Emily let out a breath. "The footage?"
"The footage," Natasha confirmed. "From Friday. I need to see exactly what happened before that call went out. The real shoplifter, the timestamp, all of it."
Emily turned to her computer without hesitation and pulled up the store's security system. She scrubbed back through Friday's footage until she found it: grainy, but clear enough. A woman, dark hair, moving fast between racks, tucking two shirts under her arm before slipping out a side exit near the food court. The timestamp in the corner read 2:47 p.m.
Then Emily pulled up a second angle: Natasha in the dressing room hallway at 2:51 p.m.—four minutes later—calmly paying for nothing because she'd bought nothing, walking out the front entrance with her own bags in plain view.
"That's it," Natasha said quietly, staring at the screen. "That's everything."
"I can get you an official copy," Emily said. "Chain of custody, signed and dated, sent straight to your office."
"Please do. As soon as possible."
Emily promised she would, and Natasha left the office feeling for the first time in days like she had solid ground under her feet.
But solid ground didn't last long.
Two days later, a mall security guard mentioned Natasha's footage request to a friend on patrol—casual conversation, nothing meant by it. That friend happened to still be close with Bailey, who'd been asking around quietly about whether anyone at the mall had heard from the new captain since Wednesday. By Thursday evening, Bailey had a name and a phone number.
He called Emily's manager directly—not Emily herself, careful not to leave a trail straight back to him—and made it sound casual, like a favor between people who understood how things worked. A word here, a suggestion there about how footage requests tied to ongoing personnel disputes could get complicated for a small mall office, how it might be easier for everyone if that particular file just quietly disappeared from the system before it became evidence in something bigger.
The manager, not wanting trouble, agreed.
Friday morning, Emily went to pull the official copy for Natasha's office and found the file gone—not archived, not misplaced, deleted from the system entirely with no record of who'd done it or when. Her stomach turned cold. She thought about calling Natasha right then to explain, but something stopped her: a flicker of instinct, the same instinct that had made her feel wrong about that garbled radio call in the first place.
Before the footage disappeared, she had done something she hadn't told anyone about yet: late Wednesday night, worried this exact thing might happen, she'd quietly copied the footage onto her own personal external drive and taken it home with her. She hadn't told Natasha; she hadn't told her manager. She wasn't even sure why she'd done it, except that something about the whole situation had felt wrong from the beginning, and she didn't trust it to stay solved just because a captain had asked a few questions. Now, she was glad she had.
Friday afternoon, Natasha received an apologetic call from the mall's IT department explaining that the requested footage appeared to have been lost due to a system error during a routine data cleanup.
Natasha sat at her desk after hanging up, jaw tight, staring at the wall. Convenient, she thought. Too convenient.
She didn't know yet that the footage still existed, safe on a drive in Emily Frank's apartment. All she knew was that somebody, somewhere, had made sure the one piece of hard evidence in her favor had vanished right when she needed it most. And that meant somebody was still working against her, even now, even with her badge on.
Natasha asked her assistant to schedule 15 minutes with Officer Tristan Smith the following Monday, no reason given on the calendar invite. She wanted him to come in without rehearsing an answer first.
Smith knocked on her office door right on time, looking like a man walking into a dentist's chair. "Captain," he said, standing stiff in the doorway, "you wanted to see me?"
"Sit down, Tristan." Natasha gestured to the chair across from her desk. "This isn't a disciplinary meeting. I just want to talk."
He sat, but he didn't relax.
"I'm not going to ask you to rat out your sergeant," Natasha said. "I'm going to ask you a simple question, and I want you to think carefully before you answer it: what did you actually see on Friday? Not what went in the report. What you saw with your own eyes."
Smith was quiet for a long moment, his hands pressed flat against his knees. Natasha let the silence sit; she'd learned a long time ago that people filled silence with truth if you gave them enough room to do it.
"I saw a woman who didn't do anything," Smith finally said, his voice low. "I saw Sergeant Bailey grab your arm before you said a single word to him. I heard him say, before we even got close to you, 'I don't like her attitude already.' And you hadn't opened your mouth yet. That's on my body cam. All of it."
Natasha kept her face still, though something in her chest tightened at hearing it confirmed out loud. "Why hasn't that footage been turned over yet, Tristan?"
Smith looked down at his hands. "Sarge told me body cam footage tied to a formal complaint gets reviewed by the sergeant first before it goes anywhere else. Standard procedure," he said. "I didn't question it. I should have."
"That's not the policy," Natasha said quietly. She pulled a printed page from her desk drawer and slid it across to him. "Footage connected to a formal misconduct complaint bypasses the reporting sergeant entirely and goes straight to internal affairs. It's been the policy for six years. He lied to you."
Smith read the page twice, his jaw working. "He told me it protected me. Said if I just sent it up through him, it had look better for both of us."
"It protected him," Natasha said. "Not you."