Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Angus was halfway across the parking lot when Miguel appeared in the doorway.
“Angus.”
He stopped. The look on Miguel’s face brought him back without needing to be told why. He crossed the lot and returned to the office.
The office was operating as if it were an ordinary afternoon—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, a deputy’s voice on the radio at the back. Angus followed Miguel’s gaze across the floor.
Tammy was at her desk. Her hands were too still—not resting, but held. The camera system window on her second monitor was minimized. She’d been working around it rather than with it.
Miguel stepped to the edge of the main floor.
“Tammy. Can you come in here a minute?”
It wasn’t a question.
Miguel chose the small office at the back. The one with a table, two chairs, and a window overlooking the staff parking lot. Not the interview room. Not the glass-paned conference room. The room where matters too serious for a desk but not yet official were handled.
Angus came in behind Miguel and stood near the door, jacket over his arm, back against the wall. Miguel had the table. Tammy sat across from him and folded her hands on the surface.
She looked as she always did—composed, practical, the face of a woman who had managed a building full of difficult things for years and had learned to do it without showing the effort. But something around her eyes was different. A readiness. The alertness of a person braced for impact.
Miguel opened a folder. He didn’t look at it.
“The footage,” he said. “Walk me through what you found.”
She did. Precise and organized, she laid out the camera system the way she had for years—angles, recorders, timestamps, the gap. Miguel listened without interrupting.
Then he said, “The west corridor. You said it skipped.”
She looked at him. “Yes.”
“I didn’t tell you which corridor had the skip.”
The room became very quiet.
Her hands didn’t move. Neither did her expression. But something behind it shifted. The almost imperceptible recalibration of a person who said a word she hadn’t intended to say and is deciding what to do about it.
“I assumed. Given the location of the interview room—”
“Tammy.” Miguel’s voice was still quiet. “Where were you during the eleven minutes Cobb was alone in that room?”
She said nothing.
He let the silence run its full course. Then he set his pen down. “I've been going through Pete's case files,” he said, then opened a folder and placed a single sheet on the table in front of her—a copy of an old incident report, the kind that should have gone further than it did.
“How old was Kyle when Pete helped you?”
Her eyes lifted to his.
“Don’t.”
“How old?”
Her mouth tightened. For a moment Angus thought she might still choose the lie. Then her hands came apart on the table—just her fingers separating, the fold releasing—and he understood that something had given way.
“He was seventeen,” she said. Her voice had changed—not collapsed, changed.
The evenness was still there, but it came from somewhere deeper now—the place you went when the thing you’d been holding finally grew too heavy.
“It was Mill Road. Rain and a bad bend. Kyle was going too fast. The car went off the road.”
Angus knew Mill Road. Everybody in Weyport knew the bend.
“There was another boy in the car who was in the hospital for two months. He still walks with a brace.” She looked at the table.
“Kyle had been drinking—not much, but enough. Pete was the sheriff. He came to me the next morning and told me he could make it go away.” She paused.
“I said I didn’t want that. He said it was already done. He said I owed him.”
“What happened when he came back?” Miguel asked.
“He called me the week after his release and said he still had the original report. The witness statement. That Kyle had a life now and it would be a shame.” She exhaled slowly. “He said he’d been waiting a long time to collect.”
She looked toward the window for a moment.
“Kyle has a life,” she said. Her voice was steady, but the steadiness was taking a toll now. “He’s moved past it. I couldn’t let Pete take him back there. I kept telling myself that a mother was allowed to do anything for her child. That it was love.”
Miguel looked at her. “So you let him take Jonah instead.”
She didn’t answer.
“What did he ask for?”
She told him. Movement patterns inside the office since Pete came back.
When Angus was running searches, when Miguel was at or away from his desk.
She’d fed it through numbers Pete had given her—calls only, never anything in writing.
That was all she knew. What he told other people about her, she had no say in and no knowledge of.
“Prepaid?” Miguel said.
She nodded. “Different numbers. He changed them twice.”
She’d given him what he asked for because she’d told herself each time that it was small. That it wasn’t hurting anyone. That Kyle has a life now.
“The cameras,” Miguel said.
“I controlled what you saw after Cobb was brought in,” she said without flinching. “I’ve managed that system for six years. I knew where the gaps were, and I made sure you only saw what wouldn’t lead anywhere.”
“Walt Greer. Not Jonah. That was Cobb’s doing.”
A pause. “Pete said Walt had described him to someone. That Walt could identify him.” She looked at her hands. “He told me what to put in the coffee.”
“How did you get it to him?”
“I took it to him.” Her voice didn’t waver. “He knew me. He had no reason not to open the door.”
The room absorbed that.
“And Cobb,” Miguel said.
She was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was flat in a way that had nothing to do with composure.
“He said Cobb was going to give you the location. That if Cobb talked, the sealed record would surface through another channel and there’d be nothing left to protect Kyle.
” Her jaw tightened. “He put something in my mailbox. A syringe. A note. Four words.”
Angus looked at the wall and did not speak.
“Do you know what it’s like?” she asked. “To have only one thing left worth protecting?”
She wasn’t looking at Miguel. She was looking directly at Angus—the first time she’d looked at him since she’d sat down. Her eyes were dry. Whatever she’d been carrying had moved beyond the kind of grief that produced tears.
“I do now,” Angus said.
She closed her eyes. For a moment her lips moved, but no sound came out.
Miguel gave it a moment. Then he said, “Jonah. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” She said it quickly, the way people did when they needed to be believed. “He never told me locations. He was careful about that.” She opened her eyes. “But he said something after Cobb died. I didn’t understand it then.”
“What did he say?”
“He said if they found the boy before high tide, everything would be wasted.” She looked between them. “He said by the time anyone found Jonah, the tide would have done the rest.”
Angus went still.
Not the stillness of someone processing.
The stillness of someone who had already understood and was now fitting the pieces together—mapping what he knew against what she’d said.
Frank Holt walking past the North Annex without stopping and mentioning that Jonah wanted money spent there before he was ready.
Then Clara’s voice: “He said the old water system needed attention.”
He reached for his jacket.
Miguel looked at him.
“Holt Marine,” Angus said. “The North Annex.” He looked at Tammy once more—not with anger, not with pity, but with the knowledge that her fear had put a blade in Pete’s hand. “What time is high tide?”
Miguel already had his phone out, his thumb moving over the screen.
“Seven forty-two.”
They had fewer than four hours.