Marcus thanked her and explained the ways her statement might be tested. The city could challenge her interpretation of Holloway's call, question why she delayed coming forward, and ask whether personal conflicts influenced her. Price said she understood. She had served as a witness in enough cases to know that a courtroom would not accept an account simply because the speaker appeared sincere. She had kept contemporaneous notes precisely because she expected to be asked how she remembered details after the public discussion grew so loud.
As she stood to leave, she stopped at the door. "There is one part I can't write in an affidavit because it's not a fact about this incident," she said. Marcus asked what she meant.
Price looked back at the conference table. "The worst part was how familiar it all felt. An officer gets accused of crossing a line, the supervisors get nervous, everybody looks for language that makes the trouble smaller, and the person who complained disappears into a file. None of it surprised me until the woman they brought in turned out to be someone the city couldn't ignore."
Marcus remained in the conference room long after Price left. He read the affidavit carefully, comparing it with what he knew about the processing timeline and Holloway's public statements. He did not imagine it proved every allegation against the department. But it supplied specific conduct, dates, speakers, and a witness willing to testify under oath about possible interference with an inquiry. It also sharpened a question that had troubled Gloria since the arrest: how many people had come through that processing room with the same injuries and no reason to believe a supervisor would ever come to help them?
Two days after Price's affidavit, another call arrived at Marcus's office. His assistant explained that an attorney named Patricia Wynn represented Diane Finch in a pending divorce and believed information uncovered during financial discovery might overlap with the civil-rights case. Marcus asked whether the information could lawfully be shared, and Wynn said she had discussed the matter with her client and would provide a limited account first. Her caution interested him. Lawyers who rushed to hand over private documents often caused as many problems as they solved; Wynn sounded like a woman who understood that evidence had to be obtained properly if it was going to survive scrutiny.
Diane Finch had married Dale long before his conduct became a public scandal. During the first years, she had explained away his impatience and sharp temper as symptoms of a stressful job. Later, she stopped inviting friends over after he came home from patrol. He had begun keeping money, passwords, and large parts of his social life separate from her, and the secrecy had gradually become impossible to ignore. The marriage did not end because of the Fresh Mart video alone. The video confirmed a troubling picture Diane had spent years hoping was incomplete.