Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
He was at the south dock by eight.
Not as sheriff. He’d told himself that on the drive over and he almost believed it—just a man in a jacket with a notebook, asking questions any private citizen could ask about a mechanic who had rented a unit on the public waterfront and was now gone.
Nothing restricted. Nothing that touched the Holt investigation officially.
The distinction felt thinner each time he made it.
The dock was active at this hour, the weekend drawing out the smaller boat owners who worked during the week and saved maintenance for Saturday mornings.
Two men were antifouling the hull of a trailered sloop in the yard.
A teenager in oversized rubber boots was hosing down a center console at the near end of the dock, moving the hose in long arcs without much purpose.
The smell of fiberglass, diesel, and saltwater hung over everything, unchanged by the season, the day, or whatever was happening in the town above.
Angus worked the dock slowly. He didn’t flash his badge. He introduced himself by name—which was introduction enough in Weyport—and asked about Ray Cobb, listening to what people remembered.
Most of it was thin. Cobb had kept to himself, paid cash, and caused no problems. A competent mechanic by reputation, although nobody had used him personally.
He’d asked questions when he first arrived—the kind a new arrival asked—about how things worked locally, who handled what, who to talk to if you had a licensing question or a dispute about dock space.
Nothing memorable. The questions of a man learning about a new place.
Except.
An older man who ran a boat charter operation from the middle of the dock—weathered, spare, and possessing the unhurried manner of someone who’d watched the waterfront long enough that little surprised him anymore—remembered something specific.
He leaned against his boat trailer with his arms crossed and looked into the middle distance while he thought about it.
“He asked about the sheriff’s office,” the man said.
“Not the harbormaster, not the DMR. Specifically, the sheriff’s office.
Asked how often they dealt with waterfront business.
Whether you handled those matters personally or delegated them to a deputy.
” He looked at Angus. “I thought it was an odd question for a mechanic. Figured maybe he’d had trouble somewhere else and wanted to know what he was dealing with here. ”
“What did you tell him?”
“The truth. That you handled things yourself when they needed handling. That you’re straight and fast and if someone had a legitimate dispute, you were the right man to bring it to.” A pause. “Cobb seemed satisfied with that.”
Angus wrote it down. Straight and fast. The same words Cobb had apparently gone looking for, here and elsewhere. A sheriff who processed things quickly and personally and left his name on documents. The picture of a man whose signature was worth forging.
He thanked the charter operator and walked to the end of the dock road.
He sat on the low concrete barrier and looked at the sight line he’d photographed on Wednesday. Cobb’s unit, padlocked and dark, halfway down the row, with the harbor beyond it. And, at an angle across the water, the roofline of the sheriff’s office.
Cobb had sat here, probably, in a dark sedan in those early months—before the workshop routine, before anyone got used to seeing his truck on this road instead.
He’d have chosen this spot for a reason.
Movement could be tracked at both locations.
You could see when the sheriff’s truck was in the lot and when it wasn’t.
When the lights came on and when they went off.
He thought about the prologue to his life in this town—the years of building, the cases worked, the people helped, the slow accumulation of trust that a place like Weyport gave reluctantly and only to someone who earned it over time.
He thought about someone sitting at the end of the road with a notebook of their own, documenting everything from the outside.
Studying him the way a hunter studies terrain.
His jaw tightened. He looked at his hands gripping the concrete barrier, the knuckles pale in the cold morning air, and made himself breathe evenly.
He had one more stop.
Walt Greer answered the door wearing his robe, a mug of coffee in one hand and the expression of a man who had expected the day to be quieter than this.
He looked at Angus on his front step, and something moved behind his eyes—not surprise exactly.
More the look of a man who had been half expecting this visit and hadn’t yet decided how to handle it.
“Sheriff,” he said.
“Walt.” Angus kept his hands out of his pockets and his voice level. “I need to talk to you. Not officially. Just you and me.”
Walt looked at him for a long moment. Then he stepped back from the door.
The front room was the room of a man who had lived alone long enough to have arranged it entirely for his own comfort—a good reading chair angled toward the window, a lamp positioned just right, books stacked on the side table in the disorder of someone who was reading four things at once.
A ship’s clock on the wall. The harbor visible through the window, the same harbor from a different angle.
Walt sat in the reading chair, wrapped both hands around his mug, and looked at Angus the way he’d studied weather fronts for forty years.
“Something happened to you,” Angus said. “Earlier this week. Coffee with someone. A gap in your afternoon you couldn’t account for.”
Walt’s jaw shifted. A small movement. His eyes didn’t leave Angus’s face.
“The paramedic who responded to the welfare call,” Angus said, “noticed something was off. The bloodwork flagged it.” He paused. “The person you had coffee with—I need to know everything you remember about him.”
Walt set his mug down on the side table very carefully, as though it needed to be placed exactly right. His hand came back to his lap and stayed there, fingers closed.
“I remember a face,” he said. “That’s about it.
Male, middle-aged, said he was new to the waterfront.
Asked about you.” He looked at Angus steadily.
“Asked what you’d been up to lately. Whether you’d been asking questions about the waterfront.
The docks.” A pause. “I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. ”
“Did you recognize him?”
Walt’s mouth tightened at the corners. He looked out at the harbor for a moment. When he looked back, he chose his words with the care of someone who understood they mattered.
“I recognized the type,” he said. “A man who makes himself at home wherever he likes, invited or not. That’s all I’ll say.”
Angus considered that for a moment. The type. Not a stranger to Walt Greer—a category of person Walt had encountered before, in forty years reading men on the water. Before Weyport and long before Walt ever set foot in the Weyport waterfront.
He didn’t push. Walt had given him what he was willing to give, and pushing would close the door.
He stood, thanked him, and walked back to his truck.
He sat with his hands on the wheel.
I recognized the type.
A man new to the waterfront, middle-aged, asking what Angus had been up to, whether he’d been asking questions. Cobb was forty-two. But Cobb had cleared out on Monday. Which meant either Cobb had come back, or someone else had come to see Walt Greer.
Someone who recognized the type.
His phone buzzed on the seat beside him. A text from Miguel, brief and direct.
Need to see you to talk. Off the record. Today if you can.
Angus stared at the screen.
Off the record meant it was about something that had come up adjacent to the case. Something Miguel had found—or been told—that he was keeping separate from the official investigation before bringing it to Angus.
Something he didn’t want on the record.