Chapter 6 - The Interrogation Room
Three hours later, the chapel had emptied, but my day was far from over.
I sat behind a two-way mirror in Interrogation Room B at the state police headquarters. On the other side of the glass, Daniel sat at a metal table, his hands cuffed to a ring bolted to the steel surface. The air conditioning in the room was blasting, and without his designer jacket—which had been confiscated as evidence—he was shivering violently in his thin white dress shirt.
Detective Miller sat across from him, opening a thick leather binder packed with three hundred pages of financial transactions, toxicology reports, and digital message logs that I had meticulously organized.
“We have the digital footprint, Daniel,” Miller said, leaning back in his chair and tapping the folder. “Your sister-in-law gave us everything. We have the IP addresses from the offshore servers you used to purchase the synthetic potassium. We have the security footage from the shipping depot in Norfolk where you picked up the package using a fake driver’s license.”
Daniel stared at the table, his mouth pressed into a tight, pale line. “I want my lawyer.”
“Your corporate lawyer, Mr. Aris, was arrested forty-five minutes ago at his office,” Miller replied calmly. “Turns out he was helping you hide client escrow funds. He’s currently in Room A, and he’s already singing like a canary to the federal prosecutors to save his own skin.”
Daniel’s head snapped up, his eyes wild.
Through the mirror, I watched the absolute destruction of his world. He had built his entire life on the assumption that he was the smartest man in the room, that everyone around him was too slow, too emotional, or too weak to trace his tracks. He had forgotten that a paper trail is a permanent record of human greed.
Miller leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “You know what the worst part of this is, Daniel? You didn't even need to kill her. If you had just filed for divorce, if you had just admitted you failed as a developer, you would have been broke, sure. You might have spent a couple of years in a minimum-security federal facility for white-collar fraud. But you would have been alive, and your wife and daughter would be breathing right now.”
Daniel let out a dry, rattling laugh that sounded completely unhinged. “Broke?” he rasped, his voice breaking. “You think I could just be broke? You don't know what it’s like to look at those people at the club, to know they’re waiting for you to fail, waiting to laugh at you!”
“So you poisoned your pregnant wife,” Miller said flatly.
“She was going to leave me anyway!” Daniel shouted, his hands slamming against the metal table, the chains rattling loudly. “She found the statements! She was going to take her trust fund and walk away! She was going to ruin me!”
Behind the two-way glass, I took a slow, deep breath.
There it was. The truth. Unvarnished, ugly, and pure. He hadn't killed her just for the money; he had killed her because she had finally seen through him. She had stopped being an asset he could control, so he had decided to turn her into a payout.
I pressed the button on the intercom system connecting my side of the glass to Miller’s earpiece.
“Ask him about the safe deposit box in Richmond,” I said quietly into the microphone.
Miller adjusted his earpiece, nodded slightly, and looked back at Daniel. “Where is the secondary compound, Daniel? The rest of the potassium batch you bought? We know you didn't throw it away. You’re too meticulous to throw away evidence.”
Daniel froze. His gaze flicked toward the two-way mirror, as if he could see me standing there in the dark behind the reflective glass.
“She knows, doesn't she?” Daniel whispered, his voice trembling. “She’s standing behind that glass right now.”
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Miller didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Daniel lowered his face into his cuffed hands and began to weep—screaming into his palms as the finality of his fate closed in around him like a iron vault.
