He did not speak to Daniel directly.
He made two phone calls from a personal cell phone he kept in his jacket's inner pocket.
And when he was done, he spoke to the duty prosecutor who had been called in for the evening.
The conversation lasted 6 minutes.
By 11 that night, Daniel had been formally charged with three counts.
Theft of property valued above $5,000.
Possession of stolen property.
And obstruction of a police investigation.
His request for an attorney had been logged and acknowledged, but the attorney assigned through the public defender's office would not be available until the following morning.
In the meantime, Daniel was transferred to a holding cell.
He sat on the narrow bench and thought about Maya.
He thought about the way she had looked on the sidewalk, not collapsed, not hysterical, but standing with her arms at her sides after she'd stopped struggling, watching him go with that careful expression she had inherited from no one he could name.
It was entirely her own.
He thought about what she would do tonight in Sandra's house, knowing that her history project had been due today and that the tomato soup and grilled cheese he had promised had not happened.
He thought about whether she had eaten.
He thought about whether Sandra would think to tell Maya it would be okay and whether Maya would believe it if she heard it.
He let himself think about all of it for exactly as long as he needed to.
Then he put it in a compartment and closed the door.
He had a job to finish.
The preliminary hearing was held two mornings later in courtroom 4 of the Lakeshore County Courthouse.
The room was small and institutional, wood-paneled walls that had darkened with decades of recirculated air, fluorescent lighting that flattened everything it touched.
The gallery held 30 people, and most of those seats were filled.
Word had traveled.
The footage had done its work.
Daniel sat at the defense table in the clothes he had been wearing when he was arrested.
His attorney, a public defender named Michael Hadley, had been able to speak with him for 23 minutes the previous morning.
Hadley was competent and overworked, and he had made clear, without saying it directly, that the case, as presented, was not favorable.
The prosecution's evidence package was thorough.
Too thorough.
The footage from Oakridge Market's exterior camera had been obtained as part of the case file, but it covered only the parking lot, not the interior of the store.
And it had been trimmed to begin at the moment Daniel's car arrived, cutting the 47 minutes before it in which Travis Mercer and Ethan Row had been inside.
There was a written statement from the individual who had reported the device stolen.
The statement was clean and detailed in a way that written statements rarely were when produced under duress.
It had been prepared.
Ethan Row testified briefly.
He described the traffic stop as routine, initiated after a tip from a confidential informant.
He described the discovery of the device as unambiguous.
He used the word unambiguous twice, which was once more than the word typically needed to be used.
The prosecutor, a mid-level county attorney named Donna Graves, who had worked with Kincaid's department for six years, described Daniel to the court as a man who had constructed a facade of normalcy in order to conceal ongoing criminal activity.
She used the phrase premeditated concealment three times.
Daniel listened to all of it.
He noted each overreach, each piece of language that had been chosen rather than observed, each timeline that had been smoothed where real timelines were rough.