by Matt Lincoln
“Why don’t we jump ahead to yesterday?” I suggested. “If you didn’t know that we were looking for you, how come you’re here? Why did you leave San Diego?”
“Well, I was eating breakfast, and I saw Mikey on the news!” Jackson cried, becoming agitated at the memory. “And then I saw Annabelle and her husband, and I watched long enough to see where they were, and then I hopped on the first flight out.”
That would explain why Jackson’s breakfast was left sitting there half-eaten, his door unlocked. If I saw my kid on some police report on the news, I’d probably forget myself, too.
A sinking feeling was beginning to form in the pit of my stomach. It was looking less and less like Jackson had anything to do with Mikey’s disappearance. And that was bad news for Mikey.
“Do you own a gun, Jackson?” Nina asked.
“Wh-what?” he stammered, taken aback.
“A gun,” she repeated. “Do you own one?”
“N-no, I wouldn’t even know how to use a gun,” Jackson said, and he sounded honest to me. “I’d probably end up shooting myself by accident.”
He laughed nervously, though the humor didn’t reach his eyes. By the look of him, with his pale skin, anxious demeanor, and haphazard clothing, I thought he was probably right about that. I doubted Jackson saw much of the world outside of a lab.
“Do you mind if we check on that?” Nina asked him. We would anyway, of course, but whether he gave permission revealed something in and of itself.
“Um, yeah, yeah, do whatever you want,” Jackson said, looking a little surprised again. “Just—just don’t waste too much time on me, okay? You need to find Mikey. You need to find him.”
“We’re doing the best that we can,” I assured him. “We promise.”
“But you can’t promise that you’ll get him back,” Jackson said, and it wasn’t a question. He may be nervous, but he was clearly an intelligent guy.
“No,” I said quietly. “We can’t promise that, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t be honest if we did.”
“And you don’t want to give us false hope, I understand,” Jackson said, nodding and sniffling and looking down at his hands. “I understand.”
“Agent Marston, can I talk to you in the hall?” Nina asked, glancing over at me.
I nodded and followed her back out the door, leaving Jackson still sitting there behind the one-way window, where we could see him, but he could no longer see us.
The hall was empty but for the two of us.
“I’m starting to think that this guy didn’t do it,” Nina murmured when the door was safely shut behind us.
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard as that sinking feeling in my stomach grew more profound. “Me neither.”
“Which means…” her voice trailed off as if she didn’t want to speak the words.
I nodded. She didn’t have to tell me what this meant. This was in all likelihood a real stranger abduction, and now we were back to square one in our investigation, whereas Mikey had lost nearly another day. This wasn’t good.
“We should probably have him talk to the parents,” I said with a sigh because I didn’t actually want to force this family drama. “See how they interact. Then we can probably rule this possibility out for the most part and have the police in San Diego look into Jackson’s movements in the past few days and rule him out definitively.”
“Yes, I think that would be best,” Nina said, nodding slowly and checking the time on her phone. “Let’s go tell the police now.”
So we left Jackson waiting for us and headed back out into the main room of the station, where Chief Raskin had returned, looking even wearier and his eyes even more bloodshot than they had been the previous day.
“Howdy, agents,” he said, saluting us when he saw us, a fresh cup of coffee in his hands. “What’ve you got for us?”
So we relayed our conversation with Jackson to him and our suspicions that, in all likelihood, this was a stranger abduction after all.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Chief Raskin sighed when we were finished, running a weary hand across his face in a now-familiar gesture. “Kind of feels like starting over, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does,” I said, not able to find a way to sugar coat it.
“But it’s not, really,” Nina said quickly. “We have a better idea of what we’re dealing with, or at least what we’re not dealing with. We can put our contacts in San Diego on the case of ruling out Jackson entirely, and we can focus all of our energy on the stranger abduction angle now. The first order of business is trying to find this boat the Coast Guard supposedly saw and getting a better description of it. I’d say it’s more likely than not that they really saw the kid, now. We know a stranger probably took him, so the international angle is more likely.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Raskin said, nodding slowly. “Well, we’ll get right on the San Diego thing for you. I’ll make a few calls. I’ll try to see about the boat, too. The only description we’ve got is pretty loose, though. There are a million white motorboats out there. Without a make and model, it’ll be hard to know where it came from. There’s one boat shop down by the water. We already checked to see if anyone rented anything out yesterday, but there was nothing in the owner’s log. Everyone cleared out pretty early after this whole mess went down.”
“Thank you,” I said, nodding to him and making a mental note about the boat shop. “We just need to chat with the parents—all three of them—one more time, and then we’ll join the search ourselves.”
Raskin and his officers and detectives nodded to us in return, and Nina and I headed back to retrieve Jackson from the interrogation room. He looked like he was about to burst when we found him.
“Is there any word?” he asked, practically leaping out of his chair when he heard the door open. “You were gone a while, is there anything new?”
“We’re still looking,” I assured him, which was, no doubt, not the non-answer he wanted, but he nodded and grumbled something resembling thanks to me, anyway. I decided I didn’t dislike him so much after all.
