Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Angus stepped forward before the paramedics had finished packing their equipment.
“What could have caused this? He was alert twenty minutes ago. Talking. No indication of any medical issue.”
The paramedic looked at him with the measured caution of a professional choosing his words carefully. “Without a full examination, I can’t determine the cause of death. Could be cardiac. Could be a number of things.”
“Could it have been induced?”
A pause. The paramedic looked at Cobb, then back at Angus. “That’s a question for your medical examiner.”
Angus was already moving around the table.
He’d pulled on latex gloves and worked slowly, methodically, the way he had always worked the things that mattered—not rushing toward the answer but letting the evidence surface in its own time.
He checked Cobb’s arms where they rested against the table, the pale skin at the wrists, the visible veins.
Nothing there. He moved to the other side. He checked the hands. Then the neck.
There, on the left side, just below the jaw. Small. The kind of mark that would be unremarkable to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, and invisible to anyone who didn’t know how to look for it.
“Miguel,” he said.
Miguel came around the table, looked where Angus was looking, and stood very still for a moment. The two of them on either side of Cobb. The silence in the room had changed—no longer grief, but something colder. The silence of two trained minds arriving at the same conclusion at the same moment.
“Someone came in here,” Miguel said.
Not a question.
He was moving before he finished saying it. He opened the door and when he spoke into the corridor, his voice had the authority of a man who had stopped processing and started acting.
“Lockdown. Right now. Nobody in or out of this building.”
What followed was fast and purposeful. Trained people doing what they had been trained to do, the ordinary working day morphed rapidly into something else.
Deputies moved to the front entrance and back exit simultaneously.
A phone at the front desk rang twice but went unanswered.
One of the admin staff stood with both hands pressed flat on her desk, her eyes shifting between the corridor and the sealed front door.
Angus stood in the corridor and watched Miguel run the building through the glass-paned walls that had been his office walls until three days ago.
He had no weapon. No badge. Nothing that gave him any official standing in what was unfolding around him, and the frustration of it—standing in the center of something and being unable to touch it—was a sensation he had lived with for only a few days and had not yet made peace with.
He pressed his back against the corridor wall and let Miguel work.
The sweep took twelve minutes. Every room, every corner, the storage spaces, the back offices, the evidence room, the bathroom at the end of the hall. Miguel came back down the corridor with two deputies behind him, the answer already on his face before he said a word.
“Gone.” He said the word quietly and with a different gravity than the paramedic had given it twenty minutes ago. “They had enough time. In and out before we went back in.”
Angus thought about the window of time. The precise and narrow window of collective distraction.
The office watching through the glass panes while he and Miguel stood on the other side having moved the conversation from the corridor.
He thought about how perfectly timed it had been.
How it would have required someone who knew this building’s rhythms. Who understood how the office moved and where its attention would go and when.
He looked at Miguel. Miguel was already looking back at him. Neither of them said what they were both thinking because they didn’t need to. They’d known for days that there was someone on the inside. Now they knew that person had just been in that room.
“The surveillance cameras,” Angus said.
Miguel nodded. He looked across the office floor, his eyes moving through the room until he found the person he was looking for. Steady and reliable, the person in this building whose eye for detail and calm under pressure he trusted most.
“Tammy.” His voice carried across the floor without strain. “I need you on the cameras. Every angle, starting from the last hour. Find whoever walked in and out of that corridor.”
She looked up from her desk.
“Of course.”
Her voice was even. Her hands lay flat on the desk in front of her, perfectly still, and she held Miguel’s eyes with the focused competence of someone who had already begun, in her mind, doing what she had been asked to do.
She turned to the camera system and began.
Murphy arrived fifteen minutes later and processed the scene with her usual professional care.
She found Angus in the doorway once, and her eyes held his for a moment.
Whatever she read on his face she filed it away without comment and went back to work.
Angus felt out of place in his own office—a sensation he had no framework for and no way to hold properly.
His staff were working the scene around him, searching for a killer who had somehow slipped in unseen to silence the one man who could have told them where to find Jonah.
Desperate to clear his mind and make sense of it all, he went to the break room, sat down at the table, stared at the wall, and waited. What for, he wasn’t sure.
All he knew was that two people were dead. Jonah was still missing. The case had nothing left to hold it up. And somewhere in his town, a killer was hiding.
And they were nowhere close to finding either.
And he was nowhere close to clearing his name and getting his badge back.