Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Angus arrived Thursday morning under the pretense of another interview.
Miguel had gotten there ahead of him—the coffee made, the conference room door open, the red marker on the table, and Pete Hutchinson’s name written above everything else in capital letters.
Angus stood in the doorway, looked at it ,and felt the previous night settle over him again, the way certain nights did when sleep hadn’t quite cleared them away.
He heard Miguel come in behind him and offered him a simple, “Morning.” Miguel stood next to him and said, “Angus, I need you to know that I followed the evidence. I just did my job.” Miguel’s voice was quiet and direct—the voice of a man who had decided what he needed to say and was saying it without decoration.
“It was the right thing to do, and I’d do the same again.
” A pause. “But I never once stopped believing that you were innocent. I needed you to know that. I should have told you that sooner, while it still mattered. But there it is. No excuses.”
Angus turned and looked at him. At the man he’d worked alongside for years—the man who’d never once given him anything other than loyalty and straight dealing, even when straight dealing had pointed in the wrong direction.
“It still matters,” Angus said.
Miguel met his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded once and went to pour the coffee, and that was that. Both of them understood completely.
Murphy came into the office at half past eight.
She was looking for Miguel. She had preliminary notes from the overnight examination.
Something about the compound concentration—the comparison she’d been running against Walt Greer’s profile.
She found him at the board, handed him the folder, and spoke quietly and efficiently about what the full autopsy would likely confirm.
Miguel asked one question. She answered it. And then she looked at Angus.
It was brief, the kind of look that passed quickly because everything in her morning was moving fast—two bodies, a full examination schedule, a case with no formal lead investigator, and no clear resolution. There wasn’t room for what the look was carrying.
But it was there.
He watched it happen in her expression. The pieces coming together—pieces she’d been too busy to assemble until now. The tox results she gave him in confidence, shared before they were official. Miguel’s silence on the source. The question she hadn’t asked. The answer already there on his face.
She was a forensic scientist. She read what was there.
She met his eyes for longer than was comfortable. Then she closed the folder and walked back down the corridor without another word. The soft click of the office door sounded less like a noise and more like disappointment.
Pete Hutchinson walked through the front door at 11:14.
He came in without hurry, the way a man would enter a room he had no reason to be nervous about.
He paused just inside the threshold. Not dramatically.
Not long enough for anyone to call it a pause.
Just long enough to take in a space he hadn’t been inside in years.
His eyes moved across the office with the unhurried interest of someone who found the changes less significant than the things that haven’t changed.
The desks. The layout. The particular way the light came through the front windows in the morning.
For less than a second, as he looked around the office, his gaze landed on a woman at a desk near the far wall.
She had been looking down at her screen.
In that fraction of a second she looked up.
Their eyes met—briefly, cleanly. An exchange too short to read and too deliberate to miss.
Then she looked back at her screen, and he looked toward the front desk.
The whole exchange lasted no longer than a breath.
Pete approached the deputy standing on guard just inside the front door. He asked for Deputy Sheriff Garcia by name, his voice carrying the calm of a man who had been practicing patience for years and now wore it like a second skin.
“Wait here,” the deputy said as he made the call to Miguel.
Miguel appeared from the corridor. He saw Pete and went very still for a fraction of a second—the only sign that this was unexpected—then crossed the floor toward him, Angus following behind.
Pete looked at them with the mild, unhurried interest of a man with nothing to explain, a faint smug smile settling at the corners of his mouth.
“I hear you’re looking for me,” Pete said.
The office foyer fell into two seconds of absolute silence.
Miguel looked at Pete. Angus looked at Miguel. And in that silence, something moved through them simultaneously. The same terrible question arriving in two minds at once.
How did Pete know?
Miguel glanced at Angus. Just briefly. Just long enough.
There was something in his eyes that Angus recognized because he was feeling it himself at that same moment.
The flash of a doubt that had no good home, that neither of them wanted to carry, appeared anyway because the question had no other answer.
Unless.
They turned toward the conference room at the same moment.
The conference room door was shut. They had turned the board face to the wall whenever they were not in the room. Both of them, without needing to discuss it, were guided by the same instinct.
