Page 11 of Jonah’s Lure

He prayed the way he had since the first night—without structure or language, just the stripped-down version the darkness left room for. He asked to be found. He asked for Clara to find the notebook. He asked, and this surprised him in its specificity, that whatever had been built around his absence would not hold. That someone would look at it clearly and see it for what it was.

He didn’t know the full shape of what that was. He had pieces of it, and the pieces alarmed him, but the complete picture was still beyond what he could see from inside this room.

He sent the prayer into the dark anyway. Then he pulled the blanket up, watched the thin line under the door, and waited.

The slot opened.

A water bottle slid through. No hand visible. No sound beyond the mechanism of the slot itself, opening and closing in under three seconds.

Then silence again.

He reached for the bottle with bound hands, held it, and was, despite everything, grateful.

Chapter Seven

The phone carrier records came in at 7:43 on Wednesday morning.

Angus had just reached his desk when the email arrived, the attachment flagged as Priority in response to the missing persons case number he’d cited in the request. He opened it and read it while standing, leaning over the desk with his jacket still on.

Jonah Holt’s call history for the six weeks leading up to March 21 filled four pages. Most of it was unremarkable—Frank Holt’s number appeared regularly, Clara’s appeared more often, and there were a handful of suppliers and harbor board contacts Angus recognized from the business records at the dock office. It was normal traffic for a man running the operational side of a marine business.

The prepaid number appeared six times.

Always outgoing. Never the reverse. The last call was Saturday, March 21, at 2:14 in the afternoon. Eleven minutes. The same afternoon he stopped answering.

Angus wrote the prepaid number in his notebook and called it from the desk phone. It rang eight times and went to a generic voicemail with no name recorded. He hung up without leaving a message.

He ran the number through the system. Registered to a prepaid carrier, purchased with cash at a convenience store in Augusta fourteen months ago. No subscriber name. No address. A dead end in the conventional sense—but the purchase location and timing sat in him like a splinter. Augusta more than an hour’s drive from Weyport. Someone had driven to Augusta to buy a phone with cash fourteen months ago, around the time Cobb arrived in Weyport, and had since been using it to receive calls from Jonah Holt.

He wrote that in his notebook too. Then he called Miguel.

“Phone records are in,” he said. “Six calls to a prepaid, all outgoing from Jonah, the last one was the same afternoon he went quiet. I’m at the office. I’ll pull what we can on the south dock unit myself. Meet me at the workshop in an hour?”

“I’ll meet you there,” Miguel said.

* * *

The south waterfront dock ran along the lower edge of the harbor, below the main working piers, a stretch of older corrugated units that housed the smaller marine trades—outboard repair, sail making, the kind of cash businesses that ran on reputation and handshakes rather than storefronts. The units were close together, separated by narrow service lanes, the smell of diesel, fiberglass, and saltwater constant regardless of the wind direction.

Cobb’s unit was halfway along the row. A rolling steel door, padlocked, a single small window set high in the right wall, dark inside. No sign. No business name on the door or the frame. The padlock was a heavy-duty model and appeared to have been recently oiled.

Miguel was already there, standing to one side of the door with his notebook out, when Angus arrived.

“Lease is through a property management company in Bangor,” he said. “Payments by money order, dropped at their office in person each month. No bank account, no electronic trail. The unit has been in Cobb’s name for sixteen months.”

“Who owns the property management company?”

“Working on it. It’s registered to a holding company. There’s another company behind that one. It’ll take time to unwind.”

Angus looked at the padlock. He had no warrant and no grounds for one—yet. Cobb was a person of interest in a missing persons case, not a suspect in a crime. Angus photographed the door, the padlock, and the window, then moved to the back of the unit.

A narrow service lane ran behind the row, just wide enough for a small vehicle. At the back of Cobb’s unit was a steel door, also secured with a padlock. A ventilation grille sat low on the wall. Through it came the faint smell of engine oil and something chemical he couldn’t identify. He crouched and peered through the grille. The interior was dark, but he could make out the shapes of equipment—a workbench, tools hanging from a wall rack, and the corner of what appeared to be a tarp-covered object on the floor. He straightened and walked back around to the front of the row. The unit next door had its rolling steel door halfway up, with a radio playing inside. Angus knocked on the frame.

The man who appeared was in his forties, heavyset, with grease on his arms up to the elbows, and a look that said he’d been interrupted mid-job and was willing to be polite about it for about thirty seconds.

“Ted Garver?” Angus said.

The man looked at his badge and nodded.