Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Miguel arrived a short while later, his tone hushed as he spoke. “Conference room.”
That was it. Two words before Miguel disappeared into the nearby conference room almost as quickly as he had appeared.
Miguel had set up the murder board in the conference room while Murphy was still processing the scene.
By the time Angus came in, it had the shape of something serious—two columns, two names at the top, and connecting lines between them drawn in red marker with the deliberateness of a man who had decided that deliberateness was the only thing holding the situation together.
Walt Greer on the left. Ray Cobb on the right.
Below each name, what they knew. Miguel stood at the board with his back to Angus, the marker in his hand, studying what he’d written.
“What do we know?” Angus asked, breaking the silence as he shut the door behind him.
Miguel answered quickly.
“Cause of death unconfirmed for both, but the injection point on Cobb’s neck was photographed and documented.
Murphy said nothing that could be quoted, but her face said enough.
Cobb's off-the-record statement—the location, everything he gave us before the attorney arrived—is inadmissible without formal testimony. There’s no formal case without a witness.
The surveillance footage from the corridor shows nothing useful.
We’re nowhere close to solving any of this.
” Miguel’s voice lacked its usual patience as he tossed the marker onto the table.
Miguel’s knuckles were white as he gripped the back of one of the chairs. He stared at the board as though the answers might rearrange themselves if he looked long enough.
“We’ve got nothing, Angus. No witness, no case, no footage, and someone out there who walked into this building in broad daylight, killed our only witness, and walked back out again without leaving a trace.” He shook his head. “Every time we get close, we hit a dead end. Literally.”
Angus pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Stop looking at what we don’t have,” he said.
Miguel looked at him.
“That’s all this board is right now. A list of what’s gone.” Angus kept his voice even. “Turn it around. What do we actually have?”
“I just told you—”
“You told me what we lost. Tell me what’s still standing.”
A beat. Miguel’s grip on the chair loosened slightly.
“Two bodies,” Angus said. “A method. A pattern. Whoever did this has a signature, and we’re staring right at it.” He nodded toward the board. “That’s not nothing. That’s a thread. Pull it.”
Miguel straightened slowly. He picked up the marker.
“Same method,” he said. Not a question.
“Same compound, most likely,” Angus said. “Murphy’s preliminary on Walt pointed to a specific sedative—clinically controlled, not recreational. If Cobb’s autopsy comes back with the same compound—”
“Same killer.”
“Same killer.”
Miguel drew a single line connecting the two names. He capped the marker and turned around.
“Which means Walt’s death wasn’t a coincidence,” he said. “Someone killed him because he spoke to you and could identify the man who came asking questions about you.”
Neither of them said anything. The office remained locked down and quiet. Deputies were searching the streets, and the front desk was unmanned. It was just the two of them, the board, and their thoughts.
“And Cobb was killed before he could formally testify,” Angus said. “Two people who could have moved this investigation forward. Both dead within a day of each other.” He looked at the board. “Someone is cleaning up.”
“Cleaning up implies something left to clean,” Miguel said. “Which means—” He stopped.
“Which means it’s not over,” Angus finished. “Whatever this is, it isn’t finished yet.”
They worked through it methodically, the way they had always worked through things that mattered, as the day turned into evening.
They pulled what they had, examined what they didn’t, mapped the gaps between them.
The planted evidence against Angus—the device, the bank account, the witness.
Someone who always knew their next move before making it.
The surveillance footage showed nothing usable.
Sixteen months of Cobb in Weyport before anyone noticed.
The pre-built watch alert on Cobb’s state record.
A dormant bank account that someone had known about and knew how to access.
“This wasn’t improvised,” Miguel said at some point, standing at the board with his arms crossed, looking at what they’d built.
“Sixteen months minimum. Probably longer. It has to be someone with institutional knowledge—how permits get processed, how state records work, and how this office operates.” He paused. “How you operate.”
Angus said nothing.
“The level of preparation,” Miguel said.
He wasn’t accusing. He was thinking out loud, the way he did when he was close to something.
“The patience required for it. Everything carefully staged. Every piece of evidence designed to hold up. Nothing left to chance.” He looked at Angus.
“Who hates you that much? And who has that much time?”
The question lingered between them.
“There’s something else,” Miguel said behind him, his voice quieter now. “Jonah.”
Angus turned.
Miguel was looking at the board—at Jonah’s name, separate from the two columns but connected to both by lines of reasoning rather than confirmed fact. He looked at it the way a man looks at something he has been trying not to say but has run out of room to avoid.
“It’s been thirteen days,” Miguel said. “The call to Frank was a week ago. Nothing since. Two people were killed to protect whatever this is.” He exhaled slowly. “We have to consider that we’re not looking for a missing person anymore.”
The words landed in the room with the weight of something irreversible.
Angus looked at Jonah’s name on the board. At the age next to it—twenty-eight—and the photograph pinned beside it, Jonah on the Holt Marine dock in a yellow slicker, squinting against the light, looking like a man who expected to be somewhere else soon.
He thought about Clara handing him an oxblood planner across a diner counter. “I don’t believe you did this.” He thought about Frank Holt staring at the whiteboard in the dock office, looking back at the space where his son had been.
He couldn’t let that be the end of it.
They kept going. Another hour, then another. The coffee machine down the hall cycled twice. The building settled around them as the board grew denser with connections, questions, and the specific untidiness of a case that had been built in pieces rather than seen whole from the start.
And then, somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted.
Angus was looking at the timeline they’d drawn.
Sixteen months back, then further—the preplanning, the inside knowledge, the patience.
And he felt it arrive the way certain things do.
Not as a deduction. Not as a logical conclusion drawn from evidence.
As a certainty that lived beneath the level of argument, in the part of him that had spent years learning to read people, situations, and the exact language of human motivation.
He knew who this was.
He had known for weeks, in the way you know things you couldn’t yet prove.
But standing in front of this board, looking at the shape of everything laid out in red marker—the patience, the institutional knowledge, the specific cruelty of using the law as a weapon—there was only one person it could be.
Angus walked to the window. The parking lot outside was empty, the single lamp at its far end casting a circle of pale light on the wet asphalt.
He thought about a man in the third pew on Sunday morning.
The pressed shirt. “I’m a changed man, Angus.
” The patience of someone who had spent years planning exactly this and had the discipline to perform rehabilitation while doing it.
“Pete Hutchinson,” he said.
It came out quietly. Flatly. Not a theory offered for consideration. A name placed in the room where it had always belonged.
Miguel didn’t move. He looked at the board for a long moment.
Then he uncapped the red marker and wrote the name at the top. Above both columns. Above everything.
He stepped back and looked at it.
“Walk me through it,” he said.