Page 51 of Jonah’s Lure

“It’s been thirteen days,” Miguel said. “The call to Frank was a week ago. Nothing since. Two people were killed to protect whatever this is.” He exhaled slowly. “We have to consider that we’re not looking for a missing person anymore.”

The words landed in the room with the weight of something irreversible.

Angus looked at Jonah’s name on the board. At the age next to it—twenty-eight—and the photograph pinned beside it, Jonah on the Holt Marine dock in a yellow slicker, squinting against the light, looking like a man who expected to be somewhere else soon.

He thought about Clara handing him an oxblood planner across a diner counter. “I don’t believe you did this.” He thought about Frank Holt staring at the whiteboard in the dock office, looking back at the space where his son had been.

He couldn’t let that be the end of it.

* * *

They kept going. Another hour, then another. The coffee machine down the hall cycled twice. The building settled around them as the board grew denser with connections, questions, and the specific untidiness of a case that had been built in pieces rather than seen whole from the start.

And then, somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted.

Angus was looking at the timeline they’d drawn. Sixteen months back, then further—the preplanning, the inside knowledge, the patience. And he felt it arrive the way certain things do. Not as a deduction. Not as a logical conclusion drawn from evidence. As a certainty that lived beneath the level of argument, in the part of him that had spent years learning to read people, situations, and the exact language of human motivation.

He knew who this was.

He had known for weeks, in the way you know things you couldn’t yet prove. But standing in front of this board, looking at the shape of everything laid out in red marker—the patience, the institutional knowledge, the specific cruelty of using the law as a weapon—there was only one person it could be.

Angus walked to the window. The parking lot outside was empty, the single lamp at its far end casting a circle of pale light on the wet asphalt. He thought about a man in the third pew on Sunday morning. The pressed shirt. “I’m a changed man, Angus.” The patience of someone who had spent years planning exactly this and had the discipline to perform rehabilitation while doing it.

“Pete Hutchinson,” he said.

It came out quietly. Flatly. Not a theory offered for consideration. A name placed in the room where it had always belonged.

Miguel didn’t move. He looked at the board for a long moment.

Then he uncapped the red marker and wrote the name at the top. Above both columns. Above everything.

He stepped back and looked at it.

“Walk me through it,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Angus arrived Thursday morning under the pretense of another interview.

Miguel had gotten there ahead of him—the coffee made, the conference room door open, the red marker on the table, and Pete Hutchinson’s name written above everything else in capital letters. Angus stood in the doorway, looked at it ,and felt the previous night settle over him again, the way certain nights did when sleep hadn’t quite cleared them away.

He heard Miguel come in behind him and offered him a simple, “Morning.” Miguel stood next to him and said, “Angus, I need you to know that I followed the evidence. I just did my job.” Miguel’s voice was quiet and direct—the voice of a man who had decided what he needed to say and was saying it without decoration. “It was the right thing to do, and I’d do the same again.” A pause. “But I never once stopped believing that you were innocent. I needed you to know that. I should have told you that sooner, while it still mattered. But there it is. No excuses.”

Angus turned and looked at him. At the man he’d worked alongside for years—the man who’d never once given him anything other than loyalty and straight dealing, even when straight dealing had pointed in the wrong direction.

“It still matters,” Angus said.

Miguel met his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded once and went to pour the coffee, and that was that. Both of them understood completely.

* * *

Murphy came into the office at half past eight.

She was looking for Miguel. She had preliminary notes from the overnight examination. Something about the compound concentration—the comparison she’d been running against Walt Greer’s profile. She found him at the board, handed him the folder, and spoke quietly and efficiently about what the full autopsy would likely confirm.

Miguel asked one question. She answered it. And then she looked at Angus.

It was brief, the kind of look that passed quickly because everything in her morning was moving fast—two bodies, a full examination schedule, a case with no formal lead investigator, and no clear resolution. There wasn’t room for what the look was carrying.