Page 5 of Jonah’s Lure

Her expression changed—not recognition, but the opposite. She looked at it the way you would look at something that had no business being where it was.

“I’ve never seen that before,” she said. “Where was it?”

“Back of the notebook.”

She took it from him carefully, by the edges, and read the name. Then she looked up.

“Three weeks ago Jonah told me he’d found someone who could help make the northern expansion work—someone with connections at the county level, he said. Permitting. Licensing. He said this person understood how approvals moved through the system.” She paused. “He wouldn’t tell me the name. I assumed it was someone he’d met through the harbor board.”

Angus looked at the plain white card in her hand that held no trail.

County level. Permitting. Licensing. Someone who understood how approvals moved through the system.

“Did he say anything else about this person?”

Clara’s jaw tightened slightly. “He said this person had noticed things about the operation that nobody else had noticed. That he could see what Jonah was capable of.” She held the card out to Angus. “Those were the words he used. ‘What Jonah was capable of’.”

Angus took the card. He looked at the name again.

R. Cobb.

He didn’t recognize it. But whoever it was had spent weeks telling a twenty-eight-year-old man exactly what he most wanted to hear—and now that man was gone.

He pulled an evidence bag from his jacket and sealed the card inside it.

“I’ll need the number from Jonah’s phone records,” he said to Miguel. Then, to Clara: “Don’t touch his desk. Don’t move anything. We’ll be back.”

She nodded. Her eyes went to the evidence bag in his hand and stayed there.

Outside, crossing the parking lot to the truck, Miguel fell into step beside him.

“R. Cobb,” Miguel said. “You know the name?”

“No.”

“Want me to run it?”

“Yes.” Angus opened the truck door. “And Miguel—whoever this person is, he spent weeks building Jonah’s trust before he disappeared. That’s not coincidence, and it’s not a stranger.”

He got in and started the engine.

It wasn’t until he was pulling out of the Holt Marine lot and onto the harbor road that the thought arrived—quiet and precise, cutting through everything else.

County level. Someone who understood how approvals moved through the system.

Someone who knew how the sheriff’s office worked.

Chapter Three

The darkness was not complete.

A thin line of gray light showed at the base of the door—enough to confirm there was a door, enough to tell him that somewhere on the other side, the world was still running on a normal schedule of day and night. Day, by the look of it. He’d been awake for a while—or thought he had. Somewhere between Saturday afternoon and now, time had lost its shape.

He sat with his back against the wall, knees drawn up, the blanket draped across his shoulders. Concrete beneath him, cold through his jeans. The wall behind him was concrete too—rough, painted at some point, the paint long since flaked away. He’d felt around as much as the zip ties allowed when he first woke. A room, roughly square by his estimate, perhaps fifteen feet on a side. A metal door. No window. A drain in the floor six feet to his left told him this had been a kind of utility space. A processing room, maybe. A cold room, though the temperature wasn’t cold enough for that.

The smell was the thing that stayed with him. Concrete and dust and, underneath it, unmistakably, saltwater. Not the harbor smell he’d grown up with—not diesel and brine and the richness of working boats—but something cleaner than that, the deep-water smell that came off the ocean when the wind was right.

He was close to the coast. He hadn’t moved far.