Page 35 of Jonah’s Lure

Someone was gone.

Miguel was already on his radio, his voice clipped and efficient. The voice of a man shifting from one kind of operation to another. Angus stood outside the doorway, looking at the blanket, the water bottles, and the paper plate. It was ten forty-five. An hour and ten minutes since he'd left Walt in his reading chair. He understood that the difference between where he was standing and where Jonah was could be measured in hours.

Maybe less.

Someone had known they were coming.

He was still standing there, working through what that meant and what it required, when Miguel’s radio crackled with a different call. A different address. Miguel listened, and his expression shifted in a way that had nothing to do with the empty building in front of them.

He looked at Angus.

“Prospect Street,” he said.

When the words landed, Angus felt the cold of them move through him in a single wave.

Walt Greer lived on Prospect Street.

Chapter Twenty-One

He followed Miguel’s truck from Pembrook Road to Prospect Street, his hands tight on the wheel and a cold certainty building in his chest that he didn’t want to name.

Murphy’s vehicle was outside Walt’s house.

A patrol car sat behind it, lights off. A woman stood on the sidewalk in a housecoat, arms crossed and eyes moving between the front door and the street and back again, with the marked restlessness of someone who had found something they couldn’t unsee and didn’t know what to do with themselves while waiting to be told what to do next.

Angus parked and got out.

Miguel was already moving toward the front door. He stopped when he saw Angus, and the look he gave him was brief and complicated. Not a warning exactly. More the look of a man who understood that what was about to happen was going to hurt both of them and couldn’t be avoided.

Miguel entered the house. A minute later he was back on the porch, hands on his hips as his eyes swept the scene.

He glanced toward the woman in the housecoat, then back at Angus, who was already approaching him.

“You need to wait in your car, Angus,” Miguel said. His voice gruff.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Angus pushed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Miguel continued, as he tried to push past him.

Angus ignored him. “We need to speak to the neighbor.”

“No. I need to speak to the neighbor. You need to go home.”

“I have nothing to hide, Miguel. You know none of this is my doing. I want to find whoever’s behind this as much as you do.” Angus was desperate for answers. Desperate to set things straight.

Miguel’s eyes locked onto his. “You can stand with me. Don’t speak to her directly. Don’t ask questions. Don’t respond to anything she says.” A pause. “Understood?”

“Understood.”

Miguel considered him for a moment—checking, not doubting—then turned toward the woman on the sidewalk.

* * *

Her name was Vera Stinson. Seventy, sharp-eyed, the kind of woman who noticed everything on her street. She looked at Miguel when he approached, then at Angus beside him, and something shifted in her expression. Recognition, unease, a rapid internal calculation that resolved into a tight-jawed decision to say what she’d come outside to say regardless of who was standing there.

Miguel introduced himself. He kept his voice even and unhurried, using a tone that settled people rather than alarmed them. He asked her to tell him what had happened.

She’d knocked on Walt’s door at eleven to return a book she’d borrowed the previous week. She liked to be prompt about such things. The door wasn’t locked—Walt didn’t always lock it during the day—so when the knock went unanswered, she opened it and called his name. He was in his reading chair. She could see him from the doorway. She thought he was sleeping at first because he looked so peaceful, with his hands in his lap, and his head tilted slightly to one side. Then she noticed the coffee mug on the floor beside the chair, and the way a man sitting peacefully doesn’t let his mug fall—and she understood.