"You keep treating every case like somebody's running a conspiracy," her supervisor, Elaine Mercer, told her one afternoon. They were alone in the cramped conference room, with three towers of pending discovery requests between them. "There's a difference between challenging the state and making enemies you can't afford."
"I'm not trying to make enemies," Olivia replied. "I'm trying to find out why the same seven minutes keep disappearing from the same officers' recordings."
Elaine rubbed the bridge of her nose. She was a capable lawyer who had spent twenty years watching budget requests shrink while caseloads grew, and she cared deeply about clients in the weary, practical way of someone who had already lost too many arguments with the city council. "Document it, then," she said. "But don't mistake suspicion for proof. And don't forget that the people who need you in court tomorrow cannot wait while you fix the entire department."
Olivia wrote those words in the inside cover of her notebook. They became the rule she tried hardest to follow. Whatever she believed about Captain Reed, she would have to demonstrate it with independently verifiable facts, and she would have to protect the people whose cases might otherwise be swallowed by her pursuit of him. She had seen what happened when investigators fell in love with a theory and stopped considering explanations that contradicted it.
Her father had warned her about that long before she understood how costly the warning would become. Detective Thomas Turner had been a quiet man with broad hands, patient eyes, and the habit of asking one more question after everyone else considered the matter settled. He wore ordinary shirts on his days off, repaired the family's kitchen appliances rather than replacing them, and taught his daughters that the important difference between confidence and certainty was whether a person could admit being wrong. In Olivia's memory, he was rarely without a notebook tucked into his pocket.
Thomas joined the Milfield Police Department because he believed the people in the poorest neighborhoods deserved officers who knew their names. In the early years, his work earned praise from families and prosecutors alike, and he sometimes came home carrying drawings children had pressed into his hands during community events. Later, the praise became less frequent, and the silences at the dinner table grew longer. He had begun questioning what happened to drugs and cash after seizures, and the questions were making the wrong people uncomfortable.
In 2017, when Olivia was beginning to establish herself as a public defender, an internal allegation accused Thomas of mishandling narcotics evidence. The department displayed photographs, announced an inquiry, and allowed rumors to spread before the accusations had been tested. Thomas insisted that he had been set up and continued gathering records, but he died before he could clear his name. Officials ruled his death a suicide, a conclusion Olivia could never reconcile with what he had told her in their last conversation.