This was not improvised.
This had been prepared.
The language was too consistent.
The framing too clean.
Someone had coached this narrative before Mercer walked into the room.
Kincaid.
Daniel filed that thought and kept his expression neutral.
"I'd like to speak with an attorney," he said.
"That's your right," Mercer said.
He closed the folder and stood.
"We'll get that process started."
He moved toward the door, then stopped as if something had occurred to him.
"The girl," he said. "Maya. That's her name."
Daniel said nothing.
"She's with a neighbor right now."
Mercer's voice was even, conversational.
"We'll need to contact child services if this goes the way I think it's going to go. Long process. Lot of moving parts."
He tilted his head slightly.
"Could go faster if there's cooperation on your end. Just something to think about."
He left.
Row followed without looking at Daniel.
The door closed.
Daniel sat in the silence of the room and let the full weight of what had just been said settle around him.
It was not the first time someone had used a child as leverage in a room like this.
It was, however, the first time it had been his child.
He breathed through it.
Then he focused on what mattered.
The recording unit in his watch had been running since the moment he pressed the crown on Alderman Street.
Everything Mercer had just said, the threat about Maya, the coached language, was captured.
When the unit's battery depleted after its set recording window, it would automatically transmit a burst signal to the duty desk in Washington.
That signal also carried a pre-arranged distress code.
It told the office one thing.
Field Agent Reeves had gone dark, and the 48-hour escalation protocol was now active.
The office would move.
Robert Kincaid arrived at Lakeshore PD at 9:47 that evening.
He was a broad, deliberate man who moved through spaces as though they had been arranged for him specifically.
He had run Lakeshore PD for 11 years.
Before that, he had been a deputy chief in a larger department two states north, where he had left under circumstances that his current employment file did not mention.
He had a reputation in Lakeshore for efficiency, for quiet problem resolution, and for an absolute intolerance of what he called unnecessary complications.
Daniel Reeves had become an unnecessary complication.
Kincaid reviewed the situation in Mercer's office for 12 minutes.
He did not visit the interrogation room.