He understood what Baez was doing.
More importantly, he trusted her enough not to interrupt it.
Inside, Baez slid one page free but kept the printed side facing down.
The suspect’s eyes locked onto it.
“You know,” he said, “Reagan would’ve put whatever he had on the table by now.”
“I’m not Reagan.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
Baez looked directly at him.
“And you still haven’t understood why that matters.”
The smile vanished again.
For the first time, the suspect stopped trying to insult her and started trying to calculate her.
That was the shift Baez had been waiting for.
People behaved differently once they realized they had underestimated someone.
Some became cautious.
Some became angry.
He became talkative.
“You don’t have proof,” he said.
“You have a theory.”
Baez hadn’t used the word proof.
Outside the room, Danny’s expression changed.
He had heard it too.
Baez tilted her head slightly.
“I said neither of those things.”
The suspect froze.
Then he laughed too loudly.
“Come on.
That’s what this is.
You sit there with your mysterious folder and hope I panic.”
“Are you panicking?”
“No.”
“Then we’re doing fine.”
The suspect rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table.
Baez saw the movement and remembered an earlier interview.
The same gesture had appeared when he was forced to explain a gap in his version of events.
At the time, it seemed minor.
Now it returned.
She opened the folder fully.
The pages remained angled toward her, unreadable to him.
The first section contained the timeline she had reconstructed.
The second held statements whose wording didn’t fit together.
The third contained the detail that had changed the direction of the investigation: information the suspect had reacted to before anyone had officially placed it in front of him.
Baez had noticed it during what seemed like an ordinary conversation.
Danny had been pushing on one part of the story.
The suspect had been watching Danny closely, anticipating each question.
Then Baez had quietly mentioned an apparently insignificant element from the investigation.
The suspect’s eyes had flicked sideways.
He recovered almost immediately.
But not before she saw it.
Later, she checked the interview notes.
Then she checked them again.
The detail had never been disclosed to him.
That didn’t automatically solve the case.
It did something more useful.
It gave them a place to look.
And when Baez followed that thread, the contradictions began collecting around it.
The suspect had spent so much energy preparing for Danny that he had failed to notice Baez building the case from underneath him.
