The questions were not dramatic. They were slow and repetitive, and they required Finch to place his own words beside the written rules and visible record. Halfway through, he began looking less at Marcus and more at his attorney. Marcus did not interpret this as proof of guilt. People could become defensive under rigorous questioning even when they were telling the truth. But Finch's report contained specific statements about resistance and escalating danger, and his explanations did not fit what the recordings showed.
At last Marcus turned his laptop toward the witness. The video began with the runaway cart and ran continuously through the arrest. Finch watched with one ankle crossed over the other, but by the time it reached the handcuffing his foot had stopped moving. Marcus paused the recording at the moment Gloria's hand touched the car for balance.
"Your report says she pulled against your restraint," he said. "What does this image show her doing?" Finch stared at the screen. Watts objected to the form of the question, and Marcus rephrased it with the same patient precision.
The deposition continued for another hour. Finch acknowledged that he had not seen Gloria take the crackers from the parking lot, had not spoken to the owner, and had not verified her official identity before arresting her. He disputed Marcus's characterization of the force and insisted he had followed his training. Marcus did not ask the witness to admit moral fault. He asked him to account for factual discrepancies, one at a time. By the end, Finch's own answers had created a record that was much narrower than the confident story he had offered in the incident report.
During a break, Finch leaned toward Watts and spoke too softly for the court reporter to hear. He smiled briefly. Marcus saw the expression and remembered the same smile in the parking-lot recording.
He could not know what Finch had said or what he believed. He did know that the officer had watched a clear record of his actions and still seemed confident that the people examining it could be made to doubt their own eyes. Marcus wrote a note about further discovery concerning supervision and post-incident communications. He avoided writing a conclusion where he needed evidence.
Later that day, Gloria read the deposition transcript in Marcus's office. The pages were thick with objections, clarifications, and answers that circled questions instead of meeting them. She had spent a career reading transcripts and could usually spot the moments when a witness began retreating from certainty. This one was painful because she was the person being discussed as though she had not been present. Finch repeatedly referred to her as the subject, and Gloria felt a flicker of anger each time. The label was procedurally ordinary but emotionally cold when set beside the memory of her hip hitting the bumper.
"He doesn't understand that accuracy was his obligation," she said. Marcus replied that the case would require proving what he had done, what the city knew, and what the law required under the circumstances. Gloria closed the transcript and looked up. "Then don't write a brief about who he is," she said.