That wasn’t a theory. That was a fact.
The silence changed.
Angus and Miguel looked at each other, and the doubt was gone, replaced by something colder and more specific. Not a leak to the press. Not a coincidence. Someone in this office had seen that board—this morning, or last night, or sometime in the hours between—and had made a call.
Their eyes moved across the office.
The deputies. The admin staff. The people who had been here since before either of them arrived that morning. Each one familiar. None of them looked up from their work. None of them gave anything away. The office ran with the indifferent efficiency of a workspace that knew nothing.
Pete waited in front of the desk with the smug, patient courtesy of a man who had all the time in the world.
“Interview Room One. After you, Hutch,” Miguel said as he followed the man who needed no directions.
“You should sit this one out, Angus,” Miguel said as Angus fell in step alongside him. “Watch from behind the glass. I’ll leave the mic on.”
With one look—brief, clear, the shorthand of two people who knew each other well—Angus waited until Miguel shut the interview room door behind them before slipping into the observation room.
He stood behind the glass and watched Pete settle into the chair across from Miguel.
The way he sat—unhurried, hands resting easily on the table, back straight without being rigid—was the posture of a man who had decided how this conversation would go before he walked through the front door.
The pressed shirt. The white-streaked hair.
All of it precise. All of it controlled.
Miguel opened his notebook.
“You said you heard we were looking for you,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”
Pete’s expression didn’t change. “Small town,” he said.
“People talk.” He held Miguel’s eyes with the openness of a man who knew that openness was the most impenetrable defense available.
“I thought it better to come in directly, given my history with this office. I didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding about my willingness to cooperate. ”
Miguel looked at him for a moment. Then he worked through the events methodically.
Walt’s death, Cobb’s death, and Pete’s whereabouts for both.
Pete answered everything. Not quickly, not with the speed of rehearsed answers, but with the careful deliberateness of a man who understood that how you said a thing mattered as much as what you said.
Church Sunday morning. The minister, three congregants who could confirm it.
Aldridge’s yesterday morning when Cobb died.
Breakfast at nine. There until noon. Mrs. Aldridge available to confirm every detail.
He looked at the mirror once.
Not twice. Not as a taunt. Nothing as obvious as a taunt.
Just once. At a moment in the interview when Miguel was writing something down and the room went briefly quiet, Pete looked at the glass with the measured calm of a man who had nowhere better to be.
No expression in it. No triumph, no malice, no performance.
Just the acknowledgment. I know you’re there.
I know you see me. Nothing you can do about it.
He held it for two seconds and then looked back at Miguel.
Twenty-four minutes after sitting down, Miguel thanked him for his time. Pete nodded. He straightened his cuff. He stood and walked toward the door with the same unhurried stride with which he had entered.
He paused at the door.
“I hope you find who’s responsible. It’s not a good look for the town to have two unsolved murders. Weyport is a safe place. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking otherwise, would we?”
He walked out alone. Down the corridor. Across the office floor without looking left or right. Out the front door, which gently shut behind him.
Angus stood in the corridor.
Miguel came out of the interview room and stood beside him.
Neither of them spoke. Outside, through the front window, they saw Pete’s car roll through the lot toward the exit with the pace of a man who understood that moving too quickly signaled urgency, and urgency signaled a problem he didn’t have.
The car reached the street, turned, and disappeared.
“Clean,” Miguel said. “Both alibis confirmed.”
Angus said nothing.
He thought about the mirror. About two seconds of eye contact through one-way glass that couldn’t be quoted in a report or entered as evidence or used in any proceeding in any court anywhere.
He thought about the name on the murder board and someone in this building making a phone call overnight.
He thought about Jonah—wherever Jonah was, whether he was still alive.
About a man who had just walked out of this building free, clean, untouchable, and who had wanted Angus to watch him do it.
He thought about the gap it left behind—the gap between knowing and proving.
Angus had one question left. Not a procedural one. Not one that belonged to the investigation or to Miguel or to any official process.
One that had nothing to do with procedure, law, or anything Miguel could sanction.
What was he going to do about it?