Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The habit of nine years, bent but not broken. He wasn’t going to let this morning take that too.
He sat in his truck for a moment first, looking at the building he’d walked into nearly every working day for almost a decade. The flag above the entrance moved in the cold morning air. Through the front window he could see Jeanine at the desk, head down, not looking out.
He got out and went in.
Jeanine looked up. She held his gaze longer than she had on Friday—long enough that it cost her something, long enough for him to understand she was choosing to do it rather than look away. Her eyes were reddened at the edges. She’d been crying—or close to it—at some point this morning.
“Morning, Jeanine,” he said.
Her throat moved. “Morning, Sheriff.”
He hung his jacket on the hook and walked to the conference room.
Commander Kovak stood when he came in. She’d driven from Augusta rather than send a representative, and he noted that without commenting on it. She was silver-haired and known for her upright character. Beside her, the documentation sat in a neat folder on the table.
Miguel stood to one side of the room. Not at the table—off to the side, notebook in his hand, positioned to be present without being at the center. He looked at Angus when he came in and didn’t look away.
Kovak spoke first.
“I didn’t expect to see you across this desk again, Sheriff Reid.” She paused. “Certainly not like this.”
“Neither did I,” Angus said.
Her expression shifted—not sympathy exactly, but something more deliberate than that. The acknowledgment of a woman who had read the file and understood that what she was looking at was not simple.
She walked him through the documentation—the formal terms of the leave, the review conditions, the reinstatement process. She spoke clearly, without padding, and he listened and signed where required, saying nothing beyond what was necessary.
Then she nodded to him.
He unclipped his badge.
It was a small object. He'd done this once before—handed it over, felt the belt where it had been, walked out of a building without it.
He'd told himself then that it was just metal.
That the work was what mattered, not the emblem of it.
He still believed that. But as he lifted it away from his belt, feeling its absence before he'd even set it down, he understood that believing a thing and living inside it were two different exercises entirely.
He set it on the table.
His weapon followed. Then, his credentials folder.
The room was very quiet.
Miguel’s pen had been moving across his notebook. It stopped.
Kovak gathered the items carefully and placed them in her folder. She looked at Angus with the directness of a woman who believed in doing hard things properly. “The review will be conducted fairly. You have my word.”
“I know it will.” He meant it. That was exactly what made it so hard to swallow—a fair process applied to manufactured evidence produced the same result as a corrupt one.
He shook her hand. He turned to leave.
And then stopped.
He looked at Miguel. At the notebook and pen still in his hand, the careful neutral expression on Miguel’s face that had held steady for nine days and was held even tighter now in this room.
“Nine years,” Angus said. His voice came out level, though he had to hold it there. “You know what I’m capable of. You know what I’m not.”
Miguel’s jaw tightened. A small movement, visible only because Angus knew his face well enough to read such subtle movements.
“A young man is missing. He’s been missing for nine days.” He stopped. Drew a breath. “Come on, Miguel. You know me. You know I’m not capable of this. Why would I do this?”
The question hung in the room. Kovak stood silently with her folder.
Miguel looked at him for a long moment. Then at the badge inside the folder. Then back at Angus, and something behind his eyes shifted—not broke, but shifted, the way it does when a man stops holding his expression in place.
“I know,” he said quietly. Just those two words.
“Then believe me.”
Miguel’s throat worked. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, stripped of the professional register it had carried all morning. “I’m trying to, boss.” His hand tightened around the notebook. “I’m trying.”
It was the most honest thing he could have said and they both knew it.
Angus nodded once. He picked up his jacket from the hook behind the door and walked out.
Standing on the steps outside, the cold air hit him. The harbor was visible at the end of the street, unmoved by what had just happened in the building behind him.
He hadn't expected it to feel like this.
He'd been preparing himself for the weight of it—the badge going into Kovak's folder, the credentials, the weapon—and he'd expected it to feel like grief, like loss.
What it actually felt like was exposure.
Like something that had been between himself and the world for nine years had been removed, and the world was now pressing in at all the places it had once covered.
He walked down the steps. His jacket felt wrong without the gear underneath. Lighter in a way that registered as wrong rather than free.
The parking lot was ordinary. A deputy's truck. The sky the same flat late March gray it had been for two weeks. A gull rode the thermal above the harbor, dropped toward the water, and rose again without landing.
He'd thought about faith often in the context of patience—waiting on God's timing, trusting the process even when it moved too slowly to understand.
He'd written about it in his journal enough times that the language came easily.
But standing in a parking lot with no badge and no weapon, and with a young man's location still unknown, that language felt thin.
Constructed. The articulate version of something that was really just fear.
He said nothing to God. He didn't have anything formed enough to say.
He stood with the wind off the harbor working through his jacket and asked, without words, for the thing beneath the thing—not answers, not restoration, just the capacity to keep going in the direction he'd been going without the tools he'd been going there with.
So he walked to the diner.
The door hadn’t fully shut behind him before he felt it.
