Page 52 of Jonah’s Lure

But it was there.

He watched it happen in her expression. The pieces coming together—pieces she’d been too busy to assemble until now. The tox results she gave him in confidence, shared before they were official. Miguel’s silence on the source. The question she hadn’t asked. The answer already there on his face.

She was a forensic scientist. She read what was there.

She met his eyes for longer than was comfortable. Then she closed the folder and walked back down the corridor without another word. The soft click of the office door sounded less like a noise and more like disappointment.

* * *

Pete Hutchinson walked through the front door at 11:14.

He came in without hurry, the way a man would enter a room he had no reason to be nervous about. He paused just inside the threshold. Not dramatically. Not long enough for anyone to call it a pause. Just long enough to take in a space he hadn’t been inside in years. His eyes moved across the office with the unhurried interest of someone who found the changes less significant than the things that haven’t changed. The desks. The layout. The particular way the light came through the front windows in the morning.

For less than a second, as he looked around the office, his gaze landed on a woman at a desk near the far wall. She had been looking down at her screen. In that fraction of a second she looked up. Their eyes met—briefly, cleanly. An exchange too short to read and too deliberate to miss. Then she looked back at her screen, and he looked toward the front desk. The whole exchange lasted no longer than a breath.

Pete approached the deputy standing on guard just inside the front door. He asked for Deputy Sheriff Garcia by name, his voice carrying the calm of a man who had been practicing patience for years and now wore it like a second skin.

“Wait here,” the deputy said as he made the call to Miguel.

Miguel appeared from the corridor. He saw Pete and went very still for a fraction of a second—the only sign that this was unexpected—then crossed the floor toward him, Angus following behind.

Pete looked at them with the mild, unhurried interest of a man with nothing to explain, a faint smug smile settling at the corners of his mouth.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” Pete said.

The office foyer fell into two seconds of absolute silence.

Miguel looked at Pete. Angus looked at Miguel. And in that silence, something moved through them simultaneously. The same terrible question arriving in two minds at once.

How did Pete know?

Miguel glanced at Angus. Just briefly. Just long enough. There was something in his eyes that Angus recognized because he was feeling it himself at that same moment. The flash of a doubt that had no good home, that neither of them wanted to carry, appeared anyway because the question had no other answer.

Unless.

They turned toward the conference room at the same moment.

The conference room door was shut. They had turned the board face to the wall whenever they were not in the room. Both of them, without needing to discuss it, were guided by the same instinct.

That wasn’t a theory. That was a fact.

The silence changed.

Angus and Miguel looked at each other, and the doubt was gone, replaced by something colder and more specific. Not a leak to the press. Not a coincidence. Someone in this office had seen that board—this morning, or last night, or sometime in the hours between—and had made a call.

Their eyes moved across the office.

The deputies. The admin staff. The people who had been here since before either of them arrived that morning. Each one familiar. None of them looked up from their work. None of them gave anything away. The office ran with the indifferent efficiency of a workspace that knew nothing.

Pete waited in front of the desk with the smug, patient courtesy of a man who had all the time in the world.

“Interview Room One. After you, Hutch,” Miguel said as he followed the man who needed no directions.

“You should sit this one out, Angus,” Miguel said as Angus fell in step alongside him. “Watch from behind the glass. I’ll leave the mic on.”

With one look—brief, clear, the shorthand of two people who knew each other well—Angus waited until Miguel shut the interview room door behind them before slipping into the observation room.

He stood behind the glass and watched Pete settle into the chair across from Miguel. The way he sat—unhurried, hands resting easily on the table, back straight without being rigid—was the posture of a man who had decided how this conversation would go before he walked through the front door. The pressed shirt. The white-streaked hair. All of it precise. All of it controlled.