And Officer Oliver, the one witness who could speak directly to what happened inside that house, still hadn't answered a single call in over a week. By evening, Francis sat in his car outside the still condemned house on Somerset Court, engine off, staring at the plywood covering the windows in the fading light. He hadn't meant to drive here. He'd just found himself pulling onto the street out of habit, the way you keep reaching for a tooth that's already gone. He walked inside past the caution tape, boots crunching over drywall dust that still hadn't been swept away, and sat down on the stairs in the dim evening light.
The house was quiet in a way that felt heavier than silence usually did, the kind of quiet that came after something had been taken and not yet given back. He thought about the vote that morning, 4 to one. A real win snatched back within the hour by men who'd never once set foot in this house. Using a system built to protect people exactly like him and turning it instead into a wall. His eyes drifted to the small closet tucked beneath the staircase where he was sitting.
He reached over without quite deciding to and pulled the door open, running his hand along the wall until his fingers found the cool metal edge of the lock box bolted into the floor joist. The one thing the raid team had never thought to search because it didn't look like anything worth searching. He didn't open it. Not yet. He just sat there in the dark, hand resting on the box, thinking about everything inside the department that had been buried and reeried for years before his own door ever came down.
They took my house apart, looking for something illegal, he said quietly, his voice the only sound in the empty room. They never once looked for something legal. Outside the street lights on Somerset Court flickered on one by one, and Francis sat in the ruins of his own home, finally understanding what he needed to do next. Francis sat on the stairs a long moment before he finally pulled the lock box free from its bracket and set it across his knees. The key was small, worn smooth from years of handling, kept on a ring he still carried out of habit, even after he'd halfforgotten what had opened.
He fitted into the lock and turned it, and the lid came up with a soft, familiar click. Inside wasn't much to look at, a few old documents. His father's watch stopped years ago, and underneath all of it, a thick spiral notebook, its cover worn soft at the corners, rubber banded shut. Francis pulled it out and slid the rubber band off carefully like it might crumble. He'd started this notebook 11 years earlier, back when he was still a junior prosecutor working intake, the year the Brooks complaint had first crossed his desk before it ever went anywhere.
He remembered reading that file back then, a wrong address, a door kicked in, a family left with nothing but a closed case, and no answers, and feeling something he hadn't known what to do with. He hadn't had the authority to reopen it. He hadn't had the power to do anything but watch it get buried. So, he'd started writing it down. Dates, names, patterns he noticed in warrant executions that never quite lined up.
He'd never planned on it becoming anything. It had just felt wrong to let it disappear completely, even if all he could do at the time was remember it. Over the years, the notebook had grown. Entries on the second buried complaint. Four years later, entries on the third, two years after that, small notes on Garvey's name appearing again and again across different addresses, different families, the same excuse every time.
He hadn't been building a case. He hadn't known back then that he'd ever need one. He'd just been keeping a record because somebody had to, and nobody else seemed willing. He flipped through page after page in the dim stairwell light, and for the first time since the morning his own door came down. He felt something besides fury.
He felt the pieces locking into place. This notebook predated everything. It predated the raid on his own house by more than a decade. Nobody could argue this was revenge built after the fact to settle a personal score because half of it had been written back when Francis didn't even know Garvey's face, only his pattern. He called Stella before he even stood up from the stairs.
"You need to see something," he said when she picked up. She met him at the house 20 minutes later and he showed her the notebook by flashlight, page by page, watching her expression shift as she understood what she was looking at. This changes everything, she said quietly. This proves you saw this coming before it ever happened to us. It proves more than that, Francis said.
It proves the department knew. Pauler signed off on every one of these closures. He had this pattern in front of him for years and buried it every single time. He closed the notebook carefully, holding it like it weighed more than paper should. The conflict of interest argument only works if people think I started caring about this because it happened to me.
This proves I didn't. He sat with that for a moment, turning the notebook over in his hands, and something in him hardened into resolve. "I can't prosecute this myself anymore," he said. "Not with Archer running it, not with the board's ruling standing. But I don't need to prosecute it.
I just need everyone to see it at the same time. The notebook, the footage, Brooks and the others, all of it together before anyone in that building has a chance to bury it the way they buried everything else. Stella looked at him steadily. You're going public with all of it. Tomorrow, Francis said, before Archer has time to quietly let this one disappear, too.
He spent the rest of the night at the kitchen counter of Stella's sister's house, sorting the notebook alongside the engineer's report, the recovered footage, and copies of the three old complaints, building a single package meant to leave no room for the case to be buried a fourth time. By 2 in the morning, the folder sat finished in front of him, thick and undeniable. Stella stood in the doorway, watching him work, exhaustion written across both their faces. But something steadier underneath it ow. This isn't over, Francis told her, sliding the last page into place.
It's just starting for real. By 8 the next morning, Roxanne had made the calls Francis asked her to make, and reporters were already gathering on the steps outside city hall when he arrived. The finished folder tucked under his arm like something he wasn't willing to let out of his grip. He hadn't slept more than 2 hours. It didn't show.