by Matt Lincoln
“Right, so I wasn’t involved in that whole thing at the mall,” Justin said quickly. “The second time, I mean. I wasn’t even there. Neither was Rudy.”
“Where were you, then?” I asked, almost dreading the answer.
“We were, uh… with the kid,” Justin said, averting his eyes from mine. I felt my blood boiling some more.
“And where was that?” I asked, swallowing hard and trying not to picture the worst-case scenario. Justin seemed to realize what I was thinking.
“Hey, we never touched him. We’re not like that,” he said, wagging a finger at me through the handcuffs as if he was insulted that I would ever deign to think such a thing. “None of us are, not even Charlie.”
“What do you mean, ‘not even Charlie?’” Nina asked, narrowing her eyes at him.
“Well, you know, Charlie’s kind of an odd duck,” Justin said with a nervous laugh and a haphazard shrug. “But I’ve never seen him do any of that stuff, he just takes the kids, he doesn’t… well, you know.”
I wanted to vomit. I couldn’t even find my voice to say anything.
“So you and Rudy were with Mikey when Charlie went back to the mall?” Nina pressed again. “Where were you?”
“We were hiding out in the van,” he said. Then, before either of us had a chance to ask, “It’s parked down by the water now. We drove it there to look for you. Before that, we were in the next town over, hiding out in an abandoned parking lot. Went there straight after we took him.”
“So how did Charlie get back to the mall?” I asked, finding my voice again. “And why? Why did he go back?”
“Well, he wanted to see what was going on, didn’t he?” Justin asked as if this should be obvious. “We all did. We got a bit on the radio, enough to know there was a crowd at the mall. Then, Charlie, he got it in his head that he could blend in. Rudy and me both offered to go instead since he was so set on somebody going anyway, and nobody saw our faces. But he insisted on doing it himself. Charlie, he’s one of those, ‘if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself’ folks.”
Nina and I exchanged a look. There were a lot of words I could think of for the stunt this Charlie fellow pulled at the mall with Nina, but “right” or “smart” weren’t any of them.
“Yeah, yeah, I know it didn’t go so well,” Justin said quickly, reading our faces. “But that’s just Charlie, you see. I told you he was weird.”
He shrugged as if that was that, settling everything.
“Right, so what happened after the mall incident?” I asked, skipping right over the part where this idiot thought it was a good idea to shoot at an FBI agent in broad daylight when half the country was already looking for him.
“Well, Charlie kind of panicked after that,” Justin admitted, wincing as he said the words. “We came back to pick him up, and the next thing we knew, he was stealing a boat!”
Nina and I exchanged another look.
“What boat?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, I’d reckon you’re probably right that it was that one from the shop we were at, but Rudy and me, we weren’t there when it happened,” he sighed. “One minute we were in the van, and the next Charlie was grabbing the kid and stuffing him on that damn boat, saying he had to make a run for it, and every police officer in the country would know his face on sight now. Told us to keep watch on shore and make sure nothing else happened.”
“He just left you?” Nina asked, incredulous. “Did you have any way to contact him?”
“No, he just ran for it with the kid,” Justin said, shaking his head. “Didn’t make much sense to Rudy and me, but he said he’d be back in touch somehow, so we kept watch as he asked. The alternative was going back to Durham, and that didn’t sound good to either of us. They’d kill us after what happened. Then we ran into you, and well, you know the rest. We didn’t want to shoot you, I swear, and that was all Rudy at the start. I was just defending myself. You get that, right?”
And here we were, back to square one, with Justin jumping to his own defense, throwing his dead friend—or colleague, or whatever—under the bus in the process.
“Did Charlie say anything about how or when he would contact you again?” Nina asked.
“No,” Justin said, shaking his head. “Just that he would, somehow. I don’t know if I believed him or not, but I didn’t really want to risk it. Charlie’s weird, but he can be mean, too. Not so mean as the bosses back in Durham, but pretty bad. Rudy and me, we just planned to bide our time for a few days, and if Charlie didn’t show back up again, we were gonna make a run for it and start a new life somewhere else.”
He hung his head, then, as if he actually felt some remorse for what had happened to the other goon.
“You sure he’s dead?” he asked in a low whisper, as if he was afraid to hear the answer.
“One hundred percent,” I assured him, looking down at my blood-soaked shirt.
