by Matt Lincoln
“Unfortunately,” Osborne said with a curt nod. “They got very distraught when I… made things clear to them.”
“Well, that’s good at least,” Nina shrugged. “That might mean they weren’t behind this after all.”
“That is my hunch, but I was wrong earlier, so I’m not making any more predictions,” the doctor promised. “As for whether it was the biological father or a true stranger abduction, I wouldn’t know where to begin answering that question.”
“That’ll be up to us, then,” Nina said, nodding to the other woman in gratitude and then making her way back over to the MBLIS agents while Osborne returned to the parents’ side.
Predictably, there wasn’t any more news about Mikey, not from the Coast Guard and not about the biological father. The police hadn’t been able to reach Jackson at his residence in San Diego, and when they contacted law enforcement out there, a detective had found that the man was gone, his breakfast left half-eaten on the kitchen counter. The man’s fiancée was nowhere to be found, either, though they didn’t have her name yet. Jackson didn’t seem to use social media at all.
This troubled Nina and she didn’t seem to be the only one.
“If he was behind all this, why would he leave behind half his breakfast this morning?” Holm asked as he, Marston, and Nina all congregated at a desk in the corner after debriefing with the detectives.
“We also have to take into account the time difference,” Marston pointed out. “By the time Jackson was eating breakfast, Mikey was probably taken already, unless he got up to eat in the middle of the night.”
“Fair point,” Nina said, pointing the ball of a pen at him thoughtfully. “So if it was his food, he wasn’t here in North Carolina when everything went down.”
“Do we know how old the food was?” Holm asked.
“They said it looked relatively fresh,” Marston shrugged. “And it’s still afternoon out there. I suppose it’s possible that it could’ve been from yesterday, but then there was that neighbor who saw him leave in a hurry this morning.”
“Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that,” Nina said. She’d been lost in thought during some of the detectives’ updates, worrying about Mikey and where he could be now, let alone what could be happening to him.
Marston’s phone buzzed, and he picked it up.
“Oh good,” he said as he read through a text message. “That’s Diane. She got in touch with all our contacts on islands along the coast. They’re going to be on the lookout for Mikey and the guys in the video.”
“Good, that’s good,” Nina said, nodding slowly. “I’m wondering if maybe we should release the footage of the second guy to the media, just in case.”
“Let’s give it ‘till morning,” Marston suggested, scrunching up his face as if he disliked all the possible options here. “We don’t want them to know we know about the second guy, and we don’t want even more public panic and sensationalism than we’ve already got. If we don’t have a new lead by morning, we can still release it then.”
“Good thinking,” Nina said, gladder than ever that she’d called in the MBLIS agents to help her and Osborne. “It’ll be easier to get coverage in the morning, anyway. Most people will be asleep by now.”
The three agents stayed at the police station late into the night, waiting on any word that Jackson or his fiancée had been located or that the Coast Guard saw Mikey and his abductor again. But no news came, and around two in the morning, Nina thought that it might be time to call it a night.
“Come on,” she said, standing up from her adopted desk and motioning for Holm and Marston to follow her, both of whom looked like they were in the midst of falling asleep if they hadn’t already. “We won’t be any good to anyone as zombies tomorrow. Let’s go get you guys checked in at the inn.”
Both agents nodded weakly and rose to follow her. Nina waved goodbye to the others who remained in the station. A new slate of officers and detectives had come in about an hour earlier to replace the others, while the lead detective on the case grabbed some shut-eye in the back, having agreed to stay the whole night there, and the rest went home to get some well-needed rest.
“Heh, zombies,” Holm chuckled weakly as they made their way out to the parking lot. “You know, because of our New Orleans mission.”
“Yes, I can’t say I needed that one explained to me,” Nina quipped, giving him a wry smile.
Back at the inn, Nina and Marston had to check Holm in for him as he leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, practically snoring already. Marston then helped him upstairs to his room not far from Nina’s and deposited him fully-clothed on his bed.
“Thanks for all your help today,” Nina told him as he shut the door gently behind him, leaving Holm alone in his room. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad we’re here, too,” he said, giving her a wide if sleepy smile.
“Are you sure about that?” she asked. “Because I got the sense from Holm that you two weren’t too happy to be pulled off the Holland case, even for a little while.”
“He was less happy about it than I was,” Marston admitted as he followed her slowly down the hall toward where her own room, and his, were located. “I, for one, was glad to leave all that paperwork behind for a living breathing case. If just for a little while.”
He winked at her, and Nina felt a familiar, not altogether unwelcome, jolt in the pit of her stomach.
“Anyway,” he continued. “A missing kid trumps everything. Even Holm gets that, though he might not like it.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” she murmured, stopping in front of her door. “Well, this is me.”
“I’m down here,” Marston said, gesturing at a room two doors down from her. She nodded vaguely and swallowed a yawn.
“I’ll see you bright and early in the morning, then,” she said, already wincing at the thought of having to wake up in only a few short hours.
“Sleep well,” he said, ever the gentleman as he nodded to her and took a reluctant step toward his room.
