Then whispered, "Then please don't let them make me regret coming here."
I could not promise that the investigation would be easy.
I could not promise every person responsible would be convicted.
And I could not promise that the process would repair the damage already done to her family.
But I could promise one thing.
"We're not closing this complaint because somebody tells us the paperwork is inconvenient."
Elena looked at me.
For the first time since entering the room, she seemed to believe I might mean it.
Our initial review uncovered twenty-seven incidents involving questionable evidence handling during the previous four years.
Not all were connected.
Some appeared to involve ordinary procedural mistakes.
Others were explained by incomplete documentation or late data entry.
But nine cases contained irregularities that could not be reconciled easily.
Cash amounts changed between the point of seizure and central booking.
Evidence packages were transferred without required signatures.
Digital records were amended after court hearings.
And several complaints disappeared from the public-facing tracking system despite confirmation that they had been submitted.
The same names appeared repeatedly.
Sergeant Todd Keller.
Officer Evan Rourke.
Lieutenant Charles Whitaker.
And Deputy Chief Harold Mercer.
The pattern did not prove conspiracy by itself.
An officer working in a busy unit might appear in many legitimate cases.
A supervisor might sign hundreds of forms.
But certain details troubled me.
Three missing-money cases involved transfers supposedly authorized by Mercer personally.
Two involved property releases signed under Whitaker's account.
Four contained later corrections entered through a terminal normally used by Sergeant Keller.
And nearly every disputed seizure had been routed through the Fourteenth Precinct's older evidence-storage system before being entered into the central city database.
That older system used physical ledgers.
Bound books.
Numbered pages.
Carbon-copy receipts.
And handwritten transfer signatures.
The city had begun digitizing its evidence records years earlier, but older facilities still used paper books as part of their audit trail.
Most officers considered them a nuisance.
I considered them potentially valuable.
Digital records could be edited by authorized users.
Access logs could reveal who made changes, but only if the logs were preserved.
Physical records had different vulnerabilities.
Pages could be torn out.
Entries could be altered.
Books could disappear.
But they also carried handwriting, impressions, paper damage, and chronological relationships that sometimes exposed manipulation.
Our preliminary audit found that the physical ledger covering the night of the South Harbor raid had a gap.
Page 186 was present.
Page 187 was missing.
Page 188 followed immediately.