“We think it might be time for us all to have a talk with Annabelle and Curt,” Nina said, and Jackson visibly winced.
“I don’t think they’ll want to talk to me,” he said quietly. He left unsaid that he probably didn’t want to talk to them, either.
“Well, you’re all this boy’s parents, so you’re going to have to figure out how to get through this thing together,” I pointed out, and the man just hung his head and nodded as Nina opened the door for him.
Holm and Dr. Osborne were talking to Curt and Annabelle, who were still sitting on the couch when we found them. I noticed that they looked a little more put together today, at least, though that wasn’t saying much.
This was short-lived, however, as the second they caught sight of Jackson, they both jumped up from where they were sitting and started screaming at him.
“What’s he doing here?!” Curt roared, pointing violently in the other man’s direction.
“Where is he? Where did you take him?” Annabelle cried, tears suddenly streaming down her previously clear cheeks.
Apparently, Annabelle had changed her tune since the previous day, when she’d been adamant that Jackson couldn’t have had anything to do with Mikey’s disappearance. It was more likely than not hope, for the same reason that Nina and I had hoped that Jackson had the boy. It would be simpler that way, and we would be closer to finding him.
Osborne and Holm both looked back at us questioningly for good measure.
“Alright, alright,” Nina said, more than a twinge of annoyance in her voice, and I saw why she let Osborne handle the parents on her own before. “Everybody just calm down.”
“We’re in the process of officially clearing Jackson,” I explained, and Holm’s shoulders slumped while I watched the corner of Osborne’s mouth twinge downward. They knew it was better for Mikey if Jackson had him, too.
Of course, none of the parents were comple
tely in the clear yet. As far as I was concerned, all three of them were suspects until we knew what happened for sure. Someone else Mikey knew could’ve taken him, too, which was why the Atlanta police were interviewing everyone he knew from school and daycare.
“So… so it wasn’t Jackson who took him?” Annabelle asked, her whole body sagging at the notion.
“How could you think that I would do something like that!” Jackson challenged her, his pale face suddenly beet red for the second time in an hour. “He’s my kid!”
“He’s not your son. I’m his father!” Curt cried, taking a step in the other man’s direction.
I moved between them, holding out my arms in either direction.
“He’s both your sons,” I said as calmly as I could. “I think everybody just needs to get nice and clear about that. And all this fighting and going back and forth isn’t going to help us find him any faster.”
All three parents hung their heads, then.
“Hey, uh, what’s going on, boss?” Holm asked, rising from his seat and crossing over to mutter into my ear.
I quickly pulled him and Dr. Osborne aside while Nina begrudgingly watched the three parents, who were now pacing in opposite corners of the lounge area from each other. I explained everything we’d learned from Jackson.
“God, we have to find this kid,” Holm said, shaking his head as his expression darkened. That sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach was pulling me practically all the way to the ground then, and I nodded.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We really do.”
Time was running shorter every second.
We returned to the main lounge area, where the parents were still on opposite ends of the room, glowering at each other, while Nina stood tenuously in the middle, looking like she wanted to be pretty much anywhere else.
“Alright, now this is a small police station,” Osborne announced to them. “So we can’t exactly keep you three separated this whole time. Now’s as good a time as any to learn to get along, if not for your own sakes, for Mikey’s.”
At the mention of the missing boy’s name, something shifted on each parent’s face, and they glanced uneasily at one another. Then, almost in unison, they nodded somewhat reluctantly, though agreement was agreement as far as I was concerned. I’d take the win.
“Good,” I said, nodding to each of them in turn. “Now, can you all stay here and talk to Dr. Osborne? I’m sure they can get you anything you’d like here. You can even get a hotel room, though you’ll understand that someone will have to remain with you at all times. We can’t rule anything out yet.”
“We understand,” Annabelle murmured, her eyes swimming.
“Why can’t we help look?” Curt asked, a twinge of anger in his voice. “We want to help find our boy.”
“We appreciate that, but these people are armed and dangerous,” Nina reminded him. “You could end up doing more harm than good.”
“People? As in plural?” Jackson asked, his tone and expression frantic, and I realized that he only knew what was in the police reports.
I sighed, not wanting to get into this all again right then. I was itching to get out looking for Mikey myself.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get them all updated,” Osborne assured me, sensing my reticence.
“Thank you,” I said, nodding to her in thanks. “You all stay here. We’re going to go find your son.”
13
Ethan
We joined the police search after that and spent the rest of the morning combing through every corner of the town and the surrounding area, looking for anywhere that the perps and Mikey could be hiding. We spoke to shop owners in town, as well as homeowners in the residential areas. None of them knew anything, though all of them expressed support for our investigation and concern for the missing boy. More than a few of them also hinted that they’d love to hear more details about our search to fuel the local—and now, even national—gossip mill, but we always rebuffed these requests by thanking them for their time and going on our way.
In the end, we had to determine that the perps and Mikey were likely no longer there, either skipping out to sea as the Coast Guard report suggested, or driving or even flying off to some other corner of the world that we had yet to reach in our search.
