Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13)

by Matt Lincoln

  “That’s the thing, it’s pretty far,” the woman said, shaking her head again. “You’d think someone would’ve stopped them. Do you have footage of them? You must. There are so many shops between here and the other entrance.”

  “You let us handle that,” Nina said, forcing a smile.

  They didn’t have more footage, though. That was another strange thing. If the entrance was so far away, there should’ve been more. Smith was right about that. So either these men had a more coordinated plan than Nina had thought and had managed to stop the other security footage, or they had exited the mall somewhere else, taking cover somewhere until the ruckus died down and then slipping out of the food court entrance, or leaving some other way that Nina hadn’t thought of yet.

  “Hey, look!” Smith hissed in Nina’s ear, pointing back toward the crowd.

  Nina followed her gaze and immediately saw exactly what Smith did. It was the man from the video, the one in the brown jacket. He’d discarded the jacket, just wearing a plain flannel shirt now, but it was him, alright. The sunken face and pockmarked cheek proved as much.

  The man was standing off from the crowd, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and he seemed to be scrutinizing the crime scene with his eyes narrowed and his expression piercing.

  It was exactly as Nina had predicted. He had returned to the scene of the crime, unable to stop himself from checking on the cleanness of his work. He was probably blissfully unaware that he had even been caught on tape in the first place.

  “Go,” Nina said sharply to Smith. “Run back to the food court. Tell the police what you saw and where. Tell them they need to get all these people out of here now. This place needs to be completely shut down and should’ve been hours ago.”

  The woman hesitated, and for a moment, Nina was afraid that she was going to freak out and give away that they had seen the man. But she didn’t in the end, returning to herself and running off to go alert the officers and security guards to the presence of the man.

  When Smith was safely out of the way, Nina silently drew her gun and crept toward the man, who had moved a few feet closer to the crowd, each moment seeming to get braver in his curiosity about what was going on behind the caution tape.

  As Nina drew closer, for a moment, she thought that he wasn’t going to notice her. But at the last moment, he did, and he pulled his own gun out from under his shirt.

  “Dammit,” Nina cursed under her breath. Then, holding up her own gun and calling out to him, “FBI! Stop now, or I’ll shoot.”

  His eyes widened at her words, and she saw panic there. He had expected the police, even from out of town, but not this. Not the FBI. Nina had seen that look countless times over the years. It usually was followed by a surrender. But every once in a while, as the panic set in, it elicited a fight-or-flight response that truly defied reason.

  Unfortunately, this was one of those times, and the man seemed to choose both options at once, running as fast as he could in the opposite direction, away from the food court, and wildly shooting his firearm at Nina at the same time.

  As the shot rang out, the crowd was alerted to the man’s presence, and pandemonium ensued as everyone screamed and fled, looking around quickly to try to see what was happening.

  Nina managed to duck down and get out of the way of the errant shot, and the bullet ran right into the pot containing the plant she had looked at earlier, causing a series of crashing noises as it broke apart and the small tree fell to the ground with a clunk.

  People were all over the place then, obstructing Nina’s vision. She looked around wildly, trying to find the man again in the crowd as the shot continued to ring in her ears, and the screams and raging of the panicked people around her vied for her attention.

  The crowd’s members were running in all directions, not knowing where exactly the shot had come from and who had created it.

  Nina leapt into action, pushing around the people frantically trying to find an exit and desperately searching for the pockmarked man in the flannel shirt.

  Finally, she caught another glimpse of him, disappearing around a corner not far from the shoe store.

  “Move it, move it!” she called to them all.

  She ran and screamed out, telling people to get out of the way, but it didn’t register, and a large man crashed into her, not having seen her in his pursuit of an exit.

  Nina was disoriented from the fall, and her shoulder hurt, so much so that she barely registered the man who had run into her rushing apologies and then standing back with his arms in the air when he saw her gun.

  She didn’t respond to him, merely getting to her feet the best she could under the circumstances and hobbling after the escaped perp. She looked everywhere for him around the corner, and the police helped her search the entire mall later on.

  But it was no use. He was gone.

  2

  Ethan

  The MBLIS office was crawling with FBI agents when I arrived one morning several weeks after my return from New Orleans, where I had interviewed the hotel owners who had accepted the bribe of a long lost pirate ship found by the Hollands in return for allowing drug kingpins to take refuge in their properties.

  This wasn’t surprising, however. It would’ve been surprising if they weren’t there, actually. We’d grown accustomed to sharing our offices in recent weeks, though we still weren’t exactly happy about it or used to it.

  I elbowed past several agents, grunting good mornings to them that were largely not reciprocated, to make my way over to my desk right next to my partner’s, Agent Robbie Holm. Holm was already there, sipping from a to-go cup of coffee and glaring at the other agency’s operatives with something resembling disdain.

  “Morning,” I grunted to him, straightening my jacket from all the jostling amongst the many occupants of what I now considered a far too small office.

  “Morning,” Holm grunted back, seeming to be in no better mood than I was.