Justin winced and looked away from me as if he had just now realized where all that blood had come from.
“Alright, then, Justin, I think that’s enough for now,” Nina said, standing up and nodding to him while motioning for me to do the same. “Others will be in shortly, I assume, to get more details about this operation in Durham.”
Justin winced.
“If I tell on them, they’ll kill me,” he said, looking up at us with pleading in his eyes. “Even in jail, they’ll find a way to kill me.”
“You just let the police worry about that,” I said, sighing again at the thought of this asshole ending up in witness protection instead of rotting in prison. “I’m sure they’ll find a way to protect you.”
18
Ethan
Nina and I huddled together when we were back out in the hall, speaking in low voices so that Justin couldn’t hear us where he still sat inside the interrogation room. Dr. Osborne and the three parents wouldn’t be able to hear either from where they probably still congregated in the lounge area at the end of the hall, which was too distant for me to see clearly from where we stood.
“So we know it wasn’t the parents now, at least,” Nina said with a low huff, shaking her head and glaring through the one-way window behind which Justin was fidgeting in his handcuffs.
In a way, I thought he looked kind of relieved to have been caught, to have everything out on the table. Still nervous, though. Who wouldn’t be?
“That’s one thing, at least,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Good news for them, not so much for Mikey.”
“We can only hope that Justin’s right that this Charlie character isn’t weird in ‘that way,’” Nina said, giving voice to my own worst fears. “That he just panicked and took him but didn’t do anything to him.”
“I guess so,” I murmured. “He could still kill him, though. What else is he going to do? He can’t haul a kid around wherever he’s going to start a new life. I assume that’s what he’s doing. He might just drop him in the middle of the ocean and sail away.”
Nina’s face darkened at this, and I was sorry to give voice to such a horrible possibility, but we had to be prepared for it if it did happen.
“I guess we just have to find him, then,” she said quietly. “We have to find him, and we have to find him fast.”
“Someone should call the Durham Police Department and update the detectives,” I said. “And the other should update the family.”
Nina gave me a pointed look, and she didn’t have to say who was going to take which role. Nina was great at her job, but she wasn’t exactly as great at the softer parts like this.
“I’ll meet you back out front when you’re done,” she said when she detected acceptance of this in my eyes. “Good luck.”
I nodded and gulped, knowing that I would need it. The parents weren’t going to be happy about this, and they weren’t exactly happy already. Not with me, not with the investigation, and not with each other.
The trek back down the hallway to the lounge area felt like it took a life
time, each step heavier than the last.
“Is there news?” Annabelle asked the moment she saw me, her head whipping up from where it had been resting on her husband’s shoulder where they still sat on the couch. “There has to be news.”
I surveyed the whole room. Dr. Osborne was still sitting in the chair across from Curt and Annabelle, while Jackson was huddled in a far less comfortable looking chair in the left-hand corner of the room. He was pressed up against the wall like he was trying to be as far away from the other two as humanly possible while remaining in the same room.
“Yes, there is,” I said with a curt nod, pulling up a folding chair from against the wall and taking a seat next to Dr. Osborne.
“No,” Curt said, shaking his head at the expression on my face, his voice breaking. “No, don’t say it, don’t tell us that.”
“Don’t worry, Mikey’s still alive, as far as we know,” I said quickly, knowing even as I said it how ridiculous it was to tell parents in this situation not to worry. “We do have some new information, though. The good news is that all three of you have been cleared.”
“Cleared?” Annabelle repeated, shaking her head in confusion. “What do you mean by cleared? Cleared of what?”
“Cleared of doing this,” Jackson said darkly from the corner. “It’s not just me who was a suspect, then, was it?”
“Suspect!” Curt roared, looking over at his wife. “Us? How dare you think…”
“Curt, Curt, please,” Dr. Osborne said, holding out her hands to silence him. “You have to understand how these investigations usually go. Just like Agent Marston told you before, ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s the parents who are behind this kind of thing. And failing that, it’s someone known to the v—I mean Mikey.”
I was sure that no one failed to notice how Osborne stumbled over the word “victim,” but at least she caught herself before she said the whole thing.
“I thought you thought it was him, though!” Curt cried, pointing almost violently in Jackson’s direction, though he made a point of not looking at the other man.
“That was what we thought,” I said, nodding slowly. “But we couldn’t rule anyone out as a suspect until now. It was nothing personal, I assure you.”
