Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The state oversight office was in Augusta, but Catherine Marsh conducted the meeting by phone at two o’clock, which told Angus something about how they were classifying it.
A phone call was preliminary. A phone call was still in the territory of we have some questions rather than we have a problem.
He sat at his desk with Miguel across from him, his journal open, and waited for it to become clear which one it actually was.
It became clear quickly.
Marsh’s voice was measured and precise, the voice of a woman who chose her words the way a surgeon chooses instruments—for function, not comfort.
She said there had been an anomaly flagged in the Holt missing persons case file.
She said a series of encrypted messages had been identified by the state’s digital forensics unit, traced to a device registered at Angus’s home address, and sent over the past three weeks to a prepaid number linked to a network previously associated with a relocation operation out of Weyport.
Angus kept his voice level. “What network?”
A brief pause. “The operational network identified in connection with Logan Reid’s case. The language in the messages uses specific terminology from that investigation. Relocation protocols. Asset security. Exposure risk.”
He said nothing for a moment.
“The messages reference Jonah Holt by name,” she continued. “By name and by description. They predate his disappearance by eleven days.”
The room was very quiet. Through the window, the harbor appeared still. A single boat made its way toward the mouth in the thin afternoon light.
“I don’t own that device,” Angus said. “I didn’t send those messages.”
“I understand,” Marsh said, in a tone that indicated she had written that down.
“We’ll need you to provide a full accounting of your whereabouts and communications for the relevant period.
Deputy Garcia will continue as lead on the active investigation in the interim.
This is preliminary, Sheriff Reid. But I want you to understand that it’s serious. ”
She ended the call at 2:17 p.m.
Miguel closed his notebook. He didn’t look up immediately, and in that small delay Angus read everything.
Not accusation—Miguel was too careful and too fair for accusation based on the little they had been told.
He maintained the careful neutrality of a man recalibrating.
Separating what he knew about Angus from what the evidence was showing him—the way he always separated knowledge from assumption before he spoke.
It was the right thing to do. Angus knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier to sit across from him.
“I don’t own a device registered to my address that I don’t know about,” Angus said. “Someone registered one there. It’s an address, not a verified location—any address can be used to register a device.”
Miguel looked up. “I know.”
“The language in those messages came from sealed case records. Logan’s investigation. Whoever built them had access to terminology that wasn’t public.”
“I know that too.” Miguel held his pen between his hands. “Angus. I have to run this the right way.”
“I know you do.”
A pause. “I’m going to need your movements for the past three weeks. Formally. On record.”
“I’ll write it up tonight.”
Miguel nodded, stood, carried his notebook to his own desk, and that was the end of the conversation.
The silence that settled was not hostile.
It was something Angus had no good word for—the silence of a relationship that had shifted without breaking, holding its shape through an act of mutual will.
He was grateful for it and unsettled by it in equal measure.
He stayed at his desk for another hour, working through the formal response Marsh had requested—a written account of his communications and whereabouts for the past three weeks, submitted through the department’s official records system.
He wrote it carefully, completely, and without omission, the way he wrote everything.
When he was done, he read it back and found nothing he would change.
He printed a copy before he submitted it.
He’d learned, the hard way, not to assume access to a system was something he could count on.
Then he drove home.
The house was quiet in the way it became quiet when the day had been too full and the evening had nothing adequate to offer.
He fed Scout, stood at the kitchen window while the last of the day’s light left the yard, and tried to identify the thing sitting in his chest that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anger.
It was closer to the disorientation of a man who had just watched the ground shift under something he believed was solid.
Someone had built this carefully. That was the fact he kept returning to.
The device registered to his address. The language pulled from sealed records.
Jonah Holt’s name in messages that predated his disappearance by eleven days.
None of it was accidental or opportunistic.
It was constructed, piece by piece, by someone who understood how the system worked and what it would do when presented with this kind of evidence.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
Murphy: You’re quiet tonight. Everything okay?
He called her instead of texting back.
She picked up on the second ring and he told her about the meeting with Marsh, the messages, and the device registered to his address. He stated it plainly, without editorializing, the way he’d write a case report—just the facts in sequence. When he finished, Murphy was silent for a moment.
“You didn’t send those messages,” she said. Not a question.
“No.”
“Then someone went to considerable trouble to make it look like you did.” Another pause, shorter. “That’s not a small thing, Angus. That’s not someone acting impulsively. That took planning.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who?”
He looked at the kitchen table. At the journal sitting closed on it, containing the entries from Tuesday night with a deliberate gap between them. “I have a direction. Nothing I can take anywhere yet.”
She didn’t push. That was one of the things about Murphy—she understood the difference between withholding and not being ready, and she didn’t treat them the same. “Come for dinner,” she said. “You shouldn’t sit in that house alone tonight.”
“I’m alright.”
“I didn’t ask if you were alright. Come for dinner.”
He almost said yes. It was the closest he’d come all day to something uncomplicated. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I need tonight to think.”
She acquiesced without argument, which was its own form of grace. They said goodnight and he put the phone on the table.
He sat with the journal for a long time without opening it.
The question that had been forming since the call with Marsh was not whether the evidence was planted—he knew it was, the same way he knew the sky outside was dark, as a simple fact not requiring proof.
The question was what did it mean that someone had planted it this well.
So specifically. Using language from sealed records, registering a device to his home address, timing the messages to predate Jonah’s disappearance.
This was not someone with a grudge and a lucky guess.
This was someone who had studied him. Who knew how the system would respond to this specific arrangement of facts.
Who had access to sealed case records from his investigation into Logan.
Who understood law enforcement procedures well enough to build evidence that would withstand initial scrutiny.
Who had been patient enough to construct this weeks before Jonah Holt ever went missing.
He opened the journal. He looked at the two entries from Tuesday—Cobb on one line, Pete Hutchinson below, a gap between them. He looked at them for a long time. Then he closed the journal without adding anything and pushed it aside.
He reached for his Bible instead. He opened it without a destination in mind, and it fell, the way well-used Bibles fall, to a page he’d been to before.
Jonah, chapter two. The prayer from the belly of the fish—Jonah in the darkness of the whale, three days and three nights, crying out from a depth he’d brought on himself.
“From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God. He said: ‘In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry.’”
He read to the end of the chapter. Then he sat with the book open on the table and looked at the top of the next page where chapter three began.
“Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: ‘Go.’”
He paused. He wasn’t ready for chapter three yet. Chapter three was where Nineveh was spared, and right now he didn't have it in him to read about mercy for people who hadn't earned it.
He closed the Bible without reading any further.