He opened it, more out of impatience than interest, already halfway through rolling his eyes.
And then he stopped moving entirely.
For a long moment he just stood there, staring down at what was in his hand. His eyes went from the photograph to the name to the seal stamped across the top of the identification card, and something in his face began, very slowly, to drain of color.
He read it again. And again, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less terrible the third time through.
His partner noticed the change immediately — you couldn’t miss it, the way all the bravado had gone out of the man’s shoulders in the space of two seconds.
“What,” the second officer said. “What is it?”
The tall one didn’t answer. He just held the case out, hand trembling slightly, and let his partner read it for himself.
It was Victoria’s service identification. Her photograph. Her rank. And beneath it, the name of the department she worked for — the Directorate of Internal Affairs, the unit whose entire job was investigating complaints of exactly this kind of misconduct by police officers in the field.
