Four for four, he said again, quiet and certain. Now it's a pattern, not an accident. And patterns are a lot harder to hide. The following week, Francis's office filed a formal subpoena demanding the original body cam footage from every officer present during the raid on Somerset Court. It should have been simple.
Body cam footage was standard evidence, and Francis's office requested it in cases like this all the time. He expected push back, maybe some delay tactics, but not what actually landed on his desk 2 days later. A letter from the department's records division, two sentences long. Footage from the incident in question was corrupted during server upload and cannot be recovered. We regret the inconvenience.
Francis read it twice, then set it down flat on his desk and stared at it for a long moment. Corrupted, he said out loud to no one. All of it. Every single officer's camera at the exact same time. Pepper, standing across from his desk, shook her head slowly.
That's not how the system works. Even if one camera glitched, they wouldn't all fail on the same call. I know, Francis said. That's the point. It's not a technical failure.
It's a decision. He picked up his phone and made a call to the department's record supervisor directly, keeping his voice level, even as the frustration built behind his ribs. The answer he got back was the same two sentences read aloud this time instead of typed like the supervisor had rehearsed it. Francis hung up and sat with that for a while. Pauler's office had erased the one piece of evidence that would have shown beyond argument exactly what happened inside his house that morning.
Without it, the case would come down to his word and Stella's word against a department that had already decided to protect its own. He didn't know yet that the footage wasn't actually gone. Across town, reporter Terresa Anderson had been quietly working her own angle on the story since the morning it broke. She'd covered Garvey's tactical unit twice before, years apart, both times chasing complaints that had gone nowhere. She recognized the pattern the second she heard the raid on the district attorney's house had been the wrong address.
She'd been making calls all week, and on Tuesday afternoon, one of them finally connected. The message came through an encrypted line, no name attached, just a file and four words. You will want to see this. It was the body cam footage. Every second of it, the breach, the shouting, Stella on her knees in the grass, Garvey waving off the address correction, the sledgehammers going through drywall that had never needed to be touched.
Anderson watched it twice before she believed what she was looking at. She didn't know it had come from officer Laurelai Oliver, who had copied the file onto a personal drive in the chaos of that morning, and sat on it for days, terrified of what would happen to her career if anyone found out, but not willing to let it disappear either. Oliver had sent it anonymously, routing it through a source she trusted, keeping her own name as far from it as she could manage. Anderson published the footage that Thursday evening alongside her article. Within hours, it was everywhere.