Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
He drove home with the oxblood planner on the passenger seat.
He didn’t touch it until he was at the kitchen table with the door locked, his jacket off, and an untouched glass of water sitting beside him. Then he opened it and went through it properly, page by page, the way he’d been trained to examine things—slowly, without deciding in advance what mattered.
Most of it was what Clara had described.
Family dinners recorded in Jonah’s compressed handwriting.
Times he’d visited his father, annotations beside them that were either optimistic or resigned depending on how the meeting had gone—a tick, a question mark, once just the word fine underlined twice in the way that meant the opposite.
Supplier meetings Clara had attended with him, her name beside his in the entries, included the way siblings often were—by assumption rather than formal notation.
A reminder about his nephew’s birthday in three months, underlined and starred.
A man’s life in shorthand. The parts of it that didn’t belong at the office.
He turned the pages carefully.
The RC entries started four months ago. Earlier than the coffee shop meetings—the harbor board contact first, then the gap, then the patterns shifting into something more deliberate.
The first entry was just initials and a time.
RC — 7am. Harbor board. Then a gap of several weeks.
Then another. Brief, infrequent, the early stage of an acquaintance that hadn’t yet become a plan.
The entries grew more frequent in the last three months.
Times, locations, occasional notes beside them.
Survey maps—good. Penobscot licensing—check DMR timeline.
RC confirms north grounds viable. The language of a young man building toward something, each entry a brick in a wall he believed he was constructing for himself.
Reading it now, knowing what the entries were actually recording, Angus felt the heaviness of watching someone be used without knowing it.
The enthusiasm in the handwriting. The hope.
Then, near the back, the circled line Clara had found.
RC says AR approval already confirmed.
He turned the page.
One more RC entry. The last one, two days before Jonah disappeared. A Thursday. No time recorded, just a location Angus didn’t recognize—not the coffee shop on Harbor Street, not the south dock.
RC—warehouse end of Pembrook Road.
He sat back.
Pembrook Road ran along the northern edge of town, past the old cannery buildings that had been empty for years, down to a stretch of disused waterfront that predated the working harbor by several decades.
Not a place that featured in the ordinary life of Weyport.
Not a place you went to discuss business over coffee.
A place you went when you didn’t want to be seen.
He wrote the address in his journal. closed the planner, and sat with what he had, feeling the slow, cold pressure—the sense of something tightening around a specific point, drawing closer, and being on the outside of it with no badge, no authority, and a crossed wire where his judgment used to be clean.
He thought about Logan.
Not with grief this time. With something more uncomfortable than grief—the precise, practical awareness of what his brother could do that Angus couldn’t.
The resources that moved outside the system.
The ability to trace an encrypted message source in forty-eight hours.
The knowledge of how to find a man like Cobb in the spaces official records left empty.
The thought stood between him and the planner on the kitchen table. Solid. Patient. Impossible to ignore.
He opened his journal and uncapped his pen and before he’d decided to do it he’d written two words.
Call Logan.
He stared at them.
His chest was tight in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
He knew what those two words meant—not just the act of making the call but what the call would confirm about who he was becoming in this kitchen on this Monday afternoon.
He knew the argument he’d make to himself if he let the thought continue: that he had no choice, that the system had been turned against him, that a man was missing and nine days was already too long, and the planner on the table contained information the official investigation didn’t have.
That someone needed to move faster than the review process allowed.
He knew the argument because he’d heard it before. In a different voice, from a different man, in a fish-processing plant on a cold night that felt like another life.
He drew a single line through the words. Pressed hard. The ink bled into the page and the words disappeared beneath it but the shape of them stayed—the ghost of a thought he’d had and crossed out and wasn’t willing to pretend he hadn’t had.
He didn’t tear the page out.
That was the line. Tearing it out would have been the beginning of something he couldn’t come back from—the first act of a man rewriting his own history to make the next step easier.
He left it there, visible beneath the crossing-out, because he needed to be honest with himself about what this afternoon had produced.
He closed the journal.
Pembrook Road. The cannery end. A location Jonah had written down and nobody else knew about.
He didn’t need a badge to drive down a road.
He said it to himself and heard Logan’s voice underneath it—the same logic, the same reasonable framing, the same way of standing at a line and telling yourself you haven’t crossed it yet.
He heard it and didn’t like it, but got his jacket anyway because Jonah Holt had been missing for nine days, the planner on his table had an address in it, and he was the only person who knew.
Scout appeared in the kitchen doorway, reading the movement—ears forward, body angled toward the back door, the quiet readiness of a dog who understood that jackets meant something was happening.
“Not this time,” Angus said.
Scout held the position for a moment, assessing whether this was negotiable. It wasn’t, and he seemed to accept that, turning back to his corner with the unhurried dignity of a dog who had made his position clear.
Angus picked up his keys and the planner and left.
Pembrook Road was quieter than he remembered.
He hadn’t been here in years—there was no reason to come this far north unless you were going to the cannery buildings, and nobody went to the cannery buildings.
They stood in a row along the disused waterfront, four of them, corrugated metal and weathered timber that had been sitting since the seventies, padlocked, council-owned, and left in the predictable administrative limbo of structures too expensive to demolish and too derelict to use.
He drove the length of the road slowly.
The third building from the end had a padlock that was different from the others. Newer. Heavy-duty. Recently oiled. The shackle bright against the old metal of the door hasp.
He stopped the truck.
He sat and looked at the building through the windshield. The same type of padlock he’d photographed on Cobb’s south dock workshop. On a council building that had been empty for years. At an address written in a missing man’s personal planner two days before he disappeared.
Angus’s hands were still on the wheel. He became aware of that—the stillness, deliberateness of them, the way a man held himself in place against the pull of something with a very clear gravity.
Jonah could be in that building.
The thought arrived without drama and sat in the cab and didn’t move.
Jonah could be twenty feet away behind a corrugated metal wall and a newer padlock, and Angus had no warrant, no badge, no legal authority to touch any of it.
And if he forced that door, everything that came after it would be compromised and Pete Hutchinson—he let himself think the name plainly for the first time—would walk away clean.
His phone rang.
Miguel.
He looked at the screen. At the building. At the padlock catching the flat afternoon light.
He answered.
“Miguel.”
“Where are you?” Miguel’s voice had the tight, controlled quality it got when something had broken open and he was barely holding the pieces in place. “I need you to hear something. Not officially. Off the record.”
Angus looked at the padlock through the windshield and said nothing for a moment.
“I’m listening,” he said.