We needed only to find the laws they had already broken, and prove it, and hand the proof to people whose job it was to act on it.

Julian, who had spent the years since our unit lawfully, and had the standing to do this right, coordinated everything with federal investigators from the first hour — because a crime that crosses the lines these families’ reach crossed, involving public corruption and a coordinated cover-up, is a federal matter, and the local machinery that had been bought could be routed around entirely.

Marcus’s recovered footage, chain of custody clean, went to the FBI.

And the team’s real gift — the ability to see patterns, to follow money, to know where powerful people hide the things they don’t want found — we turned entirely toward assembling, lawfully and thoroughly, the documented case of what these three families had actually done: not only the assault, but the cover-up they’d mounted to hide it, the officials they had pressured, the evidence they had ordered destroyed.