Page 48 of Jonah’s Lure

He thought about Murphy. About her sitting at his kitchen table last night telling him something she shouldn’t have told him because she believed in him. He thought about what he’d done with that trust, what it made him, and what the word Logan would mean if he applied it honestly to what he’d done in this office today—and found he couldn’t quite keep himself from applying it. It fit in a way he didn’t have the luxury of arguing with.

He stood at the window until the thought had run its full course. Then he straightened and joined Miguel.

* * *

They went back in together to let Cobb know that his attorney had been called. A routine matter. The kind of procedural courtesy that kept everything proper and the process clean. Miguel opened the door, and Angus followed him in.

But Angus knew before he had fully entered.

Cobb hadn’t moved at the sound of them entering. He hadn’t lifted his head, shifted his weight, or done any of the small involuntary things a man did when a door opened and people came in. Cobb had been tracking every movement and sound in that room all morning with the focused alertness of a man running continuous calculations. This stillness was something different. Something absolute. Not the measuring stillness of a man working something out, but the complete and irreversible stillness of one who had stopped altogether. His head forward, his cuffed hands resting loosely against the table, as though the last of the tension had drained from them.

Miguel’s hand found Cobb’s neck. Two seconds. He looked back at Angus, and his face said everything before his mouth opened.

Angus hit the emergency call button and started chest compressions. He kept going when a voice appeared in the doorway behind him, high and frightened, calling for someone to call an ambulance—the kind of alarm that came from encountering something never before seen in this building. He kept going until the paramedics arrived and moved him aside with the efficient professional kindness of people who had done this before and knew exactly what they were walking into. He mentally continued the compressions even while standing against the wall watching them work. Because stopping meant arriving at what was on the other side: the full weight of two dead bodies and a missing young man, and a case that still cast suspicion onto him. And he wasn’t ready for that yet.

After eleven minutes, one of the paramedics sat back and looked at the other.

Miguel stood beside him. He looked at Cobb and said nothing for a long moment. When he looked at Angus, his face had the look of a man who had run out of the right things to do and was standing in the aftermath.

“He’s gone,” the paramedic announced.

Angus stood against the wall and looked at Raymond Cobb.

Eleven days since Jonah Holt disappeared.

Cobb had been measuring something in that room all morning. Angus had seen it in the way the man sat, in how he watched the door, in the specific alertness of someone calculating what he had and what it might be worth. The attorney was on her way—for a negotiation that was no longer taking place.

And now, there was no way to know if Jonah was still alive. He hadn’t known that for eleven days, but it had felt different when there was a man in a chair across the room who could answer it. Now the question had nowhere to land.

He pressed his back against the wall and held himself there.

All that was left now was to update Frank Holt.

Chapter Thirty

Angus stepped forward before the paramedics had finished packing their equipment.

“What could have caused this? He was alert twenty minutes ago. Talking. No indication of any medical issue.”

The paramedic looked at him with the measured caution of a professional choosing his words carefully. “Without a full examination, I can’t determine the cause of death. Could be cardiac. Could be a number of things.”

“Could it have been induced?”

A pause. The paramedic looked at Cobb, then back at Angus. “That’s a question for your medical examiner.”

Angus was already moving around the table. He’d pulled on latex gloves and worked slowly, methodically, the way he had always worked the things that mattered—not rushing toward the answer but letting the evidence surface in its own time. He checked Cobb’s arms where they rested against the table, the pale skin at the wrists, the visible veins. Nothing there. He moved to the other side. He checked the hands. Then the neck.

There, on the left side, just below the jaw. Small. The kind of mark that would be unremarkable to anyone who wasn’t looking for it, and invisible to anyone who didn’t know how to look for it.

“Miguel,” he said.

Miguel came around the table, looked where Angus was looking, and stood very still for a moment. The two of them on either side of Cobb. The silence in the room had changed—no longer grief, but something colder. The silence of two trained minds arriving at the same conclusion at the same moment.

“Someone came in here,” Miguel said.

Not a question.

He was moving before he finished saying it. He opened the door and when he spoke into the corridor, his voice had the authority of a man who had stopped processing and started acting.