In that haze, as he stopped in the middle of the lobby, staring at nothing in particular as he tried to get his tired mind to wrap around all of this shit, Archer heard the crying. A slow turn of his head registered the source. When he found it, it was enough to make him try and pull himself together. Annie Thompson. Max Moretti. He knew that Annie was Hunter's best friend, that Hunt and Max were close... and knew that since he hadn't been the one to ID the body (not just the fucking 'body,' it's Hunter, Hunt's dead), chances are it was one of them.
As the sheriff, he could have marched over there, gave a perfunctory expression of his condolences, asked them a couple of questions. The idea made his stomach lurch. Archer hadn't felt so far away from being the sheriff -- fuck, from being a cop -- as he did right now. Hunter's death was real for him in a way Bran's hadn't been, even after seeing the wreckage of the car and his body, even before his ghost showed up. He wasn't close with either of these two, though he and Max were about the same age and Annie had been Hunter's best friend the same way Bran had been Archer's, but he couldn't be official with them right now, for fuck's sake, but he couldn't walk right fucking by them without saying anything, either. They were grieving, though Archer was so numb and detached from himself that he didn't immediately realize that he was grieving, too.
The few seconds it took for Archer to trudge over them blurred together in his mind, he was unaware that his normal self-control was shredded and that he looked every drop of overworked and shell-shocked as he was, that grief and regret were evident in his tired blue eyes. His sleepwalker's tread just brought Archer right up to the pair and somehow he found himself hunkering down awkwardly in front of them, the third point of a triangle, only able to maintain the pose because of a career of crouching next to bodies and evidence, of time spent as a catcher playing high-school baseball. His voice was low, rough, though it took him a few seconds to figure out which words to use as he looked back and forth between a Max that looked as worn as Archer felt and an Annie who was doing something an unconscious part of Archer envied, expressing her grief in tears. "Sorry," he managed at last. "I'm sorry. About Hunter."