Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Angus was already awake. He’d been awake since five, lying in the dark with the alertness of a man whose body had given up on sleep without consulting him, listening to the house settle around him and waiting for his phone to do something.
“He was there,” Miguel said.
Angus sat up. “And?”
“Room twelve. Cash payments going back three days. He had a laptop, two prepaid phones, and a bag packed like a man who intended to move again soon. We’re transporting him back to Weyport now.
” A pause—the kind that carried weight. “He also had emails. A personal account, separate from anything connected to his work in Weyport. He hadn’t deleted them. ”
Angus said nothing. He let Miguel speak freely.
“He kept them as insurance,” Miguel said. “That’s how he explained it. He wasn’t loyal to whoever hired him. He wanted something to hold over them in case the arrangement turned bad.” Another pause. “It turned bad.”
“What do the emails say? Any names?”
“They’re careful. No names. Everything routed through the shell structure.
The same holding company behind the dock lease.
But there are instructions. Specific ones.
Locations, timing, procedures.” Miguel’s voice was measured, each word chosen with care.
“One email references a property. An outbuilding on the north edge of Weyport, attached to a defunct processing facility. The email describes it as a secondary containment point.”
Angus’s hand tightened on the phone.
Secondary containment point.
He knew what that meant. He also knew that he couldn’t act on it—no badge, no authority. The same wall he’d been standing against for three days. The knowledge of a location and the inability to move on it was its own kind of torture.
“You have the address?” he said.
“I have the address but I’m not giving it to you. The fact that I’m telling you all of this could cost me. It’s out of courtesy … and respect. That’s all.”
“Miguel—”
“I’m forty minutes from Weyport. I’ve already called Judge Farrell’s clerk. By the time I’m back in town, the warrant will be ready.” His voice was steady. Not unkind. The voice of a man who had made a decision and would not be swayed. “I need you to stay where you are.”
Angus looked at the bedroom ceiling.
He thought about Pembrook Road. How close he’d been.
What the blanket against the wall meant, and what it might not mean anymore.
He thought about how difficult it had been to hold himself back, to stay in the truck, to drive home when Miguel told him to.
He thought about what he’d prayed yesterday in the truck, what he’d written in his journal, and what it had cost to mean both.
“I’ll stay,” he said.
He heard Miguel exhale. Brief. Controlled. The exhale of a man who’d been carrying something and could finally set it down. “I’ll call you when I have something.”
Angus got up, dressed, and went to the kitchen.
Scout was at the back door. He let him out into the yard and stood on the step in the cold morning air while Scout moved through the damp grass, his nose working and his tail steady, completely indifferent to the significance of what had just been discussed in the bedroom.
The yard was just the yard. The morning was just the morning. Scout’s only concern was whatever had come through the fence overnight and whether it was still worth tracking.
Angus stood on the step and took deep breaths.
He thought about the outbuilding on the north edge of Weyport.
An old processing facility. He knew the area.
The disused waterfront stretched further north than Pembrook Road, past the cannery buildings and into a stretch of land that had once been industrial but hadn’t been used for years.
He could picture it without trying. Could picture the drive there.
Could picture himself arriving before Miguel’s warrant came through and looking for another padlocked door.
He went back inside.
He made coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and opened his journal. He didn’t write anything for a long time. Then he wrote:
The address exists. I don’t have it. That’s probably the right call.
He looked at that for a moment. Then, below it:
Lord, let him be there. Let him be alive. Let this be the day all of this ends.
He closed the journal.
Clara called at 8:15.
He almost didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t want to talk to her, but because he had nothing to give her yet. No confirmation. No news. Nothing that would make eleven days—five of them silent since that one call to Frank—any shorter or easier to bear.
But she’d been holding her father together since this started. She’d come to the diner, sat across from him, and said, “I don’t believe you took my brother.” She’d handed him the planner that had started the chain leading Miguel to Augusta last night.
She’d earned a phone call.
He answered.
“Anything?” she said. No preamble. Clara’s directness no longer surprised him.
“Things are moving,” he said carefully. “I can’t give you details yet. But something broke open last night that wasn’t there yesterday.”
Silence. He heard her breathe. “Is he alive?”
The question sat between them with its full weight.
“I don’t know,” he said plainly, the way she deserved to hear it. “I genuinely don’t know, Clara. What I know is that we’re closer this morning than we were yesterday evening and that someone is moving on it right now.”
Another silence, longer. Her voice held the same steadiness it had in the dock office on day one—the steadiness of a woman who processed what she was given rather than what she wanted to hear.
“My father asked me last night whether you did this,” she said. “He’d seen something online. About the messages. About the account.” A pause. “He wanted me to tell him it wasn’t true.”
Angus said nothing.
“I told him no,” she said. “He didn’t believe me.”
“I know.”
“He’s not sleeping. He’s not eating properly.
He sits in the dock office and looks at the whiteboard and the boats go out without Jonah and come back without Jonah and he—” She stopped.
When she continued, her voice was smaller, the steadiness harder to come by.
“He didn’t look back, you know—at the dock.
All those years. Jonah was always twenty feet behind him doing the work, and he never looked back.
And now that’s all he does. He just looks back. ”
Angus considered that. Frank in the dock office, staring at the water.
All those years of not looking back—assuming the son behind him would always be there, coiling rope, doing the work, waiting to be noticed.
And now looking back was all he could do.
Staring at the space where Jonah had been and finally understanding what had been standing there.
“Tell your father I’m going to find him,” Angus said. “Tell him that from me.”
Clara was quiet for a moment. “Okay,” she was all she said..
The call ended.
He sat at the table and waited.
He wasn’t good at it. He’d established this about himself over the past three days—the evident impatience of a man built for action, for the next step, for the forward motion that had structured every working day of his adult life. Waiting ran against the grain of everything he was made of.
But underneath that, quieter and more durable, something else had been building since Tuesday evening in the truck.
The understanding that his job right now was not to find the next step.
His job was to hold the line he’d drawn and trust that the process he believed in was working the way it was supposed to, with or without him at the center of it.
That didn’t feel like doing something.
He was beginning to understand that that was the point. It was a test. A test of whether he would cross the same line Logan had.
His phone lit up on the table.
Miguel.
He answered before the second ring.
“Warrant came through,” Miguel said. “We’re heading into the property now.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I’ll call you when I have something.”
Angus set the phone on the table, looked at it, and waited.