Page 23 of Logan’s Way

The system didn’t just erase records. It erased witnesses. Quietly. Efficiently. With enough pressure that people learned to claim confusion rather than maintain what they knew to be true.

And Angus had just learned what happened when someone asked the wrong questions of the right people.

They fell silent.

This wasn’t about records anymore.

It was about people who’d learned what happened when questions were asked. And it was about the infrastructure of silence that protected whoever was responsible — Logan or someone connected to him — by making sure anyone who remembered understood the cost of remembering out loud.

Angus looked at his notes one more time. Sandra Hammond’s words were there, documented before she’d retracted them. Evidence that couldn’t be taken back, even if the witness no longer stood behind it.

“He told me I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.”

Someone had said that to Elena Martinez. Someone had made it true. And someone had spent eighteen years making sure no one would connect those truths to a name or face or brother who’d disappeared into a life that required institutional protection.

Hammond had paid the price for remembering.

And Angus was going to make sure that price wasn’t paid for nothing.

Chapter Eight

The investigation wall came down piece by piece.

Angus worked methodically in the hours after Hammond’s retraction, unpinning photographs and documents, sorting them into categories that made sense only to him. What could stay visible. What needed to be hidden. What should never have been written down at all.

Logan’s photo went into a drawer. The death certificate copy—the one with J. Brennan’s fabricated signature—went into a folder that went into a locked filing cabinet that had always held personal records. Nothing unusual about that. The timeline he’d sketched across the wall came down entirely, reduced to cryptic notes in his leather journal, where dates and connections existed without names attached.

Scout watched from the doorway, tracking Angus’s movements with the patient concern of a creature who understood distress even when it wore the mask of productivity.

What remained on the wall looked innocuous. A few old family photos. A calendar. Nothing that would raise questions if someone walked into this room and looked around. Nothing that connected to fake registrars or fabricated documents or witnesses who’d retracted their statements within an hour of providing them.

Angus stepped back and studied what he’d created: the appearance of a guest bedroom returned to normalcy. A man on bereavement leave, putting away the remnants of grief-driven inquiry, accepting what he had been told and moving forward.

Except the truth was in the locked cabinet, the coded journal, and the external drive hidden in a box of his mother’s belongings, where no one would think to look.

And the realization went through him like ice: he wasn’t documenting the truth anymore. He was managing exposure. Protecting evidence from people who had the authority to seize it. Hiding what he knew because revealing it would make it disappear.

This was what criminals did. What people with something to hide did.

Angus had spent twenty years building cases against people who operated this way—keeping secrets, destroying evidence, and making sure no one could prove what they knew to be true.

Now he was doing the same thing—for different reasons with different intentions. But the actions were identical.

The thought disturbed him more than the State Oversight call. More than Hammond’s retraction. Because this—hiding evidence, managing information, operating in shadows—was a line he’d never imagined crossing.

But he’d crossed it, and was still crossing as he organized his files into categories of exposure risk. And he wasn’t going to uncross it, because the alternative was letting someone destroy what he’d discovered.

Scout joined him, nudging his hand until Angus reached down and ran his fingers through the thick fur. Angus ran his hand through the dog’s fur, anchoring himself in something real and present, and untouched by lies.

His phone buzzed. A text message from Murphy:

Checking in. Haven’t heard from you in a few days. Everything okay?

A simple question. Normal concern. Exactly what someone in a relationship would send when their partner had been unusually quiet.

Except Angus realized he had been avoiding her calls. Not deliberately. Not consciously. Just… not answering. Not reaching out. Letting distance accumulate because talking to Murphy meant either lying about what he was doing or telling her a truth that would implicate her in something she hadn’t chosen to be part of.

He typed a response: I’m fine. Just needed some space to process. I’ll call soon.