“Damn, it’s getting hot,” Holm said when it was getting to be around lunchtime, running a hand through his hair. It glistened in the sun, a thin coat of sweat atop his head.
“Maybe we should break for a spell,” Nina suggested. “We’ve been at it for hours, and we have to eat sometime. We can get back to it in not too long.”
Holm and I both nodded at this, and we climbed back into her sweetly air-conditioned rental car and headed back to the seafood place downtown, where we each ordered a healthy portion of the house chowder to go along with those buttery biscuits.
The owner brought it all to us quickly, saying the soup was already brewing.
“This one’s on the house,” he told us when he brought it all out, along with another basket of the biscuits. “You just find that boy, you hear?”
We ate as quickly as we could, just as the food had arrived. That sinking feeling that had been in the pit of my stomach since questioning Jackson earlier that morning had covered my hunger, but as soon as I smelled those biscuits, I realized how hungry I actually was. I hadn’t eaten anything since we were there at that restaurant last, early the previous evening.
As we ate, we discussed the case, which we hadn’t had a lot of time to do yet that day in the middle of all the anxious searching we were doing. This was the first time we had really stopped to breathe since we left the station. Even in the car going from destination to destination, we’d sat in tense silence, no one wanting to speak about how quickly the clock was ticking.
“So what did the parents—Curt and Annabelle, I mean—say to you while we were talking to Jackson?” I asked Holm as I blew on my first spoonful of piping hot soup. I was a seafood chowder, and I detected chunks of clams, oysters, crab, and other assorted seafood floating around there with potatoes in the creamy mixture. It tasted as good as it looked and smelled, warming that anxious pit in my stomach and abating it momentarily.
“More of the same,” Holm sighed, shaking his head. “They’re a nervous wreck, the both of them, not that I blame them. I’d be the same in their position. Worse, probably.”
“They seemed to have changed their tune about Jackson when they first saw him,” I pointed out. “Or Annabelle did, at least. Yesterday, she seemed to defend him. Said he wouldn’t hurt a fly, didn’t she?”
Nina and Holm both nodded to indicate that I remembered correctly.
“Well, yeah, I guess Osborne talked to them some more about these cases and how they usually tend to go,” Holm said thoughtfully. “And Curt was always a little suspicious, even more so last night. I guess everything just got her convinced, hopeful even, because, well… you know.”
We did know. Things were looking bad for Mikey. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he was taken, and almost twenty-four since he was last seen if the Coast Guard guy was to be believed. And still, there were no new leads if Jackson was to be believed. And no matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, for Mikey’s sake, I believed him. Sure, the guy was a little rough around the edges, but I was inclined to believe Annabelle’s first instinct that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
The police had also confirmed since we left the station that his fiancée was actually in Germany, and she was panicked out of her mind when they finally got her on the phone. She hadn’t heard anything about any of this, insulated in the bubble of her academic conference. She was on her way to join Jackson now, having hopped on the first flight from Berlin to North Carolina, though she wouldn’t land until sometime the following day.
“Anything from the Coast Guard?” I asked Nina, though I knew that she’d checked her phone before we sat down.
She checked it again anyway, looking almost as eager to see if she had any me
ssages as I was. Her face fell, however, when she looked at it.
“No,” she said, shaking her head glumly. “Nothing since the last report.”
And the last report, we knew, had contained nothing notable, just saying that the only people the Coast Guard had found out on the water today were a lone fisherman who let them search his boat, which was the wrong color anyway, and some swimmers on a private beach not far from there. None of the swimmers had seen anything either, and they were questioned for some time. Just college kids out at someone’s parents’ beach house for the summer. They hadn’t even heard about the abduction yet, not having been into town in a couple of days.
“What’s next, then?” Holm asked as he chomped on a biscuit. They were crunchier today.
There was a long period of silence in which no one seemed to have any ideas. We were running shorter and shorter on time—or, rather, Mikey was running short on it. And there hadn’t been any new leads since Jackson, and that had obviously gone nowhere fast.
As if on cue, Nina’s phone buzzed, and she looked at it so quickly that she nearly toppled her almost full water glass across the whole table when she went to grab it.
“What is it?” Holm asked apprehensively, his whole body suddenly tense. “Is it the station?”
She nodded slowly, her eyes darting across the screen, left to right, and then back to the left again. She didn’t answer, though, and just continued to read until her shoulders slumped, and she banged the phone back down on the table with almost enough force to topple the glass for a second time.
I reached out as if to catch it as it wobbled, but it remained in place in the end.
“Nothing new?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink and the food I’d eaten churn inside me as I hoped beyond hope that I was reading her expression wrong.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not really. Just that they’ve mostly cleared Jackson in San Diego. Atlanta police, too. Neither department was able to find anything on him or his fiancée, no guns in the house, not even a can of pepper spray. They’ve both been at their jobs regularly, where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there, and Jackson’s custody lawyer doesn’t seem to think he’s gotten particularly desperate lately. He was only really suing for full custody to try to get summers and some holidays as a last-ditch effort to get Curt and Annabelle to cooperate with him. I guess he figured going for broke made it more likely he’d get what he actually wanted, which was a relationship with his son.”
