Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
By midmorning, Angus had drunk two cold coffees and walked the length of the kitchen so many times that Scout had stopped lifting his head when he passed.
Outside, a delivery truck had come and gone. Nothing exciting occurred on the street.
When the phone rang, he had it to his ear before the sound finished.
“Angus.” Miguel’s voice was different. Not the controlled professional register. Not the careful neutrality he’d been carrying since the investigation turned either. Something gentler than either of those. “It’s not good news. I’m sorry.”
Angus stood very still at the kitchen window.
“Jonah was definitely here at some point.” “We’ve been through the entire building.
” Miguel paused. A pause filled with grief.
The specific grief of a man who had arrived somewhere important too late.
“The signs are all there. A water bottle. A blanket. And it was recent. I’d stake my badge on it.
” Another pause. “But he’s not here. Someone moved him before we arrived. ”
Angus looked out at the quiet street and said nothing.
“I keep thinking about the twelve hours,” Miguel said quietly, almost to himself. “If we’d had the first warrant twelve hours earlier.”
“Don’t,” Angus said.
Silence. Then Miguel drew a breath, and the professional register returned.
Not coldly. More like the way a man picked up a tool and returned to the work in front of him.
“Cobb is still locked up at the office, and I’ve been interrogating him since he arrived.
He’s not budging on giving me the location though.
I know he has it. My guess is he’s holding it for a deal. ”
“He knows where Jonah is.”
“He knows where Jonah is,” Miguel confirmed. “He’ll give it. But he’s smart and slick. He won’t give it up without something in writing first.”
Angus turned away from the window. “I want to be in that room.”
The silence on the line was longer this time.
“Miguel.”
“I heard you.” Angus could hear him working through it. The procedural weight. The risk. The ramifications if it went wrong. “If you’re in that room, it has to look like something it isn’t.”
“I know.”
“I’ll bring you in for a follow-up interview as part of the ongoing review.
You’re still a subject. Nobody on the staff will question it.
” Another pause. “I don’t think I need to say this, but you should sit on my side of the table.
You can’t speak unless I indicate. You can’t react to anything Cobb says, regardless of what it is.
If I tell you to leave, you leave without argument. Deal?”
“Understood.”
“I mean it, Angus. If you make this difficult, I’ll have no choice but to walk you out myself.”
“I understand.”
The sheriff’s office felt different from the outside than it had on Friday morning.
On Friday, he’d walked in and the room shifted around him.
Careful non-acknowledgments. Thinned conversations.
Jeanine’s reddened eyes. Miguel’s silent coffee.
Today, he came through the door with Miguel two steps behind him, his hands in his jacket pockets, and the posture of a man being brought in for questioning—which was exactly what everyone was supposed to see.
Most of them saw it. Jeanine looked up when he came in and held his gaze for a half a second, a moment that felt different from Friday. Less guarded perhaps. He didn’t have time to read it before Miguel moved them past the front desk and down the corridor to the interview room.
Ray Cobb looked smaller than Angus had expected.
He’d built an idea of the man throughout the investigation.
The person who had walked into a harbor board meeting thirteen months ago and found a door.
Who had spent months building Jonah’s trust with the patience of someone working to a plan.
That man had existed at a distance, defined entirely by what he’d done rather than by what he looked like.
The man at the interview table wasn’t much older than Angus—lean, with the wary stillness of someone who had made a calculation and was living with the result. He looked at Miguel when they came in. Then at Angus.
An emotion moved across his face. Not surprise. Recognition. He knew exactly who Angus was.
Angus sat beside Miguel, looked at the table, kept his hands still in his lap, and said nothing.
Miguel opened his notebook and looked at Cobb with the unhurried attention of a man who had time and intended to use every minute of it.
“Mr. Cobb. For the record, we’re resuming the interview. Sheriff Reid is present as part of the ongoing administrative review.” He looked at Cobb steadily. “Where’s Jonah Holt? We know you know.”
“And you know what I need before I tell you anything,” Cobb said. His voice was even, midrange, the voice of a man accustomed to the long middle of difficult conversations. “Those are different discussions.”
“They’re the same discussion,” Miguel said. “A young man has been missing for nearly two weeks. His location is relevant to an active criminal investigation. Withholding it has consequences.”
“Everything has consequences,” Cobb said. “That’s why I need the deal in writing first.”
Miguel wrote something in his notebook. The scratch of the pen was the only sound in the room.
Angus kept his eyes on the table. He thought about a blanket in an empty building, Clara’s hands braced on the diner counter, and Frank Holt’s face in the parking lot.
He kept his hands still.
“Tell me about the emails,” Miguel said.
“Tell me about the immunity agreement,” Cobb said.
The exchange had been circling the same track all morning. Miguel’s jaw tightened slightly, barely visible, but Angus noticed.
He looked at Cobb directly for the first time.
“The woman who processed Walt Greer’s examination,” Angus said. “She’s thorough.”
Miguel looked at him. One sharp look. A warning.
Angus held Cobb’s gaze.
Cobb’s expression shifted. Small. Quick. A man updating an assumption.
“Her preliminary findings came back,” Angus said. “Not a cardiac event. A specific compound. Clinically controlled. Not recreational.” He kept his voice level. Factual. Not a threat; a statement. “Walt Greer’s death is not what it looked like.”
The room was very quiet.
Cobb looked at the table. The evenness in his face was still there, but it was working harder now to maintain its shape.
“Those emails you kept,” Angus said. “The ones you didn’t delete. They cover more than Jonah Holt. And the arrangement you’re negotiating, may not cover everything you think it covers.”
Miguel set his pen down. He sat back, his posture revealing he’d made a decision and was watching it play out.
Cobb looked up. His eyes moved between Miguel and Angus, then settled on a point between them. The calculation behind his face was now visible. Not the outcome but the process. A man who had walked in believing he held the leverage discovering the ground beneath him had shifted.
“I want to speak to my attorney,” he said.