Page 31 of Logan’s Way

Angus wrote one final entry:

New operational rule: Assume constant observation. Assume all systems compromised. Assume environmental pressure will increase.

Response: Remove all exposure points. Cash only. No traceable communications. No official channels.

They want to make continuing difficult. They’ll succeed. But difficult isn’t impossible.

He closed the notebook and looked at Scout. The dog watched him with no judgment, no concern, just steady presence.

“We’re going to need to be more careful now, boy,” Angus said quietly.

Scout’s tail thumped in response. Whatever careful meant to his person, the dog would adapt. That’s what faithful companions did.

The irony wasn’t lost on him, and he felt no anger. Just cold recognition that he also would adapt.

They’d moved the conflict from digital to physical. From restricting what he could see to restricting what he could do. From warning him to stop to making it the easier choice.

But Angus had spent twenty years learning how to build cases despite obstacles. How to work around restrictions. How to operate when systems were compromised.

He just hadn’t expected to use those skills against the institutions he’d served.

Angus stood and walked to the window. To the outside observer, Weyport appeared to be an ordinary town, where its citizens trusted its systems and believed its officials. A town where administrative holds were processing delays and banking verifications were security measures and document requests took however long they took.

The light outside faded toward evening. Inside, Angus stood at his kitchen window with his notebook open to a new operational rule and his investigation materials locked in a cabinet where only he could access them.

They wanted to contain him. They were succeeding in making life difficult.

But difficult wasn’t impossible.

And Angus Reid had just committed to operating as if every system was compromised, every interaction monitored, every routine task a potential pressure point.

Because that’s exactly what they’d become.

And understanding the game meant knowing how to play it differently.

Chapter Eleven

Angus had learned long ago that real truths rarely arrived with drama. They surfaced quietly, through details that didn't belong together but refused to stay apart.

The house was silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator and Scout's breathing from the hallway. It was late—or early—one of those hours when the world felt paused and your mind insisted on finishing whatever it had started.

Angus sat at the dining table with his notebook open and his own notes spread before him — not new searches, not fresh databases, just everything he'd already gathered, laid out in the order it had arrived. The registrar who didn't exist. The source file that should have been there and wasn't. Sandra Hammond's words before she retracted them. The pattern of cases that kept forming the same shape no matter how many times he looked away.

He hadn't been trying to find anything new. He'd been trying to find a flaw in what he'd already found. Trying to prove the discrepancy was a clerical error, the registrar reassigned or retired, the signature mismatch something that required no imagination to explain.

Because the alternative required something far worse.

He closed the notebook. The evidence didn't change just because he'd read it a fourth time. One error could be coincidence. Two could be incompetence. Three meant intent.

He opened a second folder. Cases he had not intended to collect. Disappearances that had brushed past his career in the margins—men removed quietly, charges dropped after sudden relocations, threats neutralized without arrests or prosecutions.

He had dismissed them at the time. Assumed jurisdictional overlap. Witness recantation. Victims fleeing danger faster than the system could protect them.

Now he looked again. Dates. Locations. Outcomes. Always the same shape.

The threat didn’t get arrested. Didn’t get charged. Didn’t die. They vanished from the victim’s life. Not randomly. Not chaotically. Cleanly.

Angus felt the tightening in his chest then—not panic, not fear—but the physiological response he recognized from crime scenes where something didn’t fit and his body noticed before his mind allowed it.