Page 22 of Jonah’s Lure

“Sheriff,” he said.

“Walt.” Angus kept his hands out of his pockets and his voice level. “I need to talk to you. Not officially. Just you and me.”

Walt looked at him for a long moment. Then he stepped back from the door.

The front room was the room of a man who had lived alone long enough to have arranged it entirely for his own comfort—a good reading chair angled toward the window, a lamp positioned just right, books stacked on the side table in the disorder of someone who was reading four things at once. A ship’s clock on the wall. The harbor visible through the window, the same harbor from a different angle.

Walt sat in the reading chair, wrapped both hands around his mug, and looked at Angus the way he’d studied weather fronts for forty years.

“Something happened to you,” Angus said. “Earlier this week. Coffee with someone. A gap in your afternoon you couldn’t account for.”

Walt’s jaw shifted. A small movement. His eyes didn’t leave Angus’s face.

“The paramedic who responded to the welfare call,” Angus said, “noticed something was off. The bloodwork flagged it.” He paused. “The person you had coffee with—I need to know everything you remember about him.”

Walt set his mug down on the side table very carefully, as though it needed to be placed exactly right. His hand came back to his lap and stayed there, fingers closed.

“I remember a face,” he said. “That’s about it. Male, middle-aged, said he was new to the waterfront. Asked about you.” He looked at Angus steadily. “Asked what you’d been up to lately. Whether you’d been asking questions about the waterfront. The docks.” A pause. “I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“Did you recognize him?”

Walt’s mouth tightened at the corners. He looked out at the harbor for a moment. When he looked back, he chose his words with the care of someone who understood they mattered.

“I recognized the type,” he said. “A man who makes himself at home wherever he likes, invited or not. That’s all I’ll say.”

Angus considered that for a moment. The type. Not a stranger to Walt Greer—a category of person Walt had encountered before, in forty years reading men on the water. Before Weyport and long before Walt ever set foot in the Weyport waterfront.

He didn’t push. Walt had given him what he was willing to give, and pushing would close the door.

He stood, thanked him, and walked back to his truck.

He sat with his hands on the wheel.

I recognized the type.

A man new to the waterfront, middle-aged, asking what Angus had been up to, whether he’d been asking questions. Cobb was forty-two. But Cobb had cleared out on Monday. Which meant either Cobb had come back, or someone else had come to see Walt Greer.

Someone who recognized the type.

His phone buzzed on the seat beside him. A text from Miguel, brief and direct.

Need to see you to talk. Off the record. Today if you can.

Angus stared at the screen.

Off the record meant it was about something that had come up adjacent to the case. Something Miguel had found—or been told—that he was keeping separate from the official investigation before bringing it to Angus.

Something he didn’t want on the record.

Chapter Fourteen

Miguel was already at the bench when Angus arrived.

He’d chosen the far end of the waterfront park, the bench that faced the harbor mouth rather than the town, where the view was open water and the nearest person was a man walking a dog fifty yards farther down the path. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his coffee cup in both hands, and he didn’t look up until Angus sat beside him.

He looked tired. Not the tiredness of a long week, though it had been that too—something deeper, a certain weariness of a man who had been carrying something uncomfortable and hadn’t found a good place to set it down.

“Thanks for coming,” Miguel said.