"I just told the others."
"I know. I'd like to hear it from you."
Bell studied her face.
Then he began again.
He talked for almost three hours.
Simone asked about dates.
She asked who controlled the keys to the evidence storage room.
She asked whether the department's towing records could be reconciled with payments received by the city treasury.
She asked what happened when an officer reported a discrepancy.
And when Bell described the arrest of the city mechanic, she stopped writing.
"Repeat that last part."
"The arrest report said they found narcotics in his work truck."
"Did they?"
Bell shook his head.
"I saw the intake photographs. Nothing was there."
"And the final evidence inventory?"
"Listed a sealed package."
"Who entered it?"
Bell looked down.
"Officer Matthews."
Simone opened another notebook.
Inside were six names.
Three had already appeared in Bell's account.
The others belonged to people who had been arrested, threatened, or financially ruined after challenging department personnel.
One was an elderly Black veteran who had lost nearly six thousand dollars during a traffic stop.
One was a Latina nurse whose car had been impounded for thirty-eight days despite the dismissal of her charges.
One was a white construction worker who had refused to pay an unofficial release fee.
And one was Simone's older brother.
His name was Daniel Carter.
He had died eleven months earlier.
The official report called it an accidental overdose following a lawful arrest.
Simone had spent almost a year learning why that report could not be trusted.
Daniel Carter had been thirty-seven years old when he died.
He was a high-school mathematics teacher, a father of two, and the sort of man who could repair a kitchen faucet while explaining fractions to a child sitting on the counter.
He had never become rich.
He had never been famous.
He had never needed to be either.
His students remembered him for keeping a jar of sharpened pencils near the classroom door, because he believed no child should lose an opportunity to learn for lack of a pencil.
His younger sister remembered him for something else.
When Simone was nine, their father lost his job at the manufacturing plant.
Money became scarce.
There were nights when their mother pretended she wasn't hungry so the children could eat.
One afternoon, a classmate accused Simone of stealing a bracelet.
The bracelet was eventually found beneath a desk, but the accusation spread farther than the correction.
Daniel, then fourteen, walked her home from school.
She was crying.
He listened without interrupting.
Then he told her something she would carry for the rest of her life.
"People can be wrong about you, Simone. That doesn't mean you have to become the person they imagined."
Years later, when he was arrested after questioning an officer's treatment of a teenage student, those words returned to her.
Daniel had witnessed two officers forcing a boy against the hood of a patrol car outside a convenience store.
He had asked whether the boy's mother had been contacted.
The arrest report claimed Daniel had interfered with police operations and attempted to strike an officer.
A surveillance camera showed him standing several feet away, holding a grocery bag.
The prosecutor dismissed the charge.
But the dismissal did not end the matter.
Daniel filed a formal complaint.