Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
He followed Miguel’s truck from Pembrook Road to Prospect Street, his hands tight on the wheel and a cold certainty building in his chest that he didn’t want to name.
Murphy’s vehicle was outside Walt’s house.
A patrol car sat behind it, lights off. A woman stood on the sidewalk in a housecoat, arms crossed and eyes moving between the front door and the street and back again, with the marked restlessness of someone who had found something they couldn’t unsee and didn’t know what to do with themselves while waiting to be told what to do next.
Angus parked and got out.
Miguel was already moving toward the front door. He stopped when he saw Angus, and the look he gave him was brief and complicated. Not a warning exactly. More the look of a man who understood that what was about to happen was going to hurt both of them and couldn’t be avoided.
Miguel entered the house. A minute later he was back on the porch, hands on his hips as his eyes swept the scene.
He glanced toward the woman in the housecoat, then back at Angus, who was already approaching him.
“You need to wait in your car, Angus,” Miguel said. His voice gruff.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Angus pushed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Miguel continued, as he tried to push past him.
Angus ignored him. “We need to speak to the neighbor.”
“No. I need to speak to the neighbor. You need to go home.”
“I have nothing to hide, Miguel. You know none of this is my doing. I want to find whoever’s behind this as much as you do.” Angus was desperate for answers. Desperate to set things straight.
Miguel’s eyes locked onto his. “You can stand with me. Don’t speak to her directly. Don’t ask questions. Don’t respond to anything she says.” A pause. “Understood?”
“Understood.”
Miguel considered him for a moment—checking, not doubting—then turned toward the woman on the sidewalk.
Her name was Vera Stinson. Seventy, sharp-eyed, the kind of woman who noticed everything on her street.
She looked at Miguel when he approached, then at Angus beside him, and something shifted in her expression.
Recognition, unease, a rapid internal calculation that resolved into a tight-jawed decision to say what she’d come outside to say regardless of who was standing there.
Miguel introduced himself. He kept his voice even and unhurried, using a tone that settled people rather than alarmed them. He asked her to tell him what had happened.
She’d knocked on Walt’s door at eleven to return a book she’d borrowed the previous week.
She liked to be prompt about such things.
The door wasn’t locked—Walt didn’t always lock it during the day—so when the knock went unanswered, she opened it and called his name.
He was in his reading chair. She could see him from the doorway.
She thought he was sleeping at first because he looked so peaceful, with his hands in his lap, and his head tilted slightly to one side.
Then she noticed the coffee mug on the floor beside the chair, and the way a man sitting peacefully doesn’t let his mug fall—and she understood.
Miguel asked her what time she’d last seen Walt before this morning.
Yesterday evening, she said. He’d waved from his porch around six when she was bringing in her bins.
Miguel asked if she’d seen anyone at the house today.
She had. She looked at Angus when she said it—one direct, deliberate look, the look of a woman doing what she believed was right, regardless of the cost. She’d seen a truck outside around nine that morning.
She knew the truck because she’d lived on this street long enough to know which vehicles belonged and which didn’t, and this one belonged to the sheriff.
She’d seen him go in, come out, and drive away.
After that, nothing—until she returned the book at eleven.
Miguel wrote it down.
Angus stood beside him, looked at a point above Vera Stinson’s shoulder, and said nothing.
He felt the information land the way it would in a report, a statement, an official record that now existed independently of him and would continue regardless of context or explanation.
He had been at Walt Greer’s house this morning.
Walt was dead. A neighbor had seen him there and told a deputy, who was writing it in his notebook.
Vera Stinson looked at him one more time before Miguel thanked her, and she went back to the safety of her porch—not with hostility, but with the expression of a woman who had done what she’d decided to do because it was right and true.
Miguel turned to Angus after she was gone.
“When did you arrive at Mr. Greer’s residence this morning?” The professional tone. Formal, deliberate, every word chosen for the record it would become.
“Approximately eight fifty-five. I left around nine thirty. He was alive and in good health when I left.”
“Purpose of the visit?”
“A follow-up conversation related to my own investigation. Not officially connected to the Holt case.”
Miguel wrote it down. He didn’t look up while he wrote. When he finished he looked at Angus directly, and the formal register dropped just enough for what was underneath it to be visible—not warmth exactly, but the acknowledgment of two men who knew each other well enough to skip certain things.
“Go and wait by your truck,” he said. “I need to go back inside.”
Angus did as he was told and waited by his truck.
He stood there for fourteen minutes.
Walt had been in his reading chair at nine-thirty this morning with a coffee mug in both hands, telling Angus about a big, precise man who spoke about Jonah Holt the way a man spoke about an outcome he’d already decided. Now Walt was in that same chair and wasn’t getting out of it.
The borrowed book was still clasped in Vera Stinson’s arms, pressed firmly against her chest as she watched from a distance. Now Walt would never get it back, and that detail sat alongside everything else with the peculiar cruelty of small things that outlive the people they belonged to.
Angus stood by his truck and looked at the front door and thought about the shape of what was happening.
He’d visited Walt. Someone had been watching.
Walt was dead by eleven. The sequence was laid out with the same precision as everything else—nothing accidental, nothing improvised, each piece placed where it would do the most work.
He thought about what that looked like from the outside, then stopped. There was nowhere useful to go with it.
Murphy came out.
She was all business—composed, methodical, her kit in hand. She came down the steps with her eyes on her footing and looked up at the bottom.
When she saw him, she stopped.
The street was quiet around them. Neither of them spoke.
He watched her face the way you watch the face of someone you know well enough to read beyond the surface.
The composure was genuine. She wasn’t performing, but there was something else beneath it.
Not doubt. Not accusation. Something more specific.
The look of a woman who had found a detail that had altered the shape of everything around it, and who could not tell him what it was, yet needed him to know it existed.
Two seconds. Maybe three.
Then she looked down at her kit and walked to her vehicle and began cataloging her equipment with the focused attention of a woman who had a job to do and was doing it.
Angus understood two things at once.
Walt Greer had not died of natural causes.
And Murphy knew it.