In the back seat, Daniel sat with his hands cuffed behind him and his breathing even.
And he counted.
He counted what he had.
He counted what they didn't know.
He counted the weeks of work that lived on an encrypted drive in a compartment behind the false back panel of his shop's storage room.
The recording unit in his watch was running.
Every word spoken near him from this point forward was going onto that drive.
And the access credentials for that drive, along with the location data and footage access for every surveillance unit he had installed across Lakeshore, had been included in his last encrypted upload to Washington 3 days before his arrest.
The count was not reassuring.
But it was not empty either.
The interrogation room at Lakeshore PD was the same beige on beige as every interrogation room Daniel had ever sat in, which was many.
The table was bolted to the floor.
The camera in the upper corner had a small red light that blinked every 4 seconds.
The mirror on the far wall was the standard one-way glass, though in a department this size, it was more likely that no one was behind it.
He had been sitting for 22 minutes when Mercer and Row came in.
Mercer sat across from him.
Row took up position near the door.
Mercer set a thin folder on the table and opened it without looking up.
"You want to tell me where you got the device?"
"It was in my vehicle," Daniel said. "I don't know how."
"You don't know how?"
Mercer repeated it without inflection, the way experienced interrogators do when they want a statement to sound foolish on playback.
"It was in your trunk and you don't know how it got there."
"That's correct."
Mercer looked up.
"You work on electronics. Phones, computers."
"I repair phones."
"Right. So you know what something like that is worth?"
"I do."
"And you're telling me you have no idea how a $9,800 piece of equipment ended up in the back of your car?"
"That's what I'm telling you."
Mercer sat back and studied him for a moment.
Then he smiled.
The same small, cold expression from Oakridge Market.
"You know what I think about guys like you?"
Daniel waited.
"I think you're smart enough to be careful and dumb enough to think careful is the same as invisible."
He leaned forward.
"We've had our eye on you for a while. That little shop of yours. Cash business. Irregular hours. Customers who don't always match the neighborhood."
It was a lie, and not a particularly sophisticated one.
Daniel had been watching Mercer long enough to know the man had not been watching him until 4 days ago.
But the lie told him something important.