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.