Page 17 of Jonah’s Lure

“Something else,” she said. “And this is secondhand, so take it for what it is.” She folded her hands on the table. “One of my technicians is seeing a paramedic. I overheard her telling someone at the office about a call he’d responded to earlier this week. A welfare check on Prospect Street. An older man was found confused and unable to account for six hours of his afternoon. There were no injuries or obvious medical causes. The paramedic said the man told him he’d had coffee with someone and didn’t remember much after that.” She paused. “He thought the man had just fallen asleep and was disoriented upon waking up. Logged it as a welfare check and closed it.”

The kettle came to a boil. Angus didn’t move.

“Coffee with someone,” he said.

“That’s what she said.”

Prospect Street was one block from the harbor front. He knew one person on Prospect Street well enough to picture the house without trying. Walt Greer. Corner booth at the diner. The man who told him about Pete Hutchinson. The man who knew everything that moved through Weyport.

The man Ray Cobb might very much have needed to know had spoken to Angus.

“Did the paramedic get a description of the person the man had coffee with?”

“She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.” Murphy looked at him carefully. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more than I already did.”

He got up and made the tea, mostly because it gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. He placed a cup in front of her and sat back down.

The silence between them was not the silence from earlier in the week—the comfortable, practiced silence of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms. This one held something else. Not accusation. Murphy was too fair and too certain to make an accusation based on what she had. But awareness. The awareness of a woman who had walked into a situation more complicated than she’d known when she put on her coat and who was deciding, in real time, how she felt about it.

He recognized it because he’d seen it on Miguel’s face too—the careful recalibration. The separation of what you knew from what the evidence suggested.

“I’m going to get through this,” he said. Not a reassurance. Just a statement.

She looked at him for a long moment. “I know you are.” She picked up her cup. “But Angus—be careful. Not just legally careful. The other kind.”

He nodded.

She finished her tea, put her coat back on, and he walked her to the door. The rain was lighter than before, a fine mist now rather than a downpour. At the door she turned and kissed his cheek, then pulled him into a brief hug. She stepped back, out onto the step, and looked at him.

“Call me tomorrow,” she said. Not a question.

“I will.”

He watched her back out of the driveway and disappear up the street. Then he went inside, locked the door, and stood in the kitchen for a moment surrounded by the silence of the house.

* * *

He sat at the table with his journal and wrote down what he had: Walt Greer, Prospect Street, a memory gap of several hours, coffee with someone. If Cobb worked the same way with everyone—coffee, conversation, something added to it—then whatever happened to Jonah might have started the same way. He had nothing to put that against yet. Just a method that had worked on at least one person in this town without anyone noticing until now, and a silence that started sometime after Jonah’s last call Saturday afternoon. Cobb had gone to see Walt Greer. Had needed to know what Walt had told Angus, or had needed Walt not to remember something. Or both.

The question was when. Walt spoke to Angus at the diner on Tuesday afternoon. If Cobb had seen them together or had been told about it through whatever channel was feeding him information about Angus’s movements, the coffee with the colleague could have happened Tuesday evening or Wednesday.

He wrote: Cobb is still in the area. Or was as of this week. He cleared out of the workshop Monday, but he hasn’t left Weyport entirely.

He looked at that line. Then wrote beneath it: Someone is still feeding him information. Someone who knew I spoke to Walt at the diner on Tuesday.

He closed the notebook.

The rain tapped against the glass, lighter now, almost gentle. Somewhere nearby, Ray Cobb was either waiting or moving. And somewhere behind Cobb, at a careful distance maintained from the beginning, was the person who had sent him here sixteen months ago with a plan, a target, and all the patience in the world.

He turned off the kitchen light.

He didn’t sleep for a long time.

Chapter Eleven

Angus drove to the office at seven thirty, parked in his usual spot, and went through the front door the way he always did, the way he had for years—and the room changed when he walked in.

Not dramatically. Nobody stopped moving or raised their voice. It was smaller than that and worse. Jeanine at the front desk looked up from her screen and then looked back down half a second faster than she normally would. Across the room, two of his deputies were talking near the coffee machine, and the conversation thinned and quieted as he passed by. A third was on the phone and turned slightly away, as if the call suddenly required more concentration. Small adjustments. The kind people made without deciding to, when they didn’t know what to say and had decided that saying nothing was safer.