Her eyes moved slowly through the dispersing crowd until they found Camille Ross near the back bench, gathering her bag.
Crane looked at the young woman for a long moment. Then she began walking toward her.
Officer Leon Briggs had been sitting in his personal car in the courthouse parking lot for 40 minutes before he finally got out.
He wasn't in uniform. He had driven here in jeans and a gray jacket, his badge clipped to his belt out of habit more than intention. His hand steady on the wheel, and his mind doing the thing it had been doing for three years. Running the same loop of memory over and over, looking for the exit he'd never been able to find.
He had worked alongside Derek Voss for six years in the narcotics division. He knew what Voss was.
He had known since the second year, when he watched Voss plant a small bag of cocaine in the door panel of a car belonging to a Black teenager named Marcus Webb, who had been stopped for a broken taillight and had made the mistake of asking why.
Briggs had written it up. He had submitted the report through the proper channel.
Two weeks later, the report had disappeared from the system, and Voss had pulled him aside in the locker room and said, with the relaxed certainty of a man who had done this before, "You're a good cop, Leon. Don't complicate it."
Briggs had requested a transfer eight months later.
He had told himself for three years that he had done what he could. That the system was too large, the protection too deep, the personal cost too high.
He had a daughter in her second year of college. He had a mother who depended on him. He had a mortgage on a house in a neighborhood that had taken him 11 years to afford. These were not small things to put on the table.
He had told himself this so many times that he had almost stopped hearing how hollow it sounded.
Then this morning had happened.
He had seen the footage on his phone at 9:47 a.m. Someone had shared Camille Ross's recording through a civil rights journalist's account, and within the hour, it had moved so far and so fast that stopping it would have required destroying the internet.
He had watched it twice, sitting in his car in the parking lot of a grocery store. And when it was over, he had sat very still for a long time, looking at the concrete pillar in front of his windshield.
Then he had driven to the courthouse.
Thomas Avery met him at the side entrance. Naomi had anticipated this. She had told Thomas before the afternoon session to watch for anyone who came to the building out of uniform and appeared to be working up the nerve to come inside.