The specificity of that sentence landed strangely in the room.
Mercer's expression shifted.
Not much.
Just a degree.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who just watched a man get told to empty his pockets without cause."
Daniel held the officer's gaze.
"A badge doesn't change the requirement."
The store was silent.
Caleb Turner was looking at Daniel the way people look at something they're afraid to trust.
Mercer stared at Daniel for a long moment.
Then he smiled, the small, cold kind, and stepped back.
He said something to Ethan that Daniel couldn't hear, and the two of them left without another word to Caleb.
The front door swung shut behind them.
Caleb exhaled.
His hands came down slowly.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"I know," Daniel said.
He put the soup can in his basket.
"You have a manager you can report this to?"
Caleb nodded, still looking at Daniel like he was trying to figure something out.
Daniel nodded back and went to find the eggs.
He didn't see Mercer's face as the officer walked to his patrol car.
He didn't need to.
He had spent 15 years learning to read the architecture of wounded pride in men who had never been told no by someone they'd already decided didn't matter.
He knew exactly what that expression looked like from the outside.
He had cataloged it in reports, in testimony, in the quiet aftermath of situations just like this one.
What Daniel could not afford to do was act on that knowledge.
His assignment required distance.
It required patience.
It required that no one, not Travis Mercer, not Robert Kincaid, not anyone in the Lakeshore PD, develop any reason to look at him closely before the evidence was complete.
He had 6 weeks left.
Maybe eight.
The financial records were almost fully traced.
The chain between Kincaid and the two businesses he was protecting was three links away from being airtight.
6 weeks.
He just needed 6 weeks.
He paid for the eggs and the soup at the register.
Caleb bagged them and said thank you again quietly while the woman behind the counter pretended to count change.
Daniel told him to take care of himself.
He drove home.
Maya was at the kitchen table working on her project, a poster about the civil rights movement, photographs and dates arranged in careful rows.