Three complaints, Pepper said, all in the last 6 years, all from black homeowners. All involving Garvey's tactical unit hitting a house that turned out to be the wrong one, and all closed without a single officer facing discipline. Francis sat back slowly in his chair. The three folders spread across his desk next to his own incident report, the one describing his own front door, his own broken walls, his own wife zip tied on their own lawn. Four for four.
Nobody looked into any of these. He asked, though he already knew the answer. Looks like they were reviewed internally and closed within a week each time, Pepper said. No outside prosecutor ever saw them. They never left the department.
Francis picked up the Brooks file again, reading it more carefully this time. The language matched almost word for word what he expected the report on his own house to eventually say. Address discrepancy. No misconduct identified. The same phrase recycled like a rubber stamp used to bury four different families worth of damage.
He thought about the young officer on his lawn who tried to flag the wrong address before the sledgehammers came out. He thought about how quickly Garvey had shut him down. It hadn't been the first time somebody in that unit had noticed a mistake and been told to keep going anyway. It had happened three times before, at least that anyone had bothered to write down. "This isn't a mistake," Francis said quietly, more to himself than to Pepper.
"A mistake happens once. This is a method." He stood up and walked to the window of his office, looking out over the city he'd sworn to protect the same year Garvey had first pinned on his captain's bars. Somewhere out there were three families who'd gone through exactly what Stella had gone through, kneeling on their own lawns, watching strangers tear their homes apart. And nobody had ever answered for it. Nobody had ever even tried.
I want you to reach out to all three of them, Francis said, turning back around. Brooks and the other two carefully. Let them know their cases are being reopened and ask if they're willing to talk about what happened. Some of them might not want to relive it, Pepper said gently. I understand that, Francis said.
But if they're willing, their stories change everything. This isn't just about my house anymore. It's about a department that's been doing this for years and burying it every single time. He looked back down at the four folders spread across his desk. Brooks, two more names he was already starting to memorize, and his own case sitting right alongside them, no different in the department's eyes than any of the others until the moment he'd said his job title out loud on his own front lawn.
That was the difference. That was the only difference. And Francis intended to use it. He gathered the folders together, squared the edges, and set them in a neat stack at the corner of his desk. Not filed away, not buried, but front and center, where he'd see them every single morning until this was finished.