Page 18 of Jonah’s Lure

He’d walked into rooms like this before, on the other side of them—rooms where something had happened and everyone knew, but nobody wanted to be the first to speak. He knew what it meant. He hadn’t expected to experience it from the inside.

He went to his desk. He opened his journal, put his pen beside it, and sat down. He did not look back at the room.

Miguel came in at eight. He poured coffee and brought a cup to Angus’s desk without being asked, which was not something he normally did. He set it down without comment and went to his own desk, and that was the kindest thing anyone did for Angus that morning.

He kept his head down and worked on his own file—the notes he’d been keeping separately, outside the Holt investigation. The harbor board minutes. The watch alert. The sight line from the dock road. Walt Greer’s coffee and the six missing hours. He arranged them in order, looked at what they formed, and knew it wasn’t enough. Not yet. Not even close.

At nine fifteen, his desk phone rang.

Commander Brenda Kovak of the State Law Enforcement Standards Board. He recognized her voice before she gave her name—composed, precise, with the cadence of someone who delivered difficult news often enough to have found the most functional way to do it.

“Sheriff Reid,” she said. “I want to speak with you directly before the formal documentation reaches you. There’s been a development in the review.”

He picked up his pen. “Go ahead.”

“A financial anomaly has been identified. A withdrawal from a joint savings account registered in your name, opened approximately twelve years ago. The withdrawal was made eight days prior to Jonah Holt’s disappearance. Fourteen hundred dollars, cash. The account shows no other activity in the past three years.”

Angus set the pen down.

He knew the account. He’d opened it with Renee, back in Vegas, before everything fell apart. After the divorce was final he’d meant to close it and never had—not out of sentiment exactly, but out of avoidance, the kind practiced by a man who didn’t want to sit in a bank office explaining why a joint account no longer had two people attached to it. Years of not dealing with it. And now it had surfaced like this, in a conversation he hadn’t wanted to have, becoming something it was never meant to be.

“I didn’t make that withdrawal,” he said. It’s a joint account. My ex-wife could have.”

“Noted. But the account is registered to you, Sheriff, and the timing is what concerns the board.” Kovak’s voice didn’t change. “Sheriff Reid, I have to be direct with you. We now have three pieces of documentation that require explanation: the encrypted messages, the witness placing your vehicle at the victim’s address, and this withdrawal. Individually each has an explanation. Together, they constitute a pattern the board cannot overlook.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “Effective Monday morning, you’ll be placed on administrative leave pending a full review. You’ll be asked to surrender your credentials at that time. The Holt investigation will transfer fully to Deputy Garcia.”

Outside the window the harbor lay still and pale in the morning light, the sky washed clean after two days of rain. A fishing boat was making its way toward the mouth in no particular hurry. Ordinary Friday. The world outside continued at its own pace, regardless of what was happening in this room.

“How long?” Angus said.

“I can’t give you a timeline. The review will be thorough.” Another pause. “I want to be clear that this is a process, not a verdict. But I also want you to understand the seriousness of what we’re looking at.”

“I understand the seriousness,” Angus said. “I also need you to understand something. I didn’t send those messages. I didn’t make that withdrawal. I didn’t arrange for Jonah Holt to disappear. Every piece of evidence you’re looking at has been deliberately placed there by someone who has been studying my life for months. I am being framed, Commander Kovak. That’s not a defense—that’s what’s actually happening.”

A brief pause on her end. “Sheriff Reid, I hear you. The review process exists precisely to establish the truth of what happened. If what you’re saying is accurate, the review will show that.” Her voice didn’t harden, but it didn’t soften either. “In the meantime, the board has a responsibility to the integrity of the investigation and to the people of Weyport. I hope you understand that.”

He understood it. He didn’t like it.

“Thank you,” he said, and meant neither word.

He ended the call.

He sat very still.

Someone had built a frame around him. That was the only word for it. Not a misunderstanding, not a coincidence of circumstances—a deliberate construction, assembled piece by piece from the material of his actual life, designed to look exactly like guilt. His address. His truck. An account he’d opened in a different life and never closed. Each piece real, each piece his, each piece twisted just enough to tell a story he hadn’t lived.

He’d given nine years to this office. Nine years to this town—to its disputes and families, its hard winters, its small disgraces, and the occasional larger one. He’d built something here. Not just a record. Not just a reputation. He’d built the specific trust a man earns over time in a place that doesn’t give it easily. The kind of trust that meant people called him by his first name at the diner, brought their problems to his door before they became official matters, and left their spare keys at his office because they knew he’d use them right.

Someone had taken that trust and built a weapon from it.

The outrage came first, clean and sharp. Then, beneath it, something heavier and less manageable—the grief of a man watching the thing he’d built being used against him by the very system he’d built it within. He’d believed in that system. Still did. That was the worst part. He couldn’t stop believing in it even now, which meant he couldn’t protect himself from it the way a cynical man could. He just had to stand in it and trust that it would eventually work the way it was supposed to.

He pushed back from his desk and stood. The movement brought two heads up across the room—Jeanine at the front desk and one of his deputies near the window. Both looked at him. Both looked away.

He looked at the room. At the people who had worked alongside him for years. Who knew him.

“I didn’t do this,” he said. Not loudly. Just clearly, to the room, to whoever was willing to hear it. “Whatever you’ve heard—whatever’s being said—I want you to know that.”

Nobody spoke. Jeanine looked at her screen. The deputy near the window found something to examine on his notepad. Miguel, from his desk, looked directly at Angus for a moment before dropping his eyes.