He had spent 15 years reading the texture of fabricated evidence.
And this had the same quality as everything else Travis Mercer had ever touched.
Confident on the surface.
Hollow underneath.
Built to withstand a casual look, but not a careful one.
The problem was that a careful look required the right person to be doing the looking.
And in courtroom 4 of the Lakeshore County Courthouse, that person was not yet present.
Caleb Turner was not present either.
Daniel had noticed that immediately.
He had half expected it.
After Mercer left Oakridge Market that afternoon, Caleb would have been told in one way or another, explicitly or not, what cooperation looked like and what it cost.
Caleb was 24 years old and worked a retail job in a city where the people he'd need to oppose had 11 years of infrastructure behind them.
Daniel did not blame him.
After the preliminary arguments, Hadley leaned close.
"They're moving for expedited trial. Kincaid's office made a call to the DA. This is being fast-tracked."
"I know," Daniel said.
Hadley looked at him.
It was the look of a man who had been a public defender long enough to develop specific categories for his clients and who could not quite find the one that fit Daniel Reeves.
"Is there anything you're not telling me?"
Daniel looked at the prosecution table, where Donna Graves was arranging papers with the organized efficiency of someone who had already decided how this ended.
"Yes," he said.
Hadley waited.
"But not yet," Daniel said. "I need two more days."
Hadley stared at him.
"For what?"
Daniel turned back toward the front of the courtroom, where the judge was returning to the bench.
"To make sure what I have is enough," he said.
That evening, Sandra Okafor brought Maya back to her house after a quiet afternoon.
Maya had asked twice to go home and get her history project.
Sandra said it could wait.
Maya said the project had been due today and wasn't finished, and that her father had promised her tomato soup and grilled cheese, which she still hadn't had.
Sandra made her tomato soup from a can she found in her own pantry.
She wasn't sure it was the right brand.
She sat at the table while Maya ate, and after a while, Maya looked up and said, "My dad isn't a thief."
It wasn't said defensively.
It wasn't said with the urgency of someone trying to convince.
It was stated the way Maya stated most things, with the calm of someone who had looked at the available information and reached a conclusion.
"I know," Sandra said, though she didn't quite.
Maya finished her soup and went back to her project.
She worked until 10:00, placing photographs in careful rows on a poster board while her father sat in a holding cell 3 miles away with the case he had spent 14 months building still intact, waiting on a server in Washington for the right moment to arrive.
By the time Maya turned off the light and pulled the blanket up, her poster was finished.
She had centered it around a quote she had found in her research, printed neatly in block letters at the top of the board.