Page 36 of Jonah’s Lure

Miguel asked her what time she’d last seen Walt before this morning.

Yesterday evening, she said. He’d waved from his porch around six when she was bringing in her bins.

Miguel asked if she’d seen anyone at the house today.

She had. She looked at Angus when she said it—one direct, deliberate look, the look of a woman doing what she believed was right, regardless of the cost. She’d seen a truck outside around nine that morning. She knew the truck because she’d lived on this street long enough to know which vehicles belonged and which didn’t, and this one belonged to the sheriff. She’d seen him go in, come out, and drive away. After that, nothing—until she returned the book at eleven.

Miguel wrote it down.

Angus stood beside him, looked at a point above Vera Stinson’s shoulder, and said nothing. He felt the information land the way it would in a report, a statement, an official record that now existed independently of him and would continue regardless of context or explanation. He had been at Walt Greer’s house this morning. Walt was dead. A neighbor had seen him there and told a deputy, who was writing it in his notebook.

Vera Stinson looked at him one more time before Miguel thanked her, and she went back to the safety of her porch—not with hostility, but with the expression of a woman who had done what she’d decided to do because it was right and true.

* * *

Miguel turned to Angus after she was gone.

“When did you arrive at Mr. Greer’s residence this morning?” The professional tone. Formal, deliberate, every word chosen for the record it would become.

“Approximately eight fifty-five. I left around nine thirty. He was alive and in good health when I left.”

“Purpose of the visit?”

“A follow-up conversation related to my own investigation. Not officially connected to the Holt case.”

Miguel wrote it down. He didn’t look up while he wrote. When he finished he looked at Angus directly, and the formal register dropped just enough for what was underneath it to be visible—not warmth exactly, but the acknowledgment of two men who knew each other well enough to skip certain things.

“Go and wait by your truck,” he said. “I need to go back inside.”

Angus did as he was told and waited by his truck.

He stood there for fourteen minutes.

Walt had been in his reading chair at nine-thirty this morning with a coffee mug in both hands, telling Angus about a big, precise man who spoke about Jonah Holt the way a man spoke about an outcome he’d already decided. Now Walt was in that same chair and wasn’t getting out of it.

The borrowed book was still clasped in Vera Stinson’s arms, pressed firmly against her chest as she watched from a distance. Now Walt would never get it back, and that detail sat alongside everything else with the peculiar cruelty of small things that outlive the people they belonged to.

Angus stood by his truck and looked at the front door and thought about the shape of what was happening. He’d visited Walt. Someone had been watching. Walt was dead by eleven. The sequence was laid out with the same precision as everything else—nothing accidental, nothing improvised, each piece placed where it would do the most work.

He thought about what that looked like from the outside, then stopped. There was nowhere useful to go with it.

Murphy came out.

She was all business—composed, methodical, her kit in hand. She came down the steps with her eyes on her footing and looked up at the bottom.

When she saw him, she stopped.

The street was quiet around them. Neither of them spoke. He watched her face the way you watch the face of someone you know well enough to read beyond the surface. The composure was genuine. She wasn’t performing, but there was something else beneath it. Not doubt. Not accusation. Something more specific. The look of a woman who had found a detail that had altered the shape of everything around it, and who could not tell him what it was, yet needed him to know it existed.

Two seconds. Maybe three.

Then she looked down at her kit and walked to her vehicle and began cataloging her equipment with the focused attention of a woman who had a job to do and was doing it.

Angus understood two things at once.

Walt Greer had not died of natural causes.

And Murphy knew it.