Page 34 of Jonah’s Lure

Walt stepped back.

They sat in the same positions as before—Walt in the reading chair, Angus across from him, the ship’s clock on the wall marking the morning with steady indifference. Walt held his mug in both hands and looked at Angus with the watchful patience of a man who had spent forty years reading weather and knew a front when he saw one coming.

“The man who came to see you,” Angus said. “The coffee. The gap in your memory.” He kept his voice level and unhurried. “I need you to think back to that conversation. Not the gap, before it. What do you remember about him?”

Walt was quiet for a moment. His eyes moved to the window and stayed there.

“Ordinary looking,” he said. “The kind of man you'd forget ten minutes after he left the room. Medium build, middle-aged, nothing that would make you look twice.” He turned his coffee cup slowly in his hands. “Except the eyes. Careful. The way he asked questions—like he already knew most of the answers and was checking the ones he didn't. Like he'd been trained to read a room without letting the room read him.”

Angus said nothing. Let him find his own way to it.

“He talked about you,” Walt said. “Which I told you. Asked what you’d been up to. Whether you’d been asking questions.” A pause. “But there was something under the questions. A notable tone to the asking. Like he already knew most of the answers and was just checking the ones he didn’t.” Walt’s jaw shifted. “I’ve met men like that before. Men who carry authority—or who used to carry it and haven’t quite put it down.”

“Did he say anything else? Anything specific about me or the Holt case?”

“He said—” Walt stopped. His hand stilled around the mug. “He said it was a shame about the Holt boy. Said it in the way a man says something he doesn’t mean as a shame. More like a fact he’d accepted. Like the outcome had already been decided and he was just waiting for the calendar to catch up.” He looked directly at Angus. “That’s what stayed with me. Not the words. The way he said them.”

The ship’s clock marked the half hour.

Angus pondered what Walt had given him: ordinary looking, careful eyes, the kind of man who asked questions he already knew answer to—not from authority, but from preparation. And the specific way of speaking about Jonah Holt—not with the performance of concern, but with the ease of a man watching something unfold on schedule.

“Thank you, Walt,” he said.

Walt nodded. He didn’t ask what Angus was going to do with it; he was too careful for questions like that.

* * *

He was back in his truck when Miguel called.

“Farrell signed it,” Miguel said, and Angus could hear him already in motion. “I’m two minutes from Pembrook Road. Meet me there.”

Angus started the engine.

* * *

Miguel’s vehicle was already at the end of the road when Angus arrived with two patrol cars behind it. Miguel stood at the third cannery building with two deputies, a bolt cutter, and the focused stillness of a man about to open something he wasn’t certain about.

He looked at Angus when he pulled up.

“I think it’s best you stay back, boss,” Miguel said. “Evidence integrity.”

Angus acknowledged, stopped fifteen feet from the building, and stayed there.

Miguel nodded to one of the deputies. One clean cut with the bolt cutter and the shackle dropped. Miguel pushed the door open with his forearm, stepped back, and looked inside.

The silence that followed lasted three seconds.

It felt longer.

Miguel turned and looked at Angus across the distance; his face said everything before his mouth opened.

“It’s empty.”

Angus looked past him into the open doorway. A concrete floor. A blanket pushed against the far wall. Two plastic water bottles. A paper plate. The smell of a space that had been occupied and recently vacated. Close and human in a way that cold empty buildings weren’t.

He looked at the blanket against the wall.

Someone had been here.