When he stood to leave, he leaned closer to Nia. “Be careful who you trust, Your Honor. This goes higher than Halverson.”
After he walked away, Darlene waited until he had turned the corner. “That was unusually polished,” she said.
Alyssa nodded. “He volunteered just enough to be interesting and nothing we can verify immediately.”
Nia looked at the empty chair. “He may still be telling the truth.”
“Yes,” Darlene said. “Or he may be measuring what we know. We don't punish a man for coming forward, and we don't hand him our files because he sounds sincere.”
A message arrived from Evan that evening. It contained only four words: Voss is involved. Nia stared at the screen for a long time. If he was a genuine whistleblower, it might be the first confirmation that the prosecutor's strange invitation had significance beyond her arrest. If he was not, the message was bait calculated to make them reveal their suspicions. She forwarded it to counsel and said nothing in reply.
What troubled her was not the uncertainty. Uncertainty belonged to honest investigation. What troubled her was how urgently she wanted to believe someone inside the police department had chosen to help. She had been alone in so many rooms recently that the possibility of an ally in uniform felt like a gift.
Darlene reminded her that hope was human, but verification was necessary precisely when hope made a story attractive.
Meera's preliminary findings became public before she had finished examining the physical evidence. A reporter obtained the court filing in which Alyssa requested independent testing and quoted the forensic analyst's observations about the seal. The next morning, the newspaper ran a careful headline questioning the integrity of the evidence against Nia.
For a few hours, strangers began leaving messages of support instead of threats. Nia read three of them while drinking coffee, then stopped. She did not want relief to become dependent on a news cycle that could reverse before lunch.
The reversal came at nine fifteen. An anonymous complaint accused Meera of falsifying conclusions in an unrelated case several years earlier. A website that had ignored the technical findings published the allegation as though it were established fact. Callers began contacting Meera's office, demanding to know whether she had been paid to manufacture evidence for a powerful judge. Her clients received messages warning them that her work was unreliable.
Meera telephoned Alyssa with the tired patience of someone familiar with professional disputes. “The case they mentioned was reviewed. The complaint was dismissed, and the review is public,” she said. “But they know the headline will travel faster than the disposition.”
“Can you continue?” Alyssa asked.
“Yes. I'd rather someone challenge the science than threaten my staff, but neither changes what the physical evidence shows.”