“You know…” she called after him. “You could…”
The next thing she knew, she was in his arms, and their lips met. She’d forgotten how warm he was, how inviting.
Finally, he broke away from her, and she reached behind her to scan her hotel key against the lock.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, grinning down at her.
“Yeah, it kind of took me long enough, didn’t it?” she laughed, reaching up to take his face in her hands and kiss him again as she leaned her elbow down on the doorknob.
Suddenly, she wasn’t quite so tired anymore, and a few hours felt like a good long time.
12
Ethan
We managed to get a couple of hours of sleep, at least, though when Nina’s phone started screeching at five o’clock in the morning on the bedside table, I had to suppress the urge to groan, roll over, and plaster a pillow over my head.
We ended up getting up in the end, though, and crawling back into the police station at what I imagined must’ve been a snail’s pace.
Dr. Osborne was waiting for us in the front desk area. Several very sleepy detectives and officers were still congregated by where Nina, Holm, and I had left them mere hours before.
“Sorry to call you in so early,” Osborne said, crossing over to us the second we stepped through the front doors.
“It’s alright,” Holm yawned, running a sleepy hand across his face. “Nature of the case, and all.”
“What happened?” I asked, hoping that there was some kind of lead that had materialized to justify pulling us out of bed just three hours after we got there.
“Jackson showed up,” she said simply, and I blinked at her.
“What do you mean showed up?” I asked. “He just came here of his own volition?”
“Seems like it,” the psychologist confirmed with a nod. “He wasn’t here, and then he was. None of the detectives seemed to be able to find him. We’re
lucky he came when he did.”
“Well, if he just showed up here, that has to mean he didn’t have anything to do with it, right?” Holm asked. “I mean, what perp would walk right into a police station if he wasn’t turning himself in? Wait, he wasn’t turning himself in, was he?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Osborne said, shaking her head. “Which makes me think that you might be right, and he didn’t take Mikey after all.”
Her mouth was set in a thin line as if she didn’t like this at all. I could see why. If Jackson didn’t take the boy, that meant that someone else did. Someone who could be far more of a danger to Mikey in the short and long term.
“It’s not unheard of for perps to needle themselves into an investigation in a case like this, though,” Nina considered. “It’s unusual for a familial abduction case, but not unheard of. We shouldn’t rule anything out just yet.”
“Agreed,” Osborne said, nodding to her. “I haven’t gotten a chance to talk to him much yet, so I don’t have a great read on him at this point. He’s waiting in an interrogation room for you.”
“What did he say when he got here?” Holm asked.
“I wasn’t out here, but the detectives said he just walked into the station and started demanding to hear all the details about the investigation,” Osborne said. “He’s kind of a nervous nelly, though, so he lost his confidence pretty quick. By the time they came and got me, he was stuttering everything he said. Still kept asking about the boy and the investigation, though.”
I sighed. This didn’t tell us much. Sure, these could be the words and actions of a concerned father, but they could also be those of a nervous, regretful perp.
“Have the parents seen him yet?” I asked. “The other parents, I mean.”
“No,” Osborne said, shaking her head. “I thought it would upset them more, and I didn’t want to put them together until we’d questioned him first. I’d like to question the parents some more, too. Perhaps one of you could join me?”
There was a period of silence as all three of us said nothing. Everyone wanted to get the first crack at Jackson.
“Fine, I’ll do it,” Holm said at last, though he didn’t exactly sound happy about it. “I wouldn’t want to break up the party.”
He winked at Nina and me and then began to follow Osborne down the hall past the interrogation rooms and toward the lounge area, where I assumed the parents were still waiting.
“He’s in the third room on the left,” Osborne called back to us.
“Thanks,” Nina said, waving to her in thanks.
“Alright, let’s do this thing,” I said, stopping in front of the appropriate room, which had a one-way window on it revealing a nervous-looking man in his thirties, tapping his foot expectantly on the floor and fidgeting with the zipper of his thin blue jacket.
Nina and I entered the room and took our seats across from the man at the interrogation table. He jumped at the sound of the door, and his eyes followed us all the way there. Neither of us spoke until we were seated.
“Jackson Moore?” Nina asked him, and he nodded vigorously to match his knee bobbing up and down from all the nervous tapping. “I’m Agent Nina Gosse with the FBI, and this is my colleague Ethan Marston with MBLIS. We’re here to ask you a few questions.”
“Wh-where’s my son?” the man stammered, looking between us expectantly.
Nina and I exchanged a look.
“Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out, Jackson,” Nina told him, folding her hands in front of her on the table and peering right at him.
“Y-you don’t know where he is?” Jackson asked, his eyes widening and his hands spreading flat against the table, hard so that I could see the whites of his knuckles.
“No, we don’t,” I said, studying him closely. “That’s what we’re doing here.”
“Well, what are you doing talking to me for? Go find him!” Jackson cried, spreading his arms wide and motioning for us to leave him there and go look for Mikey.
