Ten minutes later, Natasha sat across from Maison in a small office lined with framed community awards and photographs from ribbon cuttings. Maison was a sharp-eyed woman in her 50s who'd built her career on holding city departments accountable, and she listened to Natasha's story without interrupting once, her expression growing harder with every sentence.
Natasha laid it all out on the desk between them: Smith's body cam footage, already permanently logged with internal affairs and impossible to erase; the three prior complaints from the mall precinct, each one settled quietly with an NDA and signed off by the same deputy chief; her own written account of the day she was arrested, timestamps included; and finally, the letter confirming her sudden administrative leave dated the exact night before her scheduled hearing.
"They suspended me the night before I was supposed to present this to your committee," Natasha said. "That's not a coincidence, Councilwoman. That's a department protecting itself."
Maison flipped through the file slowly, her jaw tightening as she read the settlement dates, the repeated pattern, the same signature appearing again and again at the bottom of each closed complaint. "This is bigger than one bad arrest," Maison said finally, closing the folder. "This is an institutional pattern, and it's been sitting there for years because nobody with the authority to look ever looked."
"I have the authority now," Natasha said. "Or I did, until Friday night."
Maison looked up at her. "You still do, as far as my committee's concerned. Administrative leave inside the department doesn't strip your standing to bring a complaint to outside oversight. That's exactly why this office exists: so a department can't quietly bury something just by controlling its own personnel."
Something in Natasha's chest loosened for the first time in days. "So what happens now?"
"Now I use the authority my committee has that Deputy Chief Skyler's office doesn't." Maison pulled a legal pad toward her and started writing. "Independent subpoena power. I can compel testimony, pull records directly, and schedule an emergency public session that the department can't postpone the way they postponed your internal hearing. This isn't going through their calendar anymore. It's going through mine."
"How soon?"
"Days, not weeks." Maison looked at her steadily. "I'm going to need Officer Smith to testify on record about that footage. And I'll need to reach the loss prevention manager from the mall—Emily Frank, you said."
"She may still have a copy of the original footage," Natasha said. "The official one disappeared from the system. She never confirmed it to me directly, but I have a feeling she kept something."
"Then we find out." Maison set down her pen. "Captain Romer Connor, I want to be honest with you. This is going to get loud. Once I call this session, it stops being a quiet internal matter and becomes a public one. Skyler and Bailey are not going to go down without trying to drag your name through the mud on the way."
Natasha thought of Bailey's voice in that mall corridor calling her combative when she hadn't raised her voice once. She thought of the badge sitting in a drawer at headquarters that wasn't hers to wear right now.
"Let them try," Natasha said.
Maison almost smiled. "Then I'll have my office send out formal notices by end of day. Bailey, Skyler, Smith, and Ms. Frank, all summoned to testify."
Natasha stood, shook her hand, and walked back out through the glass doors into the hallway, the empty folder now sitting light in her arms, its contents finally in hands that couldn't be pressured into burying them.
She drove home that evening still without her badge, still technically suspended. But for the first time since Friday night, she didn't feel powerless; she felt like she'd just moved the fight to ground Skyler couldn't control. Now all she could do was wait and trust that everything she'd planted weeks ago—the footage, the policy, the truth Smith had chosen to file correctly—would hold when it finally came time to answer for it in public.
The city council chambers were packed by 9:00 on the morning of the emergency session. Word had spread fast once the formal notices went out: a captain placed on leave days before testifying against her own department; a sergeant and deputy chief summoned to answer for it publicly.
Reporters filled the back rows. Off-duty officers, unsure which side to stand on, sat scattered through the gallery.
Natasha sat near the front in plain clothes, no badge on her chest, watching Councilwoman Maison gavel the session into order.
"This committee holds independent oversight authority over complaints involving conduct within the Fairhaven Police Department," Maison said, her voice carrying easily through the room. "We're here today to examine the arrest of Captain Natasha Romer-Connor and a broader pattern that has come to this committee's attention. Officer Smith, please come forward."
Smith walked up slow, hands stiff at his sides, but when he sat at the witness table, he didn't hesitate.
"Officer Smith, does your body cam footage from that day exist in the department's internal affairs system right now?" Maison asked.
"Yes, ma'am. I filed it myself directly with IA three weeks ago."
"And what does that footage show?"
Smith swallowed hard. "It shows Sergeant Bailey saying he didn't like her attitude before we'd even reached her, before she said a single word to either of us. It shows her standing still, hands open, asking to see a supervisor while he cuffed her. It doesn't show her resisting. Not once."
A murmur rolled through the gallery. Bailey, seated at the far table with a department lawyer beside him, stared straight ahead, jaw locked.
"Why did it take three weeks for that footage to reach internal affairs, Officer Smith?" Maison asked.
"Sergeant Bailey told me it needed to go through him first."