Page 49 of Jonah’s Lure

“Lockdown. Right now. Nobody in or out of this building.”

* * *

What followed was fast and purposeful. Trained people doing what they had been trained to do, the ordinary working day morphed rapidly into something else. Deputies moved to the front entrance and back exit simultaneously. A phone at the front desk rang twice but went unanswered. One of the admin staff stood with both hands pressed flat on her desk, her eyes shifting between the corridor and the sealed front door.

Angus stood in the corridor and watched Miguel run the building through the glass-paned walls that had been his office walls until three days ago. He had no weapon. No badge. Nothing that gave him any official standing in what was unfolding around him, and the frustration of it—standing in the center of something and being unable to touch it—was a sensation he had lived with for only a few days and had not yet made peace with.

He pressed his back against the corridor wall and let Miguel work.

The sweep took twelve minutes. Every room, every corner, the storage spaces, the back offices, the evidence room, the bathroom at the end of the hall. Miguel came back down the corridor with two deputies behind him, the answer already on his face before he said a word.

“Gone.” He said the word quietly and with a different gravity than the paramedic had given it twenty minutes ago. “They had enough time. In and out before we went back in.”

Angus thought about the window of time. The precise and narrow window of collective distraction. The office watching through the glass panes while he and Miguel stood on the other side having moved the conversation from the corridor. He thought about how perfectly timed it had been. How it would have required someone who knew this building’s rhythms. Who understood how the office moved and where its attention would go and when.

He looked at Miguel. Miguel was already looking back at him. Neither of them said what they were both thinking because they didn’t need to. They’d known for days that there was someone on the inside. Now they knew that person had just been in that room.

“The surveillance cameras,” Angus said.

Miguel nodded. He looked across the office floor, his eyes moving through the room until he found the person he was looking for. Steady and reliable, the person in this building whose eye for detail and calm under pressure he trusted most.

“Tammy.” His voice carried across the floor without strain. “I need you on the cameras. Every angle, starting from the last hour. Find whoever walked in and out of that corridor.”

She looked up from her desk.

“Of course.”

Her voice was even. Her hands lay flat on the desk in front of her, perfectly still, and she held Miguel’s eyes with the focused competence of someone who had already begun, in her mind, doing what she had been asked to do.

She turned to the camera system and began.

* * *

Murphy arrived fifteen minutes later and processed the scene with her usual professional care. She found Angus in the doorway once, and her eyes held his for a moment. Whatever she read on his face she filed it away without comment and went back to work. Angus felt out of place in his own office—a sensation he had no framework for and no way to hold properly. His staff were working the scene around him, searching for a killer who had somehow slipped in unseen to silence the one man who could have told them where to find Jonah.

Desperate to clear his mind and make sense of it all, he went to the break room, sat down at the table, stared at the wall, and waited. What for, he wasn’t sure.

All he knew was that two people were dead. Jonah was still missing. The case had nothing left to hold it up. And somewhere in his town, a killer was hiding.

And they were nowhere close to finding either.

And he was nowhere close to clearing his name and getting his badge back.

Chapter Thirty-One

Miguel arrived a short while later, his tone hushed as he spoke. “Conference room.”

That was it. Two words before Miguel disappeared into the nearby conference room almost as quickly as he had appeared.

Miguel had set up the murder board in the conference room while Murphy was still processing the scene.

By the time Angus came in, it had the shape of something serious—two columns, two names at the top, and connecting lines between them drawn in red marker with the deliberateness of a man who had decided that deliberateness was the only thing holding the situation together. Walt Greer on the left. Ray Cobb on the right. Below each name, what they knew. Miguel stood at the board with his back to Angus, the marker in his hand, studying what he’d written.

“What do we know?” Angus asked, breaking the silence as he shut the door behind him.

Miguel answered quickly.

“Cause of death unconfirmed for both, but the injection point on Cobb’s neck was photographed and documented. Murphy said nothing that could be quoted, but her face said enough. Cobb's off-the-record statement—the location, everything he gave us before the attorney arrived—is inadmissible without formal testimony. There’s no formal case without a witness. The surveillance footage from the corridor shows nothing useful. We’re nowhere close to solving any of this.” Miguel’s voice lacked its usual patience as he tossed the marker onto the table.