Dana looked at him.
“Actually, don’t.”
Reeves turned back.
“What did you say?”
“I said let him watch.”
Something had changed in Dana’s face.
Not fear.
Calculation.
Reeves released her wrist.
“Sit down.”
Dana remained standing.
She looked at the red marks forming around her arm.
Then at Reeves.
“How many times have you done this?”
His jaw tightened.
“Done what?”
“Stopped someone because you decided they looked wrong before they did anything wrong.”
Reeves laughed.
“You planning to sue me?”
Dana reached slowly inside her denim jacket.
This time, Reeves let her.
She withdrew a black credential wallet.
Placed it beside the spilled coffee.
Opened it.
The sheriff stopped smiling.
Inside was a federal badge.
The waitress covered her mouth.
The father in the next booth stared.
Reeves looked from the badge to Dana.
Then back again.
“You’re federal?”
Dana nodded.
“For the last eleven years.”
His entire posture changed.
“You should’ve identified yourself.”
Dana looked at her wrist.
“I did exactly what every ordinary citizen in this diner would’ve had to do.”
Reeves opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
That silence was the reason Dana had waited.
The badge was not supposed to rescue her.
It was supposed to remain hidden long enough for her to see what happened when Carl Reeves believed there was no badge at all.
Dana was not in the county by accident.
For six months, complaints involving Reeves’s department had been arriving through multiple channels.
They did not all say the same thing.
That was what initially made the pattern difficult to evaluate.
One driver claimed he had been stopped without being told why.
Another said deputies searched his truck after he declined to answer unrelated questions.
A woman reported that cash was missing after officers searched her vehicle.
A local business owner claimed he filed a formal complaint and later discovered there was no record of it.
Several people described being detained for hours, questioned, then released without charges.
Any one complaint could be mistaken.
Incomplete.
Exaggerated.
Or explainable.
But enough of them contained the same details that Dana’s office began asking a larger question.
What happened when this sheriff’s department believed nobody outside the county was paying attention?