  “What’s got you all sour?” I asked him as I took my seat and gratefully accepted a second to-go cup of coffee from him that he must’ve picked up for me on his way there.

  “What do you think?” he asked, rolling his eyes in the direction of the FBI agents, who had taken over a cluster of desks near the door, though they rarely seemed to sit down, opting instead to congregate in the entryway in the most annoying manner possible.

  “What did they do now?” I sighed, unable to contain my annoyance either.

  “They exist,” Holm spat, and I sighed again.

  The close quarters were really starting to get to everyone, and tensions were rising between the agents from each agency. And they hadn’t exactly been great, to begin with, with several of the guys making fun of Holm and spilling coffee on him on their first day in Miami. According to Holm, anyway. I had been in Virginia when that happened, but Diane, our boss, had begrudgingly confirmed that his account of events wasn’t exaggerated.

  “We’re supposed to be working together on the biggest case in all of our lifetimes,” I reminded him. “It’s incumbent upon us to be the bigger people here. We’re hosting them, after all.”

  I was pretty much verbatim quoting Diane here, with all her pep talks to us over the past several weeks, trying to keep our spirits up and our focus on the task at hand. It certainly sounded when she said these things that she was trying to convince herself as much as she was us, and I felt much the same when I parroted her words back to Holm.

  “Oh, not you, too,” he scoffed. “I bought you coffee.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I relented with a shrug. “I’m getting fed up myself.”

  “I just don’t get why they couldn’t stay in the police station,” Holm complained for the umpteenth time. “There was plenty of room there.”

  “We couldn’t keep infringing on the local police’s space after that specific case was closed,” I reminded him.

  “Ugh, why do you have to keep being the voice of reason?” he asked, though he flashed me a gri
n.

  While I had been in Virginia looking for the journal of a pirate who was last known to be in possession of an old ship I’d been searching for most of my life, following my grandfather before me, things had gotten really interesting at MBLIS in Miami.

  Holm and Diane had been attacked late at night in the office by a hitman who had been working for the Hollands, who at that point knew that we were on their tail following a case they were involved with in the Florida Keys.

  The hitman got away at first, though Holm and Diane turned out fine, and a manhunt ensued involving MBLIS, the FBI, and the local police. But once the man was found, we couldn’t exactly keep using the police station as a base of operations.

  This brought us to now, with our small office constantly being invaded by agents who oftentimes seemed determined to crack this case without us.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this eventually,” I assured Holm, though I was beginning to doubt this myself.

  We’d been looking for the Hollands for nearly three months now, and things were not going well. We hadn’t had many leads since the couple was spotted going through security at the Atlanta airport, or at least not any that panned out.

  As far as we knew, the couple could be anywhere in the world by now. We had reports out to every intelligence agency in the world, and they were both on the FBI’s Most Wanted list by then. We got a flood of tips every day, which kept us more than busy, but at a certain point, it was easy to give up hope when all of them turned out to be dead ends.

  “Anything new from that list of people that New Orleans couple gave you?” Holm asked hopefully.

  I sighed yet again. That list had proved… frustrating. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t constantly being blown off and ghosted by everyone in the community of nautical enthusiasts in which the Hollands immersed themselves.

  “Not yet,” I grumbled. “None of them lead to anything so far. We’ll see, though. I’m still working on it.”

  So far, none of the people on the list had been interested in talking to me, beyond explaining that they had no idea the Hollands were like this and had even less of an idea of where they could be now and that they themselves had nothing to do with any of the couple’s criminal activity.

  I bought this in some cases, but not all. Both the Hollands and the hotel owners from New Orleans proved that there was a seedy underbelly to the nautical community about which I had been blissfully ignorant until recently.

  The whole thing was weird and kind of exciting if I were honest with myself. I was used to being the only one who cared about any of this stuff. That there were people out there willing to kill to get some of the stuff that I had already found was kind of validating, in a way, not that I condoned such behavior.

  That being said, I was just tired at this point. When my photojournalist friend Tessa Bleu and I had found a bunch of artifacts related to the Dragon’s Rogue at a beaten-down old house in Virginia, we thought we were close to getting to the ship I had been in search of for so long. Even more exciting was the fact that the Hollands were looking for it, too, so now my personal obsession had become professional. I thought that I could kill two birds with one stone and would be chasing leads left and right until I inevitably found Chester and Ashley Holland and the old pirate ship in one fell swoop.

  I should’ve known that it wouldn’t be like that. I knew better after my long career with MBLIS and my long career with the Navy SEALS before that. In reality, cases of this scale required a lot of slogging through paperwork and chasing down what looked to be exciting leads only to meet dead ends left and right and every other direction you could think of.

  In a way, I’d been lucky to have so many cleanly wrapped up cases in recent times. I was overdue for something like this. Still, I was starting to get frustrated, and I wasn’t the only one.

  “Morning, boys,” Diane said dryly as she emerged from her office and made her way over to our desks, talking low enough that the FBI agents didn’t notice she was there yet.

  I flinched. I’d been so deep in thought that I’d barely registered Diane’s presence until she was right next to me.

