Page 53 of Jonah’s Lure

Miguel opened his notebook.

“You said you heard we were looking for you,” he said. “Where did you hear that?”

Pete’s expression didn’t change. “Small town,” he said. “People talk.” He held Miguel’s eyes with the openness of a man who knew that openness was the most impenetrable defense available. “I thought it better to come in directly, given my history with this office. I didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding about my willingness to cooperate.”

Miguel looked at him for a moment. Then he worked through the events methodically.

Walt’s death, Cobb’s death, and Pete’s whereabouts for both. Pete answered everything. Not quickly, not with the speed of rehearsed answers, but with the careful deliberateness of a man who understood that how you said a thing mattered as much as what you said. Church Sunday morning. The minister, three congregants who could confirm it. Aldridge’s yesterday morning when Cobb died. Breakfast at nine. There until noon. Mrs. Aldridge available to confirm every detail.

He looked at the mirror once.

Not twice. Not as a taunt. Nothing as obvious as a taunt. Just once. At a moment in the interview when Miguel was writing something down and the room went briefly quiet, Pete looked at the glass with the measured calm of a man who had nowhere better to be. No expression in it. No triumph, no malice, no performance. Just the acknowledgment. I know you’re there. I know you see me. Nothing you can do about it.

He held it for two seconds and then looked back at Miguel.

Twenty-four minutes after sitting down, Miguel thanked him for his time. Pete nodded. He straightened his cuff. He stood and walked toward the door with the same unhurried stride with which he had entered.

He paused at the door.

“I hope you find who’s responsible. It’s not a good look for the town to have two unsolved murders. Weyport is a safe place. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking otherwise, would we?”

He walked out alone. Down the corridor. Across the office floor without looking left or right. Out the front door, which gently shut behind him.

Angus stood in the corridor.

Miguel came out of the interview room and stood beside him. Neither of them spoke. Outside, through the front window, they saw Pete’s car roll through the lot toward the exit with the pace of a man who understood that moving too quickly signaled urgency, and urgency signaled a problem he didn’t have. The car reached the street, turned, and disappeared.

“Clean,” Miguel said. “Both alibis confirmed.”

Angus said nothing.

He thought about the mirror. About two seconds of eye contact through one-way glass that couldn’t be quoted in a report or entered as evidence or used in any proceeding in any court anywhere. He thought about the name on the murder board and someone in this building making a phone call overnight. He thought about Jonah—wherever Jonah was, whether he was still alive.

About a man who had just walked out of this building free, clean, untouchable, and who had wanted Angus to watch him do it.

He thought about the gap it left behind—the gap between knowing and proving.

Angus had one question left. Not a procedural one. Not one that belonged to the investigation or to Miguel or to any official process.

One that had nothing to do with procedure, law, or anything Miguel could sanction.

What was he going to do about it?

Chapter Thirty-Three

Twenty-four minutes. That was how long Pete Hutchinson had sat in that room, giving Miguel every answer he asked for while none of the answers mattered. Walt Greer—not near Prospect Street that day, as confirmed by an alibi he’d delivered without hesitation. Cobb—not inside this building when he died, Mrs. Aldridge and her breakfast table to confirm that. The investigation—he’d heard about it the way any man heard what the town was talking about, because this town had always talked and Pete Hutchinson had always listened. He said it all with his hands resting easily on the table and his eyes fixed on Miguel’s, the relaxed certainty of a man who had nothing to explain and no intention of offering more than he had to.

“A man under pressure starts seeing patterns where there aren’t any.”

He’d offered it like a professional observation. Measured. Thoughtful. One law enforcement veteran to another. Angus had watched it happen from behind the glass. He had watched Pete’s eyes move once toward the mirror and back to Miguel, that single fractional acknowledgment that was not a taunt because it was something more considered than a taunt—the acknowledgment of a man who knew Angus was behind the glass and had arranged for him to be there.

The cruelty of the statement lay in how much truth it carried. Pete had spent years in a cell while Weyport moved on and Angus built the reputation Pete believed belonged to him. He’d packaged that reality as solidarity, as the quiet wisdom of a man who had been there, as something Angus might, if he were a different kind of man, have been moved by.

Angus had not been moved. He had been very careful not to be.

Before he got in the car, Pete had looked back.

He’d turned; just once, just enough—a fraction of movement that could have been a man checking traffic and was not. His eyes found the building with the accuracy of a man who knew exactly where everyone was. Across the parking lot, through the glass, he held Angus’s gaze for a moment. The expression on his face was too subtle to name from that distance. Angus named it anyway.