Smith sat with that for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes: guilt curdling into something closer to anger. "What happens if I file it correctly now?"
"Through IA, like it should have gone in the first place?"
"Then the truth is on record, permanently, where nobody can quietly delete it."
Natasha leaned forward slightly. "I'm not going to pretend there won't be consequences for you internally. Bailey's not going to like it. But I think you already know that not saying anything has its own consequences, too."
Smith nodded slowly, then stood up straighter than he had all meeting. "I'll file it today."
He did.
That afternoon, Smith walked his body cam footage directly to internal affairs himself, bypassing Bailey entirely, filing it exactly the way policy required. Once it was logged into the system, it was permanent. No manager could quietly delete it the way the mall footage had disappeared.
Bailey found out by Wednesday. He didn't confront Smith directly; that wasn't his style when he didn't have the upper hand anymore. Instead, he started small. Smith's usual shift trades stopped going through. Requests that used to get approved without a second look suddenly needed further review. Officers who used to save him a seat at the diner after shift started looking the other way, murmuring that Smith had gone and turned on his own partner, that he wasn't someone you could trust to have your back anymore.
By Friday evening, Smith sat alone at a corner table at the diner, coffee going cold in front of him, watching the table where he used to sit fill up with other officers laughing about something he wasn't part of anymore. Nobody said anything cruel to his face. Nobody had to. The empty seat across from him said enough.
He thought about calling Natasha to tell her what was happening, but he didn't want to sound like he regretted doing the right thing. He didn't regret it; he just hadn't expected doing the right thing to feel this lonely. He drank the rest of his cold coffee, paid his tab, and drove home in silence, the body cam footage he'd filed sitting somewhere in a system now, permanent and untouchable—the one thing in this whole mess he knew for certain he'd gotten right.
With Smith's body cam footage now locked permanently into the Internal Affairs system, Natasha took her next step. She sat down at her desk on Monday morning and filed a formal complaint against Sergeant Donald Bailey herself—not as a woman who'd been wronged at a mall, but as a captain with the standing to force the department to answer for it. Her rank gave her something she hadn't had a week ago. She used it to demand a hearing date on the calendar in writing, with a copy sent to Deputy Chief Skyler's office as a courtesy.
Skyler's response came back slow—too slow. Days passed, then a week. Every time Natasha followed up, she got the same answer wrapped in different language: the review board's schedule was full; the paperwork needed additional signatures; a procedural step had to be completed before the hearing could be officially calendared.
None of it was a flat no. All of it added up to a delay with no end in sight.
Natasha recognized the tactic for what it was; she'd used similar tactics herself years ago, back when she was junior and learning how department politics actually worked underneath the official rulebook. Somebody who couldn't say no outright would just make sure yes never quite arrived. If she couldn't move forward through the front door, she'd build a case so solid it couldn't be quietly filed away no matter how many procedural knots got tied around it.
She started pulling old case files—not Bailey's personnel record (she'd already seen that, and it was thin by design), but further back, into old complaint archives from the mall precinct, cross-referencing names, dates, locations. It took her most of a week, working late most nights after her official hours ended, the office quiet except for the hum of the copier.
What she found made her sit back in her chair and stare at the screen for a long time: three prior complaints, all from the same mall, all from Black patrons over the past three years, all describing something close to what had happened to her: stopped without cause, treated with hostility, held longer than necessary before being released without charges. Every single one of them had been resolved the same way: quietly, quickly, with a signed non-disclosure agreement attached and no further action taken against the officer involved.
Every one of those settlements bore the same signature at the bottom authorizing the resolution and closing the file: Deputy Chief Piper Skyler.
Natasha sat with that for a long moment, feeling something cold settle into her chest, replacing the anger she'd been carrying since the mall. This wasn't just about Bailey anymore; she understood that now, clearly for the first time. Bailey was one bad officer with poor instincts and a badge he didn't deserve to carry, but somebody with real power inside this department had just made a decision to protect him over her—quietly, procedurally, with a memo instead of a conversation, using rules Natasha hadn't even known existed until they were used against her.
If they could undo her decisions this easily, paperwork alone wasn't going to be enough. She needed something they couldn't argue away with a technicality—something solid, something with a timestamp. She thought back to Friday, to the mall, to the loss prevention manager who had made that panicked radio call in the first place. If there was security footage from that store—real footage showing the actual shoplifter, showing exactly when Natasha walked out empty-handed—that wasn't something Skyler could bury in a memo.
Natasha picked up her desk phone and dialed the main number for the Fairhaven Galleria. "Loss prevention office, please," she said. "I need to speak with someone named Emily Frank."
Emily Frank was already nervous before Natasha even walked into the Loss Prevention Office. She'd been the one who made that garbled call Friday. She'd been replaying it in her head all weekend, wondering how a five-second glance at a fast-moving shoplifter had somehow ended with a woman in handcuffs who hadn't taken anything at all. When the mall directory told her the captain of Fairhaven PD wanted to speak with her personally, her stomach had dropped straight to the floor.
"Ms. Frank," Natasha said, stepping into the small back office lined with monitors. "Thank you for making time for me."
"Of course. Please, sit." Emily gestured to a chair, her hands fidgeting with a lanyard around her neck. "Captain, I want you to know I never meant for any of that to happen the way it did. My radio call was rushed, and by the time it reached the officers—"
"I know," Natasha said, cutting in gently. "I'm not here to blame you. I'm here because I think you have something that can help me."
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."