Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The dock office smelled of coffee, brine and the particular staleness of a room that was heated just enough and no more.
A metal desk ran along the back wall, stacked with manifests, tide charts, and a radio handset resting in its cradle.
A whiteboard above it tracked the fleet—boat names, crew numbers, departure times marked in blue marker, return times still blank.
A coatrack near the door held two slickers and a set of overalls.
Everything had a purpose. Nothing extra.
Frank Holt took the chair behind the desk without seeming to notice he’d done so.
It was the chair of a man who sat there every day and couldn’t stop being that man, even now.
He pressed both palms to the desktop and looked at Angus the way someone looks at a person they’re deciding whether to trust.
Clara Holt remained standing. She’d moved from the window when they came in and positioned herself to Frank’s left, slightly back—close enough to be present, far enough to give him room.
She was in her mid-twenties, dark-haired, her father’s jaw softened into something more patient.
She held a mug of coffee she wasn’t drinking and watched Angus with an attention different from her father’s.
Frank was looking for reassurance. Clara was looking for information.
Miguel took out his notebook. Angus stayed on his feet.
“Tell me about Friday,” Angus said.
Frank drew a slow breath. “Jonah left the dock at five thirty. Same as always. I watched him go to his truck. That was the last time I saw him.” He paused. “I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I?”
“Did you speak to him before he left?”
A brief hesitation. “In passing. I had a call with a buyer up in Rockland. I told him I’d go over the weekend schedule on Monday morning.” He looked at his hands. “He said fine. That was it.”
Angus let the silence linger for a moment. “Was that typical? Keeping the schedule discussion until Monday?”
“We run a tight operation. Everyone knows what they’re doing.”
“What I mean is, did Jonah seem like himself on Friday? Distracted, preoccupied, anything different?”
Frank opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked, briefly, like a man confronting a question he hadn’t let himself ask. “He was quiet. But Jonah’s often quiet.”
“He wasn’t quiet,” Clara said.
Both men looked at her. She kept her eyes on Angus.
“He wasn’t quiet on Friday. He was excited about something. He’d been that way for a few weeks—coming in early and staying late on the accounts side, which isn’t his usual area. I asked him what he was working on.” She paused. “He said I’d see soon enough.”
“He didn’t tell you what it was?”
“No.” Clara’s expression changed—not quite hurt, more like someone revising an assumption she hadn’t realized she was making.
“Jonah tells me most things. We’re close.
The fact that he was keeping this particular thing back meant it was something he wanted to present finished.
Something he wanted to arrive with rather than develop out loud. ”
Frank shifted in his chair. “He’s always chasing the next idea. The northern expansion, the Penobscot Bay grounds—he has these plans.”
“The northern expansion,” Angus said. “Tell me about that.”
Frank’s expression flattened. “It’s not viable. I’ve told him that. The licensing costs, the fuel range for the fleet we have—” He stopped and shook his head. “He disagrees.”
“He doesn’t just disagree,” Clara said quietly. She didn’t add anything else. She didn’t need to.
The gap between those two statements held more information than anything Frank had said in the past five minutes. Angus noted it and moved on.
“Did Jonah have plans for the weekend? Was he meeting anyone? Did he mention going anywhere?”
Frank shook his head.
“Clara?”
“Nothing specific. He texted me Saturday morning. Just checking in. Nothing about plans.” She set the mug on the edge of the desk.
“When he didn’t answer Saturday afternoon, I called twice.
Sunday I drove to his apartment. His truck was gone.
I knocked for a long time.” She looked directly at Angus.
“Jonah doesn’t go dark. Not with me. Whatever this is, he didn’t choose it. ”
The certainty in her voice came from knowing someone, not from hoping. Angus believed her.
“We’ll need access to his apartment,” he said. “And anything here that was his—his desk, any files or notes, computer access if he had one here.”
Frank nodded and pushed himself up from the chair. He moved with the heaviness of a man carrying something he hadn’t put down since Saturday and wasn’t sure how.
He led them through the office door and along the side of the main building. At the north end of the property, beyond the fuel pumps, a separate structure sat lower than the rest, its corrugated siding darker with age and weathering.
“North Annex,” Frank said, following Angus’s glance. “Hasn’t been worth much since the storm.”
“Still part of the operation?”
“Technically.” Frank kept walking. “Jonah had opinions about it. Wanted money spent there before I was ready to spend it.”
Clara looked toward the building, then away. “He said the old water system needed attention.”
Frank’s mouth tightened. “Jonah said a lot of things needed attention.”
Jonah’s workspace was a small desk in the corner of the operations room next to the dock office—separated from Frank’s domain by a partition wall and a door that didn’t quite shut flush.
A working desk, not a tidy one. Manifests and printouts, a tide atlas open to Penobscot Bay, a ruled notebook with a cracked spine.
Pencils. A stapler. A dried coffee ring on the corner of a manila folder.
Miguel photographed it before they touched anything.
Angus worked through the notebook while Miguel took the manifests.
Jonah’s handwriting was small and angled, the kind produced by someone who wrote fast and didn’t go back.
The pages were dense—fleet schedules, fuel cost calculations, and contact names for buyers as far north as Bar Harbor.
Pages of work. In the margins of one page, a column of figures resolved, at the bottom, into a projected annual revenue number for a northern operation. The figure was circled twice.
At the back of the notebook, separated from the fleet notes by several blank pages, was a different kind of list. Names and phone numbers, mostly unfamiliar.
Supplier contacts, by the look of them. Restaurant groups, a cold storage facility in Ellsworth, a seafood distributor operating out of Bangor.
And between those pages, loose, was a business card.
Plain white. No logo. A name printed in simple type: R. Cobb, with a mobile number below it. No address, no company name, no other details.
Angus turned it over. The back was blank.
He held it up. “Clara.”
She came to the doorway. He showed her the card.
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.