Benton agreed.
Within the hour, the state attorney general's Public Integrity Unit was notified, as was Westbridge's inspector general. The judge retained authority over the administrative audit she had already been supervising, but any possible crimes arising from the hallway confrontation or the records inside the case would be handled by outside investigators and, if necessary, a different judge.
"No shortcuts," Carter said after hanging up. "If this is as serious as it appears, every shortcut becomes a gift to whoever wants the evidence thrown out."
I had spent enough time in compliance work to know she was right.
Bad systems survive partly because people trying to expose them become so certain of the moral answer that they stop respecting the procedural one. Then the people under investigation point to the broken process and pretend it proves the underlying facts were wrong. I had no intention of giving Marcus Vale that escape.
Inspector General Elias Romero arrived at 10:17 with two investigators and a digital forensics specialist. Romero was fifty-four, compact, careful, and incapable of entering a room without first noticing every exit. He had been the person who hired me for the audit six months earlier.
He looked at the swelling on my wrist before he looked at the folders.
"You all right?"
"Yes."
"That's not what I asked."
I flexed my fingers. "It hurts. I'm functional."
"Get it documented."
"Already photographed."
A corner of his mouth moved.
"Of course you did."
Romero's team set up in a jury conference room under courthouse camera coverage. They logged each item from the briefcase without opening sealed statements unnecessarily. The drives were placed in evidence sleeves. The red folders were numbered. My black notebook was scanned page by page and then returned to me because it contained work-product notes, not original evidence.
At 10:42, Vance's union attorney arrived.
His name was Malcolm Rusk, and he had represented police officers long enough to know the difference between a bad look and a bad case. He asked first whether Vance was under arrest. Lieutenant Ames said no. Rusk asked whether he was free to leave. Ames said Vance could leave once arrangements were made to return his secured firearm outside the courthouse, unless an outside authority lawfully changed his status.
Rusk then asked why Vance's phone had been mentioned on the record.
Judge Carter answered only what she was permitted to answer.
"Because Officer Vance stated that a departmental bulletin on the device formed part of his reason for confronting Ms. Brooks. No one has searched it. He has received a preservation instruction because it may contain relevant evidence."
Rusk nodded slowly.
He understood exactly what that meant.
Vance could leave.
But if messages disappeared after a judge told him not to delete them, that act would become its own fact.
Rusk spent twenty minutes alone with his client in the conference room. When they emerged, Vance looked different. Less angry. More contained. The panic had been pushed behind professional advice.
Rusk said Vance would provide a written account later and would not consent to a phone search.
Romero said nobody had asked for consent yet.
No one argued.
At 11:08, the state Public Integrity Unit sent Assistant Attorney General Miriam Cho to the courthouse. Cho was thirty-eight, sharp-eyed, and quiet enough that people often mistook the silence for softness. She read the hallway incident report, reviewed the courthouse video with no audio, and spoke separately with witnesses who had been present.
She did not ask to see the full corruption audit immediately.
Instead, she built the narrowest possible probable-cause question around Vance's phone: Did the device contain the security bulletin he claimed justified the seizure attempt, and did communications explain why an officer with no courthouse assignment had arrived before Elena Brooks?
The distinction mattered.
Cho did not want a warrant for everything on the phone simply because Vance looked suspicious. She wanted the messages, bulletin, call logs, and location data relevant to that morning and to the alleged alert.
A different district judge, Samuel Ortiz, reviewed the application because Judge Carter was a witness.
At 1:36 p.m., he signed a limited search warrant.
Vance was notified through counsel and ordered to surrender the device to the state digital forensics unit for imaging. He complied.
What the phone showed was not a confession.
It was worse in a quieter way.
The departmental "security bulletin" did exist, but it had been created at 6:11 that morning, less than two hours before I arrived. It had not been distributed through the normal alert system. It was a PDF sent directly to eight people in a private command group chat.
The author field showed an administrative account controlled by Deputy Chief Marcus Vale's office.
The message attached to it read:
Brooks expected at 4th District this morning with unauthorized copied material. Recover department property before transfer. Avoid public scene if possible. Confirm possession before escalation.
Vance had responded at 6:19.