
The forensic work gave the team a direction, but it did not slow the harassment. Someone scratched a hateful word into the side of Nia's car. Another person left a voicemail telling her to get out of the city. A local commentator suggested that she was exploiting her position to avoid accountability. Nia documented each incident, though she could feel the process grinding her down. It seemed that the entire world had been reduced to a series of folders labeled with the things people had done to her.
One evening, while she sat with a bowl of soup growing cold, she opened an old notebook of her father's. It was the final one he had kept before retirement, its pages filled with dates, part numbers, and remarks about buses he had repaired. Between two inspection entries he had written a single sentence: Don't let the loudest man in the garage become the one everybody calls right. Nia ran her finger beneath the words. Her father had never intended them for a courtroom, yet they seemed to describe the life she had been living for a week.
The following day they gathered in a courthouse cafeteria to meet a potential witness. Darlene insisted on choosing a table visible from several directions. Nia disliked how natural the precautions had become, but she appreciated not having to make every decision herself. The witness introduced himself as Officer Evan Ror. He was tall and clean-shaven, dressed in a plain button-down shirt, with an expression that suggested a young man determined to do the right thing despite his fear.
“I saw the video,” Evan said once he sat. “What Halverson did to you wasn't right.”
Alyssa waited. Darlene watched his hands. Nia asked what he knew firsthand.
“Halverson meets certain supervisors away from the station,” Evan replied. “There's talk about a special operations group. Evidence gets handled differently. People are told not to ask questions.”
“Who told you that?” Alyssa asked.
Evan glanced across the cafeteria. “I can't name them yet. I need to protect myself.”
“Then tell us only what you personally observed,” Nia said.
He described seeing Halverson at a coffee shop on Fourth Street with men from another unit. He said that some arrest files seemed to disappear from ordinary review. He offered to notify them when a meeting happened again. Nothing was impossible in his account. Nothing was concrete enough to support a legal motion. His eyes moved repeatedly toward Darlene, as though he were trying to determine whether she believed him.