  “Scared, Marston?” Holm snickered at me.

  “Har, har,” I said again, rolling my eyes.

  I glanced up at Diane. She had bags under her eyes, much like the ones I saw reflected back at me whenever I looked in a mirror. Holm wasn’t looking much better, either, and the FBI agents had been like that already when they arrived. Diane looked worse than usual, though, aging her up a few years. This wasn’t exactly a problem, considering she already looked ten to fifteen years younger than she actually was.

  “What time did you get home last night?” Holm asked her, clearly noticing the same thing I had.

  “Home?” she repeated airily. “What’s that?”

  “Fair point,” Holm chuckled.

  I was spending less and less time in my houseboat as of late, though I at least had managed to go home each night. Diane and Holm, along with some other MBLIS agents, hadn’t been so lucky, having to sleep at the police station while they were tracking down the man who attacked them. I wasn’t a part of that investigation, though.

  “You didn’t sleep here, did you?” I asked, my brow furrowed in concern.

  “Sleep?” she asked in an even drier tone now. “What’s that?”

  We all laughed, then, just as our colleagues Lamarr Birn and Sylvia Muñoz were walking through the front door.

  Birn and Muñoz had been with Holm and me when we first found out about the Hollands down in the Keys. It had been their case, technically, but Birn went and got himself kidnapped early on, and Holm and I had to go down and help Muñoz find him. It had been a harrowing experience, to say the least, missing one of our own. It had happened once before when Holm was in a similar situation. Suffice it to say that it didn’t get easier with experience.

  The FBI agents barely noticed the other MBLIS agents’ arrival, and the two of them elbowed through the masses just as I had to get to their desks right next to mine and Holm’s.

  “Another day, another headache,” Birn grimaced as he plopped down in his seat and glowered over at the FBI agents.

  “Honestly, Diane, when are we going to get rid of them?” Muñoz asked, taking her own seat across from Birn. “We work better separately than together.”

  This was true enough, most of the time, at least.

  “We do that, and we lose this case in an instant,” Diane said, her tone and expression characteristically grim. “They already want it all for themselves. We know as much. But technically, we got there first, and I’m not going to let them forget it.”

  She gave the FBI agents a dirty look of her own, which was about as critical as our boss was going to get about our new ever-present office mates.

  “Hey, they’re not all bad,” Holm pointed out. “That woman we met down in NOLA, Nina Gosse, wasn’t so bad.”

  My partner winked at me, and I felt my face flush a bit. I had a habit of picking up women on our missions that Holm liked to tease me about, and New Orleans had been no exception.

  “You said she contacted you while you were in Virginia, right?” Birn asked me.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. “I mean, well, I contacted her first. The FBI’s headquartered in Virginia, and I knew she spent some time there after she wrapped things up in New Orleans, so I was wondering if we could get together. But she wasn’t in town.”

  “She hinted about being on this case, though, right?” Holm asked, leaning forward across his desk and whispering, so there was no chance of the FBI agents hearing him. We weren’t sure how much Nina had gotten involved, and she’d been cagey about the whole thing, so it was good not to get her in trouble with her superiors for talking to me at all. Holm knew this as well as I did.

  “Hinted, yeah,” I said slowly, remembering what she had told me. “And something about Lafitte’s ship…”

  Jean Lafitte was a storied old pirate connected to the New Orl
eans area whose long lost ship had been a nautical mystery for what seemed like forever. It turned out that the Hollands had found it off the coast of one of the smallest Keys below Florida and sent it off with a drug kingpin from New Orleans as a bribe for the hotel owners’ help to get the Haitian zombie drug into circulation in the Big Easy.

  That hadn’t exactly gone well for the drug lord, who died after a skirmish with me inside that very ship. Holm and I had later found a whole stash of treasure and nautical artifacts inside it. That was technically Nina’s case, however, and the FBI had confiscated the ship and all its contents despite my protests. My attempts to use Diane to figure out where it was and what they were doing with it had been fruitless, to put it mildly.

  “She didn’t elaborate?” Birn asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as he turned to face me expectantly.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “She was pretty cagey about everything like I told you. And she went quiet a few weeks ago. I haven’t heard from her since. She did say in her last message that she thinks we’ll be meeting again soon, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “That all but confirms it, then,” Diane said, raising her eyebrows. “We have at least one ally at the FBI on this case then, if you manage to not mess it up.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me and paired it with a pointed look.

  “It’ll be fine,” I assured her. “Nina and I are old friends at this point. Well, not quite old, but still.”

  “Maybe try reaching out to her again?” Holm suggested, unable to hide his eagerness.

  “No,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “She’s a busy woman, with a lot of things on her plate. If she had something to tell, or at least that she was allowed to tell, she would’ve sent it by now. She’ll get back in touch when she can. Until then, well… I guess we just keep doing what we’re doing.”

  I reached for the first thing on a whole pile of papers atop my desk. Even I had let some of my usual organizational skills slip in recent weeks, though my desk was far clearer than anyone else’s at MBLIS still, except for maybe Diane.