Nina and I exchanged a look. A perp trying to learn about the investigation probably wouldn’t make that suggestion, instead wanting us to stay behind and unwittingly reveal details of the investigation to him, wasting our energy not looking for the missing boy at the same time. That said, it was possible that Jackson was still the perp and just panicking about having to talk to us. More than possible, judging by his nervous body language.
“We have people who are doing that, and they’re not going to stop anytime soon,” Nina assured him. “For the time being, why don’t the three of us have a little chat?”
“About what?” Jackson asked, looking between us wildly. Then, something resembling realization seemed to dawn on him. “Wait, you don’t think it was me, do you?”
“Well, it is often a family member or acquaintance who takes a child in these situations,” I explained carefully, exchanging another look with Nina and seeing that she also had an inkling that this man might just be genuine. “And there is a custody disagreement taking place, according to the boy’s parents…”
“I’m his parent!” Jackson cried. “And I’m no acquaintance. I’ve never even met my son. They wouldn’t let me.”
I sighed and ran a hand across my face. It was far too early in the morning, and I was operating on far too little sleep to mediate such a complicated family drama. But I supposed that this was what I signed up for, in a way, working a case like this one.
“Alright, alright,” Nina said, shushing him. “Let’s just calm down for a minute here. Why don’t we start at the beginning? Mikey’s mother says that you weren’t exactly happy when she got pregnant and didn’t want anything to do with your son. What changed?”
“Th-that’s not true!” Jackson stuttered, his pale face turning beet red in an instant. “I mean, I’ll admit I was scared, and I ran at first… But then she blocked my number, and she moved apartments, and no one would help me get in touch with her!”
“You mean you came back?” I asked, taken aback.
“Well, I’ll admit that it wasn’t right away, and I-I didn’t look as hard as I should’ve,” Jackson said, hanging his head so I could only see the tips of his bright red ears. “And when I didn’t find her, I was kind of relieved. I thought I got a chance to start over, so I transferred programs and moved out to California when I got this job. But the whole time, it was just eating at me, so about a year ago, I tried to get in touch with Annabelle. Found her on the CDC website.”
This struck me as a slightly more plausible story. In this century, if Jackson really wanted to find his son, he would’ve been able to. He just needed some time to come around to really wanting to, and by the time he had, Annabelle had left him behind. It was a tale as old as time, and an unfortunate one, really.
“We’re told you have a fiancée? Did she have anything to do with any of this?” Nina asked. It was a smart question. Sometimes big life events spurred these changes of heart.
“Oh, no, I contacted Annabelle a year ago,” Jackson said, shaking his head and looking in our direction again. “Jeannette and I really only got together about six months ago. We’ve been friends for years, so things moved quickly.”
“Alright, and where is she now?” Nina asked. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with her.”
“Sh-she's in Germany for a research conference,” Jackson stammered, seeming surprised again at this. “Has been for a week and won’t be home until next Saturday. W-what do you want to talk to Jeannette for?”
“Well, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” I said. “Pretty much constantly since we found out about you yesterday afternoon. But when the police showed up at your house, you were gone, and no one could find your fiancée, either.”
Jackson’s eyes widened at this, as he no doubt realized how bad this must’ve looked.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” he said, shaking his head wildly and moving his whole body along with it. “No, no, no, no, no, you can’t think that I had anything to do with this, that
Jeannette…”
I cut him off, holding up a hand to silence him.
“Don’t worry. If you didn’t have anything to do with this, we’ll figure that out,” I said. “There’s no reason to panic if you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No reason to panic!” he cried. “My son’s missing, and you’re wasting time trying to track me down instead of finding him!”
I exchanged yet another look with Nina. It was looking less and less like this nervous little man had anything to do with his son’s disappearance, and as good of news as that was for him, he was right that it wasn’t great for Mikey.
“We promise that there are people out looking for your son right now,” Nina reiterated. “They’re doing the best that they can.”
“You’re the best that they can!” he exclaimed, looking wildly between us again. “You’re an FBI agent, and he’s a what-cha-call-it agent, and that other lady said she was with the FBI, too. So what are you all doing here? You need to go find my son.”
“Jackson, we need to rule you out first,” I said sternly but kindly. “And the quicker we can do that, the quicker we can get out doing what you want us to be doing. Do you understand that?”
He looked right at me for a long while, his whole body tense and constricted, hunched over the table.
“Okay,” he said finally, letting some of that tension go as his shoulders slumped. “Okay, then.”
“Alright, so let’s jump ahead to all this custody business,” Nina suggested. “Why wouldn’t Annabelle let you see Mikey?”
“She said he already had a dad, and that I lost my chance,” Jackson said, blinking away what must have been tears. “And I apologized for that, I really did, but I think I deserve a second chance. I’m not trying to replace anybody, but he’s my son, too. And then, after a few months, when she still wouldn’t let me see him, I talked to a lawyer. I didn’t want to do anything so drastic, but I felt like I didn’t have another option.”
I had to admit that I felt for the guy. I could see both sides, so surely they should’ve been able to work out some kind of arrangement that worked for everyone involved.
