Every experienced investigator has a version of the same story. The informant who started as a reliable source and ended as a liability. The CI who was producing good information right up until the moment it became clear the information was being shaped, filtered, and timed to serve the informant's agenda rather than the investigation's. The gap between how CI relationships are supposed to work and how they actually develop in the field is where cases get compromised, officers get disciplined, and occasionally people get killed.

The witness who saw everything is standing right there. So is the one who didn't say a word — the phone in the victim's pocket, the doorbell camera across the street, the cloud account that synced the moment before the suspect wiped the device. Digital evidence doesn't forget. It doesn't recant. It doesn't fail to show up to court. But it disappears fast, and the window to preserve it correctly is often measured in hours.