Her first client was a sixty-year-old delivery driver facing a fee he could not understand. He spread his documents carefully, apologizing for how many there were.
“Take your time,” she said.
Halfway through the consultation, he recognized her name.
“You're the lawyer with the police complaint.”
Adrienne felt her shoulders rise.
“Yes.”
He nodded toward the papers.
“Then you know why I kept all these.”
The simple confidence of the statement nearly undid her.
After the session, she sat alone in her car for several minutes. She had expected sympathy to hurt less than disbelief. Sometimes it hurt differently, because it reached places she had held tightly shut.
Her phone rang. It was Miles.
The department had agreed to preserve additional records but disputed the scope of disclosure. Some data had retention limits. Some records were described as unavailable. A civil filing might be necessary to secure access and resolve the disputes.
“What will that cost?” she asked.
He gave her an honest answer: money, time, exposure, and no guarantee that the result would feel proportionate to the damage.
She looked at the client handouts on the seat beside her.
“What happens if we don't?”
“We keep pursuing the other routes. But some doors may stay closed.”
Adrienne watched a volunteer lock Harborlight's front door. Through the glass, the reception light remained on.
Vehicle location data arrived in a format that made Adrienne understand why specialists earned their fees.
Rows of coordinates did not look like a confession. They looked like numbers produced by equipment that sometimes lost contact, rounded times, and resumed reporting after gaps. Miles hired a qualified analyst rather than drawing a bright line on a map himself.
The analyst's conclusion was narrower than Adrienne hoped and more useful than a confident guess.
Cruiser 318 had transmitted a location near the north district early in the shift. Later records placed it back at the central station. Between those points, there was a gap long enough to include the stop, but the available data could not independently put the cruiser on Briar Cut Road.
The department's original response had treated the assignment sheet as though it filled that gap.
It did not.
Nina interviewed the supervisor responsible for the response. Lieutenant Victor Brand said he had relied on the patrol summary and Rourke's denial. He had not personally checked the underlying location record before signing the letter.
That was carelessness. Whether it was more would depend on what else existed.
A roadside commercial camera offered another possibility. The tile warehouse had closed, but a neighboring storage yard still recorded its entrance. Nina requested the footage before its next automatic overwrite. The image showed headlights passing at approximately the right time, then a vehicle with emergency lights following less than a minute later.
The angle did not reveal a plate. The camera's clock was inaccurate. A delivery truck visible in the same sequence helped investigators compare the time with an independent receipt from the driver.
It was work without applause: finding the driver, confirming the receipt, checking how the camera clock had drifted, documenting every adjustment instead of hiding the inconvenient ones.
Adrienne asked Miles whether the video proved the stop.
“It supports your account of two vehicles traveling that way. We still need the rest.”
She began to dislike the phrase even while understanding why he used it.
The analyst showed Miles an example of an apparently useful location point that belonged to a different vehicle after a unit assignment changed. They corrected the working map before it reached a filing. Adrienne found the correction embarrassing until Miles reminded her that finding a mistake before relying on it was the purpose of checking. She had no interest in proving a true account with a false shortcut. The corrected map was less dramatic and far more valuable to her.
The rest included a clerk's memory of Rourke returning late, an unexplained deletion request affecting a draft patrol summary, and a phone call between the officer and a number registered to Harborlight's office service.
A call record did not say who held the clinic phone or what was discussed. Lydia told Nina that officers occasionally called about people requesting emergency assistance. Paul said he sometimes used the office handset after hours because his mobile reception was poor inside the building.