Chapter 3 - The Interrogation Room
The observation glass in Interrogation Room 2 was slightly scratched in the lower right quadrant, distorting Lauren’s silhouette into a grotesque, wavering shape.
She sat huddled at the stainless-steel table, her beige cardigan clutched around her shoulders like a shroud. Her eyes were red, puffy, and completely bloodshot. Every few seconds, a violent tremor would shudder through her spine, making the iron chain linking her handcuffs to the welded floor ring clink softly against the metal.
"You don't have to watch this, Mrs. Mercer," Detective Miller, Vance's junior partner, murmured from behind me in the darkened observation booth.
"I need to hear it," I said. My voice was no longer trembling. The tears had stopped somewhere around midnight. What remained was a cold, brittle clarity that frightened even me. "Turn the speaker up."
Inside the room, Detective Vance set down a thick plastic evidence bag containing a black USB drive and a stack of printed bank statements.
"Let’s go over it again, Lauren," Vance said, leaning his forearms on the table. "Start from 1:30 this afternoon."
Lauren flinched, pulling her chin toward her chest. "I already told you everything! I didn't want this! You have to check on Chloe! Is she breathing? Did the doctors say she was okay? Please, God, just tell me if she's breathing!"
"Chloe is on life support, Lauren," Vance said with brutal, unvarnished simplicity. "Her lung tissue is inflamed, and her oxygen saturation is hovering at eighty-nine percent. If she suffers brain damage from lack of oxygen, we’re upgrading your charges from conspiracy to commit aggravated assault to attempted murder of a minor. And if Daniel doesn't wake up, it’s capital murder."
Lauren let out a high-pitched, choking sob, slamming her forehead against the stainless-steel tabletop. "No! No! Richard told me it was just a knock-out gas! He swore to me it was something they use in European veterinary medicine—just a sedative! He said Daniel would wake up tomorrow with a terrible migraine, think he had a sudden transient ischemic attack, and the doctors would keep him under observation for a week! That was all it was supposed to be!"
"Who gave you the cylinder, Lauren?"
"Marcus!" she cried, her voice cracking into shards. "Marcus Kane! He’s Croft’s head of site security! He met me in the parking lot behind the grocery store on Route 9 on Sunday night. He gave me the key to the lockbox in the trunk of his car. He showed me how to attach the brass nozzle to the furnace trunk."
"And the spare car fob?" Vance pressed. "Why take Daniel’s key?"
Lauren swallowed hard, her chest heaving in ragged gasps. "Marcus said... he said we needed a contingency. If Daniel smelled the gas before it knocked him out and tried to get to his car to drive away, the car wouldn't start without the transponder fob. He told me to find where Daniel hid it and put it in the drop-box behind the mailbox on the corner. I did it at noon while Daniel was on a conference call with his team in Chicago."
"And the instructions?" Vance pointed to the scanned copy of the yellow note. "The line that said Leave before the bus?"
"Marcus wrote that," Lauren sobbed, her fingers clawing at her own forearms. "He knew Chloe’s schedule because... because I told him. Two weeks ago, when Richard called me into his office to show me my casino IOUs, he asked about Daniel's habits. He asked when Daniel takes his lunch, when he walks the dog, when the house is empty. I told him Chloe never gets off the bus until 3:22! I told him Daniel always walks to the end of the driveway at 3:20 to meet her!"
She lifted her head, looking directly at the one-way glass, as if she could sense me standing there in the dark.
"I set the timer for 2:45," she whimpered, her tears dripping onto the cold metal table. "It took fifteen minutes to fill the living areas. By 3:05, Daniel should have been asleep at his desk. I was supposed to slip back in through the garage side door at 3:10, retrieve Daniel’s laptop from his home office, grab the hard drive backup from his fireproof safe, and be gone by 3:15. Five full minutes before the bus reached the corner!"
"Except the bus ran early," Vance said coldly.
"I was in the driveway!" Lauren screamed, her voice tearing her vocal cords. "I had the laptop bag in my backseat! I was pulling out onto the road when I saw the yellow lights at the corner! I saw Chloe get off! I tried to honk, but she had her headphones on—she was running because it was starting to drizzle! I watched her open the front door, and I... I panicked! I stepped on the gas! I drove three miles down the highway, and then... then I couldn't breathe. I turned the car around. I came back. I swear to God, Sarah, I came back!"
In the observation room, Detective Miller reached for the microphone switch, but I stepped past him and pushed the heavy metal door open.
"Mrs. Mercer, you can't go in there!" Miller hissed, catching my arm.
"Let her," Vance’s voice crackled through the intercom.
The heavy steel door swung inward with a dull, hydraulic groan.
Lauren looked up. When her swollen, bloodshot eyes found mine, she shrank back so violently her chair legs screeched against the concrete floor.
"Sarah..." she whispered, lifting her handcuffed wrists as if begging for mercy. "Sarah, please... hit me. Kill me. Just don't look at me like that."
I walked slowly across the concrete until I stood two feet from the table. I didn't yell. I didn't scream. I didn't reach across the metal to tear her hair out.
The silence between us was heavier than a gravestone.
"Chloe had strawberry gum in her backpack, Lauren," I said, my voice barely louder than an exhale. "She bought it at the corner store yesterday with her allowance money because she wanted to surprise you when you came over on Friday."
Lauren buried her face in her arms and began to wail, a broken, animal sound of pure destruction.
"You knew Daniel took that job because he wanted to pay for our family's future," I continued, leaning over the table until my eyes were inches from hers. "He spent his weekends calculating load bearings and concrete ratios so that bridges wouldn't collapse under school buses. And you sold his mind to a criminal for two hundred thousand dollars of poker chips."
"I was so scared, Sarah!" she gasped through her tears. "Croft said they'd break my legs! They said they'd throw acid on my face!"
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"Then you should have let them," I said, each word landing like an iron spike. "Because whatever they would have done to you is nothing compared to what you’ve done to my child."
I turned my back on her, looked at Detective Vance, and said, "Find Croft. Find the man who gave her that brass cylinder. Because if Daniel doesn't wake up to testify against him tomorrow morning, I will."
