"I don't have an attitude. I have rights."
"You have a mouth, and it's about to get you into a lot more trouble than a stolen laptop."
"The laptop isn't stolen. I proved that. You watched me prove it."
Merritt stepped closer. In the storeroom without the audience, his voice dropped, not to a whisper, but to the register men use when they want to be heard only by the person they are confronting.
"You think that little watch trick means anything? I've got a complainant. I've got a report. And I've got a juvenile who refused a lawful search and is now resisting the investigation. That's enough to hold you."
"It's not enough to hold me, and you know it. And the fact that you moved me to a room without cameras suggests you know it, too." The sentence sat in the air between them. It sat there the way a lit match sits on a dry surface. Not yet burning, but close. So close.
Merritt said nothing. He straightened up. He adjusted his body camera, a small specific gesture that Kalin tracked with his eyes, and stepped back. "Sit down," Merritt said. He pointed to a plastic chair in the corner, the kind that stacks.
"Don't move. Don't talk. Don't touch anything." He left the storeroom. The door closed behind him. It did not lock.
It was not the kind of door that locked from the outside, but the sound of it shutting as for a 16-year-old boy sitting alone with his hands cuffed behind his back in a room that smelled like stale coffee. Close enough. Kalin sat. He breathed. He counted the ceiling tiles.
14 across, nine deep. He counted the boxes stacked against the far wall. 22 mostly branded coffee supplies. Two unmarked. He counted the seconds since the last time he had been allowed to speak to another person who was not wearing a badge.
In his back pocket, his phone buzzed, then buzzed again, then a third time. Three calls arriving in the space of 40 seconds from a contact save simply as mom. He could feel the vibrations through the plastic chair. He could not reach the phone. His hands were behind his back.
The cuffs were tight. Not painfully tight, but tight enough that his fingers were starting to tingle the way fingers do when circulation is slowly, methodically reduced. The phone stopped buzzing.
Out in the cafe, Wind was speaking to Phelps. Her notepad was open. She was writing. Phelps was talking, animated, confident, his hands moving in the broad gestures of a man who has been given an audience and intends to use it. I'm telling you, I saw him.
He was right next to me. I set my laptop down, went to the restroom, came back, and it was gone. He was the only one near my table. Do the math. Can you describe the laptop?
Silver Mac. You know, a MacBook. What model? I don't What does the model matter? It's a MacBook.
Serial number? Who memorizes serial numbers? Look, officer, I've been cooperative. I called this in. I'm the one who was robbed.
Why am I being questioned like a suspect? Wind wrote something in her notepad. She did not show it to Phelps. She did not show it to Merritt, who had returned from the storeroom and was standing near the hallway with his arms crossed and his jaw working on a piece of gum he had not been chewing when he entered. Felix watched from behind the counter.
His phone was in his pocket. His text had been sent. And somewhere outside in a parking lot 12 minutes away, or maybe 10 now, a phone was ringing. A phone belonging to a woman who had just finished cross-referencing case citations at a conference table she was about to leave who was now looking at a text from a number she did not recognize containing a message that read your son is being detained at Bellamy's Coffee on Whitfield Avenue. They won't let him call you.
They have him in the back room. Please come.
The woman read the message twice. She set down her pen. She closed her folder. A leather portfolio embossed with initials that the barista who sent the text did not know, containing documents that the officers in the cafe could not imagine. Representing a career that no one inside Bellamy's Coffee had any reason to suspect existed.