Neighbors were starting to come out onto their porches now, phones already up, already recording. She could hear more furniture crashing inside. She could hear men laughing. She didn't understand yet how bad it was. She only knew her house, the one she and Francis had worked 15 years to afford.
The one with the porch swing and the herb garden she was still learning to keep alive, was being destroyed room by room, and nobody inside cared enough to stop. Above her, through a shattered upstairs window, she saw Garvey's silhouette moving from room to room like he owned the place, like he had every right to tear it apart. The sun still hadn't come up. The house didn't stop breaking. Inside, Captain Roger Garvey moved room to room like a man hunting for buried treasure.
And every door that didn't open fast enough got kicked in instead. Stella's craft closet, the hallway linen cabinet, a locked drawer in the study that turned out to hold nothing but old tax returns and a stack of birthday cards. None of it mattered to him. He wanted a safe, and until he found one, nothing in this house was safe from him. Behind the drywall, he barked, pointing at the hallway wall near the staircase.
People hide safes in walls all the time. Two officers grabbed sledgehammers from the entry team's gear bags. The first swing cracked plaster wide open, spraying white dust across the hardwood floor. The second swing went clean through, punching a hole big enough to put an arm through. There was nothing behind it but insulation and old copper pipe.
Try the other wall, Garvey said. Like this was normal. Like this was just Tuesday. They tried the other wall, too. In the kitchen, drawers were pulled out and dumped upside down onto the tile.
Silverware, mail, a junk drawer full of rubber bands and dead batteries. All of it scattered across the floor like garbage. A cabinet door was ripped clean off its hinges when it didn't swing open fast enough for the officer checking it. Someone shoved the refrigerator away from the wall hard enough to crack the tile underneath. Officer Laurelai Oliver stood near the front hallway, watching all of it happen, and felt her stomach turned tighter with every crash.
She'd checked the address plaque twice now. 44 Somerset. She pulled the warrant paperwork from her vest pocket and read it again just to be sure she wasn't imagining it. For Somerset Court, not 44. A different house three blocks away.
She looked around at the destruction, the shattered wall, the gutted kitchen, the broken picture frame still lying on the living room floor where nobody had bothered to move it, and felt sick with the certainty that none of this needed to happen. She should say something. She had said something sort of standing near the doorway when the younger officer brought it to Garvey's attention, but Garvey had shut it down in about 4 seconds flat. And nobody wanted to be the second person that morning to get that same look from him. So she stayed quiet and the house kept breaking around her.