Page 13 of Jonah’s Lure

“I don’t own that device,” Angus said. “I didn’t send those messages.”

“I understand,” Marsh said, in a tone that indicated she had written that down. “We’ll need you to provide a full accounting of your whereabouts and communications for the relevant period. Deputy Garcia will continue as lead on the active investigation in the interim. This is preliminary, Sheriff Reid. But I want you to understand that it’s serious.”

She ended the call at 2:17 p.m.

* * *

Miguel closed his notebook. He didn’t look up immediately, and in that small delay Angus read everything. Not accusation—Miguel was too careful and too fair for accusation based on the little they had been told. He maintained the careful neutrality of a man recalibrating. Separating what he knew about Angus from what the evidence was showing him—the way he always separated knowledge from assumption before he spoke.

It was the right thing to do. Angus knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier to sit across from him.

“I don’t own a device registered to my address that I don’t know about,” Angus said. “Someone registered one there. It’s an address, not a verified location—any address can be used to register a device.”

Miguel looked up. “I know.”

“The language in those messages came from sealed case records. Logan’s investigation. Whoever built them had access to terminology that wasn’t public.”

“I know that too.” Miguel held his pen between his hands. “Angus. I have to run this the right way.”

“I know you do.”

A pause. “I’m going to need your movements for the past three weeks. Formally. On record.”

“I’ll write it up tonight.”

Miguel nodded, stood, carried his notebook to his own desk, and that was the end of the conversation. The silence that settled was not hostile. It was something Angus had no good word for—the silence of a relationship that had shifted without breaking, holding its shape through an act of mutual will. He was grateful for it and unsettled by it in equal measure.

He stayed at his desk for another hour, working through the formal response Marsh had requested—a written account of his communications and whereabouts for the past three weeks, submitted through the department’s official records system. He wrote it carefully, completely, and without omission, the way he wrote everything. When he was done, he read it back and found nothing he would change. He printed a copy before he submitted it. He’d learned, the hard way, not to assume access to a system was something he could count on.

Then he drove home.

* * *

The house was quiet in the way it became quiet when the day had been too full and the evening had nothing adequate to offer. He fed Scout, stood at the kitchen window while the last of the day’s light left the yard, and tried to identify the thing sitting in his chest that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anger. It was closer to the disorientation of a man who had just watched the ground shift under something he believed was solid.

Someone had built this carefully. That was the fact he kept returning to. The device registered to his address. The language pulled from sealed records. Jonah Holt’s name in messages that predated his disappearance by eleven days. None of it was accidental or opportunistic. It was constructed, piece by piece, by someone who understood how the system worked and what it would do when presented with this kind of evidence.

His phone buzzed on the counter.

Murphy: You’re quiet tonight. Everything okay?

He called her instead of texting back.

She picked up on the second ring and he told her about the meeting with Marsh, the messages, and the device registered to his address. He stated it plainly, without editorializing, the way he’d write a case report—just the facts in sequence. When he finished, Murphy was silent for a moment.

“You didn’t send those messages,” she said. Not a question.

“No.”

“Then someone went to considerable trouble to make it look like you did.” Another pause, shorter. “That’s not a small thing, Angus. That’s not someone acting impulsively. That took planning.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who?”

He looked at the kitchen table. At the journal sitting closed on it, containing the entries from Tuesday night with a deliberate gap between them. “I have a direction. Nothing I can take anywhere yet.”

She didn’t push. That was one of the things about Murphy—she understood the difference between withholding and not being ready, and she didn’t treat them the same. “Come for dinner,” she said. “You shouldn’t sit in that house alone tonight.”