Then Vale said something that became one of the central lines of the case.
"Our job is not to hand defense counsel every piece of digital noise that can confuse a jury. Our job is to preserve usable evidence."
Naomi answered, "Our job is to preserve evidence. Full stop. Let the court decide what's usable."
The third recording was the most damaging.
It involved seized cash.
Naomi had no authority over property-room accounting, but one complaint alleged that several thousand dollars disappeared between a roadside seizure and intake. She raised it because the complainant accused Vance by name.
Vale sounded irritated from the start.
"Field counts are estimates."
"The officer wrote an exact number."
"People make mistakes under pressure."
"Then document the correction."
"It was corrected."
"After the complaint came in."
A long silence followed.
Vale lowered his voice.
"Naomi, you need to decide whether you work for the institution or for every person who walks in here convinced a cop stole from them."
Her answer came without hesitation.
"If the institution needs me to choose before I check the facts, then I'm working for the wrong institution."
The meeting ended seven minutes later.
Naomi's performance review was downgraded the following month.
Two months after that, the internal security inquiry began.
By then she was recording everything.
Vance believed those recordings were in my briefcase because Vale had told him so.
The bigger question was how Vale knew.
Romero traced the leak backward.
Only one copy of Naomi's interview memo had ever entered the inspector general's network. Access logs showed it was opened by Romero, me, outside counsel, and a temporary systems contractor named Owen Pike who was supposed to be migrating encrypted archives.
Pike had no reason to open the content.
He only needed to move containers from one server to another.
When investigators checked his financial disclosures, they found a consulting company registered to his wife.
That company had received three payments from a technology vendor used by Westbridge Police.
The vendor's primary city contact was Marcus Vale.
Cho obtained warrants for business records.
The payments were not enormous.
$4,500.
$6,200.
$5,000.
Amounts small enough to look like ordinary contract work.
Pike initially said his wife's company provided cybersecurity advice.
When investigators asked for the work product, he produced two generic reports full of language copied from public security templates.
Then they showed him the access log from Naomi's memo.
Pike asked for a lawyer.
A week later, through counsel, he admitted he had been feeding Vale information about the audit in exchange for consulting payments routed through the vendor.
He had not given Vale every file.