Four people in the diner. The teenage boy clearing tables, not looking up.
Two men at the far end of the counter who knew him—one turned slightly away, coffee cup raised, a study in deliberate inattention.
And the woman at the window table: Diane Ferris.
She’d lived on his street for seven years; he’d helped find her dog twice.
She looked at him directly when he came in, and emotion flickered across her face—not anger, something worse.
The expression of someone who had been hoping something wasn’t true but could no longer keep hoping.
She looked away.
He ordered coffee and sat at the counter.
He’d looked at the local online forums before dawn, sitting at his kitchen table when sleep stopped coming.
Jonah Holt’s name was there, along with Frank Holt’s and his own.
The threads had been building since Friday—careful, measured words, the kind people used when they were thinking something they weren’t ready to say outright.
A woman he didn’t know had posted: Nine days and nothing.
That poor family. Forty-three responses, most of them careful in the same way.
But the shape of what they were thinking was visible in the spaces between the words.
Nine days.
People in small towns understood what nine days meant. They didn’t say it directly. They said that poor family and praying for answers, but they knew that men who walked away from their lives came back within days; men who didn’t come back after nine days sometimes didn’t come back at all.
And the sheriff who had been suspended in connection with the case, was sitting at the diner counter on a Monday morning with no badge on his belt.
He drank his coffee and let the thought settle.
Twenty minutes later the door opened, and Clara Holt came in.
She stopped at the counter and looked at him. “I went to the office first,” she said. “Jeanine told me you’d walked here.”
He nodded. “Have a seat, Clara.”
She did. She put her bag on the floor, placed her hands flat on the counter, and looked at him with the same focused certainty she’d carried into every room since this began—the certainty of a woman who had done the accounting and wasn’t going to be argued out of her conclusion.
She was thinner than she’d been nine days ago, the sharpness of her jaw more pronounced, the marks of inadequate sleep visible around her eyes.
She’d been holding her father together as well as herself, and the cost showed in every line of her face.
“I don’t believe you took my brother,” she said.
He held her gaze. In her phrasing—took—he heard the awareness of the alternative. She’d chosen the lighter word deliberately, but they both knew what lay beneath it—one call four days ago that had raised more questions than it answered, and nothing since.
“Clara.”
“Don’t.” Her voice didn’t waver. “I’ve been going through everything I can find.
His files, his email, anything the police didn’t take.
” She reached into her bag and placed a small planner on the counter between them.
Oxblood cover, well-used, the spine cracked from being carried in a jacket pocket.
“This was at my house. Jonah came over about a week before he disappeared. He brought a toy car for my little boy. He’s his godfather.
” She paused, then pushed through whatever had caused it.
“He left this on my kitchen counter and I forgot I had it. The police have his work planner from the desk at Holt Marine. He used this one for personal matters. Family. Times he went to see Dad.” She pushed it toward him.
“I don’t know what made me look at it properly. ”
Angus opened the planner.
The entries were in Jonah’s handwriting—small, angled, the same hand as the notepad in the apartment.
He turned the pages slowly. Personal appointments, family dinners, a note about his nephew’s birthday.
Then near the back, on a page for the week before his disappearance, a line in the margin had been underlined and circled:
RC says AR approval already confirmed.
He read it twice.
RC was Ray Cobb. AR. He considered the initials for a moment. Alan Roper was the county administrator, handling planning approvals and licensing at the county level. A reasonable read on the surface—a read that would make sense to anyone who didn’t know what he knew.
But he knew what he knew.
He sat with the planner in his hands and felt its cold precision.
Cobb had told Jonah that someone with those initials had pre-confirmed the approval.
For the expansion plan, Jonah would have assumed.
But the note wasn’t in the work planner the police had.
It was here, in a personal planner that had been sitting on Clara’s kitchen counter.
A note in Jonah’s handwriting, in a document nobody knew existed, connecting Cobb’s initials to an approval and two letters that could be read two ways.
Letters that matched his own initials exactly.
“I thought it might be Alan Roper,” Clara said quietly. “The county administrator. But then I thought about what’s been happening to you. About what’s been built around you.” She looked at him steadily. “And I thought you should have it.”
He looked at the planner in his hands.
The police didn’t have this. Miguel didn’t have this. Nobody involved the official investigation knew it existed. Clara had come straight to him. A man without a badge sitting at a diner counter on a Monday morning.
He could call Miguel right now. Walk the planner into the investigation, hand it over, let the process do what it was supposed to do. That was the right thing, the procedurally correct thing. The thing he’d spent nine years building his career on.
Or he could sit with it a little longer. Work it himself. Move faster than the review process allowed, outside the channels that had turned against him, answerable to nobody—the way Logan had said was the only way to get to the truth when the system was the obstacle.
The thought arrived fully formed, and he recognized it for what it was.
He looked at the planner.
He looked at Clara, her fingers still spread on the counter, her eyes on him, her little boy at home without his godfather for nine days and counting.
He closed the planner and said, “Thank you.”