Sixty Years in a Private Collection

Internal Affairs Investigator Ines Farrokh had spent eleven years investigating fellow officers, and none of those cases had ever felt as personally difficult as the one currently sitting on her desk, because the officer under suspicion was her own former training partner, Costa Reyes.

“I need you to understand why I’m bringing this to you directly, rather than simply assigning it to another investigator,” her supervisor, Chief Boone Achterberg, said, sliding the file across his desk with obvious reluctance. “You have the most experience with exactly this kind of evidence tampering pattern, and I trust your judgment not to let your personal history compromise the investigation’s integrity. But I need to hear you say that confidently before I formally assign this to you.”

“I can be objective,” Ines said, though the weight of the file’s contents, once she began reviewing it, tested that confidence considerably more than she’d anticipated. “Costa and I worked together for three years. I know his instincts, his habits, the way he approaches a scene. If he’s genuinely done what these allegations suggest, I’ll need to set aside everything I thought I understood about him and simply follow the evidence wherever it actually leads.”

The allegations centered on a pattern of evidence tampering across multiple cases, each instance subtle enough that individual reviewing officers had missed it, but which, when compiled together by a sharp-eyed defense attorney building an unrelated appeal, revealed a consistent pattern connecting several convictions where physical evidence appeared to have been strategically relocated or, in at least two cases, potentially planted entirely.

“The pattern spans four years,” Ines told her assistant, Priya Marsh, presenting the compiled case files. “If this is genuine, we’re not looking at a single lapse in judgment. We’re looking at sustained, deliberate misconduct that may have contributed to wrongful convictions in at least two of these cases.”

The investigation required Ines to revisit crime scenes she remembered vividly from her own partnership with Reyes, reconstructing evidence chains with a scrutiny she’d never previously applied to their shared work, uncomfortably aware that her own signature appeared alongside his on several of the reports now under suspicion.

“I need to be direct with you about something,” she told Boone, three weeks into the investigation, her composure carrying genuine professional distress. “Two of the cases in question involve evidence I personally logged alongside Costa during our partnership. I don’t believe I was aware of any tampering at the time, but I need this investigation’s findings to include full scrutiny of my own role, not just his, because if he was manipulating evidence during our partnership, I have a professional obligation to understand whether I somehow failed to notice something I should have caught.”

“That’s exactly the kind of integrity I was hoping you’d bring to this, Ines, even though I understand how difficult it makes an already painful investigation.”

The confrontation with Reyes, when it finally came, revealed a man whose composure, carefully maintained throughout years of what Ines now understood as calculated misconduct, finally began to fracture under the weight of accumulated evidence.

“You’re really doing this,” he said, sitting across from her in the interview room, his voice carrying more hurt than defiance. “After everything we went through together, you’re the one building the case against me.”

“I’m the one who happened to be assigned the investigation, Costa, and I’m going to conduct it properly regardless of our history, because that history doesn’t change whether these allegations are true.” Ines kept her voice steady despite the genuine personal difficulty of the confrontation. “I need you to walk me through the Ferrand case specifically. The defense attorney’s appeal identified a physical evidence discrepancy that your original scene report doesn’t adequately explain.”

Reyes was quiet for a long moment, something shifting behind his composed exterior. “I believed he was guilty,” he said finally. “Everything about that case pointed toward Ferrand, except one piece of physical evidence that, if properly disclosed, would have introduced enough reasonable doubt to potentially let a guilty man walk free. I made a judgment call that the evidence was more confusing than exculpatory, and I adjusted my documentation to reflect what I genuinely believed was the more accurate picture of what actually happened.”

“That’s not a judgment call, Costa. That’s evidence tampering, regardless of how convinced you were of the suspect’s guilt. Our entire legal system depends on evidence being presented accurately, precisely because individual officers’ certainty about guilt isn’t supposed to be the deciding factor in what evidence reaches a jury.”

“So what happens now? To me, I mean.”

“That depends considerably on how forthcoming you’re willing to be about every case where this pattern occurred, not just the ones the defense attorney happened to catch.” Ines’s voice carried the professional weight of the difficult decision she’d already made before walking into this interview. “I’m recommending full prosecution for evidence tampering, Costa, and I’m recommending every conviction connected to your documented misconduct be reviewed for potential wrongful conviction. I understand this ends your career, and probably damages our friendship beyond repair. But I can’t recommend anything less, given what the evidence actually shows.”

The subsequent investigation, expanded once Reyes’s cooperation revealed the full scope of his misconduct across nearly a dozen cases, led to the eventual exoneration of two wrongfully convicted individuals and Reyes’s own prosecution for evidence tampering and obstruction of justice.

“I keep asking myself if I should have caught this sooner,” Ines told Boone, once the case had finally concluded. “Three years working alongside him, and I never once suspected what he was doing.”

“That’s not a failure of your judgment, Ines. That’s simply how skilled deception works, especially from someone you trusted enough not to constantly scrutinize.” Boone’s voice carried genuine reassurance. “What matters now is that you caught it eventually, and pursued it fully despite the personal cost, rather than looking away because the history between you made it uncomfortable to do your job properly.”

Priya spent the following months helping design a new peer-review protocol for evidence logging, one that required a second officer’s signature on any documentation change, a policy she hoped would make it considerably harder for the next Costa Reyes to quietly rewrite the truth of a scene undetected.