Page 31 of Jonah’s Lure

The third building from the end had a padlock that was different from the others. Newer. Heavy-duty. Recently oiled. The shackle bright against the old metal of the door hasp.

He stopped the truck.

He sat and looked at the building through the windshield. The same type of padlock he’d photographed on Cobb’s south dock workshop. On a council building that had been empty for years. At an address written in a missing man’s personal planner two days before he disappeared.

Angus’s hands were still on the wheel. He became aware of that—the stillness, deliberateness of them, the way a man held himself in place against the pull of something with a very clear gravity.

Jonah could be in that building.

The thought arrived without drama and sat in the cab and didn’t move. Jonah could be twenty feet away behind a corrugated metal wall and a newer padlock, and Angus had no warrant, no badge, no legal authority to touch any of it. And if he forced that door, everything that came after it would be compromised and Pete Hutchinson—he let himself think the name plainly for the first time—would walk away clean.

His phone rang.

Miguel.

He looked at the screen. At the building. At the padlock catching the flat afternoon light.

He answered.

“Miguel.”

“Where are you?” Miguel’s voice had the tight, controlled quality it got when something had broken open and he was barely holding the pieces in place. “I need you to hear something. Not officially. Off the record.”

Angus looked at the padlock through the windshield and said nothing for a moment.

“I’m listening,” he said.

Chapter Nineteen

“I pulled the Bangor agent thread,” Miguel said. “All the way back.”

Angus kept his eyes on the third cannery building. The padlock. The corrugated metal wall yielded nothing. “What did you find?”

“The registered agent handled transitional services for clients exiting the correctional system. They use a standard intake form that collects basic biographical information. The client work runs through a nominee structure, so there is no direct name. But the form has a field for prior occupation.” Another pause, shorter. “I got access to the forms.”

Angus said nothing, waiting.

“The form for the client behind the holding company has a field for prior occupation.” Miguel’s voice was careful now, the way it became when he was walking toward something significant and wanted to arrive there without stumbling. “It says former law enforcement. Senior position. Maine.”

A pregnant pause filled the truck.

“Maine,” Angus said.

“Maine. Senior law enforcement. The timeline matches—the intake form is dated fourteen months before Cobb’s workshop lease was signed. Which means whoever this is, made arrangements for Cobb before being released.” He stopped. “I can’t get the name from the form without a formal request, and that request goes through the review board, and I can’t⁠—”

“You can’t run that through officially right now,” Angus said. “Not while I’m the subject of the review.”

“No.”

The word sat between them on the line.

Former Maine law enforcement. Senior position. A plan arranged from inside a correctional facility, the infrastructure already in place and waiting on the outside, a man named Cobb positioned in Weyport to do the necessary work before the architect walked back into town.

It wasn’t proof. It was the shape of proof, the outline of it—like a form waiting to be filled in. But the shape was clear enough.

“Miguel.” Angus spoke evenly. “I’m on Pembrook Road.”

A beat. “Why?”