Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
The harbor board kept its meeting minutes in a binder archive going back eleven years, housed in a filing cabinet in the harbormaster’s office at the north end of the waterfront.
The harbormaster, a compact man named Dale Fickett who ran his operation with the economy of someone who had long ago learned that words and space were both limited resources, pulled the relevant binders without being asked and left Angus at the table in the back room with a cup of coffee that was better than it had any right to be.
Marsh had been clear. The Holt investigation belonged to Miguel until the anomaly was resolved.
Angus had told himself on the drive over that meeting minutes were public records, that any citizen could walk in and request them, and that this was not the same as running an active line of inquiry on a case he’d been asked to step back from.
He knew that was true. He also knew it was the kind of truth that didn’t hold up well in a room with an oversight board.
He went ahead anyway.
Fourteen months of meeting minutes. He worked through them in order, oldest first.
The format was consistent across all of them: date, attendees, agenda items, motions, votes, and any guests listed separately at the bottom of the first page.
Members signed on the left, guests on the right.
The guest list was usually short. Harbor board meetings drew the occasional developer, the odd supplier, and sometimes a representative from the Maine DMR. People with a specific interest in a particular agenda item who came once and didn’t return.
He found the name in the minutes from thirteen months ago.
R. Cobb. Guest. Marine mechanical services, south waterfront.
One entry. A single meeting, thirteen months ago, listed him as a guest observer with no specific agenda item beside his name. The minutes confirmed that Cobb was in the room.
No follow-up appearance in the following months.
Angus photographed the page. Then he reviewed the preceding months looking for any earlier appearances.
Nothing. Cobb arrived in Weyport sixteen months ago.
He waited three months before showing up at a harbor board meeting.
He attended once, made contact with Jonah, and never signed the guest list again.
One appearance. Long enough to find the door he was looking for. Short enough to leave almost no trace.
He closed the binder and sat for a moment with his coffee. Rain moved against the back room window in steady waves, the harbor beyond restless and choppy. A lobster boat came in low and heavy, running before the wind, the crew in slickers moving about the deck.
He thought about the patience required for it.
Three months of watching before the harbor board meeting.
One appearance to make contact. Then came months of careful cultivation.
Most people, when presented with an opportunity, move on it.
This was someone who had a timeline and adhered to it regardless.
He drove home in the rain.
Murphy arrived at six thirty. No groceries, no pretense of a casual visit. She came in out of the rain, took off her coat, and sat at the kitchen table with the directness of someone who had decided during the drive what she was going to say and how.
Angus put the kettle on. He didn’t ask how she was. He waited.
She looked at the table for a moment. Then she looked at him.
“I need to say something, and I need you to hear it the way I mean it, not the way it might sound.”
He sat down across from her. “Go ahead.”
“People are talking, Angus.” She said it without softening it, which was the right way to say it.
“Not everyone. Not loudly. But I’m hearing things—at the office, at the pharmacy, at the diner.
The kind of things that start quietly and don’t stay that way.
” She met his gaze. “I know you didn’t do anything wrong.
I know that. But I want you to know what’s out there because I think you need to hear it from someone who isn’t going to dress it up. ”
He nodded. “I appreciate that.”
She held his gaze a moment longer, checking something, and whatever she was checking apparently satisfied her because she moved on.
“Something else,” she said. “And this is secondhand, so take it for what it is.” She folded her hands on the table.
“One of my technicians is seeing a paramedic. I overheard her telling someone at the office about a call he’d responded to earlier this week.
A welfare check on Prospect Street. An older man was found confused and unable to account for six hours of his afternoon.
There were no injuries or obvious medical causes.
The paramedic said the man told him he’d had coffee with someone and didn’t remember much after that.
” She paused. “He thought the man had just fallen asleep and was disoriented upon waking up. Logged it as a welfare check and closed it.”
The kettle came to a boil. Angus didn’t move.
“Coffee with someone,” he said.
“That’s what she said.”
Prospect Street was one block from the harbor front. He knew one person on Prospect Street well enough to picture the house without trying. Walt Greer. Corner booth at the diner. The man who told him about Pete Hutchinson. The man who knew everything that moved through Weyport.
The man Ray Cobb might very much have needed to know had spoken to Angus.
“Did the paramedic get a description of the person the man had coffee with?”
“She didn’t say. I didn’t ask.” Murphy looked at him carefully. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more than I already did.”
He got up and made the tea, mostly because it gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. He placed a cup in front of her and sat back down.
The silence between them was not the silence from earlier in the week—the comfortable, practiced silence of two people who had learned each other’s rhythms. This one held something else.
Not accusation. Murphy was too fair and too certain to make an accusation based on what she had.
But awareness. The awareness of a woman who had walked into a situation more complicated than she’d known when she put on her coat and who was deciding, in real time, how she felt about it.
He recognized it because he’d seen it on Miguel’s face too—the careful recalibration. The separation of what you knew from what the evidence suggested.
“I’m going to get through this,” he said. Not a reassurance. Just a statement.
She looked at him for a long moment. “I know you are.” She picked up her cup. “But Angus—be careful. Not just legally careful. The other kind.”
He nodded.
She finished her tea, put her coat back on, and he walked her to the door. The rain was lighter than before, a fine mist now rather than a downpour. At the door she turned and kissed his cheek, then pulled him into a brief hug. She stepped back, out onto the step, and looked at him.
“Call me tomorrow,” she said. Not a question.
“I will.”
He watched her back out of the driveway and disappear up the street. Then he went inside, locked the door, and stood in the kitchen for a moment surrounded by the silence of the house.
He sat at the table with his journal and wrote down what he had: Walt Greer, Prospect Street, a memory gap of several hours, coffee with someone.
If Cobb worked the same way with everyone—coffee, conversation, something added to it—then whatever happened to Jonah might have started the same way.
He had nothing to put that against yet. Just a method that had worked on at least one person in this town without anyone noticing until now, and a silence that started sometime after Jonah’s last call Saturday afternoon.
Cobb had gone to see Walt Greer. Had needed to know what Walt had told Angus, or had needed Walt not to remember something. Or both.
The question was when. Walt spoke to Angus at the diner on Tuesday afternoon. If Cobb had seen them together or had been told about it through whatever channel was feeding him information about Angus’s movements, the coffee with the colleague could have happened Tuesday evening or Wednesday.
He wrote: Cobb is still in the area. Or was as of this week. He cleared out of the workshop Monday, but he hasn’t left Weyport entirely.
He looked at that line. Then wrote beneath it: Someone is still feeding him information. Someone who knew I spoke to Walt at the diner on Tuesday.
He closed the notebook.
The rain tapped against the glass, lighter now, almost gentle.
Somewhere nearby, Ray Cobb was either waiting or moving.
And somewhere behind Cobb, at a careful distance maintained from the beginning, was the person who had sent him here sixteen months ago with a plan, a target, and all the patience in the world.
He turned off the kitchen light.
He didn’t sleep for a long time.