“Nothing personal?” Curt repeated, his anger clearly unabated. “You seriously expect us not to take it personally that you thought we could do this to our own son!”
I glanced over at Dr. Osborne, who reached out and placed her hand lightly on Curt’s knee to silence him.
“Curt,” she said quietly. “You have to understand—this is our work. We see these things every day. People lie to us every day. We don’t really know you the way that a close friend or family member would or how you know each other. Our priority isn’t you. It’s Mikey. We couldn’t close the door on any possibilities for his sake.”
For a moment, I thought that this was a little too honest, that Curt would push Osborne’s hand away and react even more poorly to her words than he had to mine.
But Osborne was excellent at her job, excellent at reading people, and she knew Curt and Annabelle well enough by then, despite what she said, to know what would work on them. And it turned out, the truth worked just fine, to the couple’s own credit.
Curt opened his mouth as if to respond but then closed it again, his shoulders slumping slightly as if he was giving in to something.
“Yes, of course,” he said, running a hand across his face and practically wiping away his anger. “Of course, that’s your priority. And we appreciate that. We do. I just… I don’t like the idea of you wasting any time looking for Mikey where he isn’t.”
“We know you’re not, though,” Annabelle said quickly, her eyes wide with fear that we would misunderstand her husband. “Wasting time, I mean. We know you’re doing everything you can for Mikey and that you have to pursue the most obvious leads first. It’s just that we know we didn’t take him, so we don’t want you spending time on that when you could be looking for him elsewhere.”
“That’s what Jackson said earlier, just about,” I said, smiling at the man in the corner. “And we understand. This is the most difficult thing that any parent can go through. You don’t have to apologize to us.”
Jackson nodded to me in thanks. I doubted, based on all three parents’ body language, that they’d done much to mend fences even though they’d been cooped up here together all day.
“So?” Osborne asked, leaning into me. “You said there’s news?”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then launched into as delicate a retelling of what Nina and I had learned from Justin as I could manage. There was no way to deliver this news well, though. Throughout the whole story, Jackson, Curt, and Annabelle took turns gasping, yelling, and crying. Eventually, we made it to the end, though.
“That’s it?” Curt asked when I had finished, throwing his hands up in the air. “You don’t have anything else for us?”
I knew how he felt, in a way. I didn’t like that we didn’t have anything else yet, either. The story didn’t exactly end on a happy note, with Mikey adrift out at sea with a madman who may or may not harm him in some way as the best-case scenario, the worst case being that the boy was already dead.
“I’m sorry we don’t have more for you at this time,” I said honestly. “I didn’t want to keep this from you until we did, though. We’ll let you know as soon as we have anything else.”
“We… we appreciate that,” Annabelle managed through her tears, which had been falling for some time then. “We’re glad you told us.”
She winced as she said this and bit her lip like she wasn’t quite sure this was true. That maybe she would’ve preferred it if she still didn’t know what might be happening to Mikey, that her blissful ignorance from moments before seemed a lot better than what she had to think about now.
It was better that they knew, though. It was always better to know.
“So… so this man…” Curt stammered, swallowing hard. “This man has Mikey all alone in the middle of the ocean? They haven’t been seen in a day, so they could be anywhere by now, right?”
I took a deep breath and nodded slowly.
“That depends,” I said. “They could be waiting somewhere while he figures out what to do next, or they could be on an island somewhere.”
“An island?” Jackson asked from where he was still crouched in the corner, practically constricted into a fetal position in that chair now with his anxiety. “What island?”
“Well, there are a number of possibilities,” I said carefully. “This is why I told you before that MBLIS has contacted our international contacts, just in case he shows up on a coastal island.”
“He, you said he,” Curt said, pointing at me. “What about Mikey? Do you think… Do you think…”
He was unable to finish the thought, though he didn’t really need to do so. Dr. Osborne closed her eyes tightly at the thought.
“We’re operating under the assumption that Mikey is still alive and well at this hour,” I assured them, careful not to give them any false hope in case this turned out to be incorrect. “I’m not going to lie to you, though. This is a very dangerous and potentially volatile situation on all ends.”
“Tha… thank you,” Annabelle sputtered before collapsing into a sea of tears as her husband wrapped both of his arms around her.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, not knowing what else to say. “We’re doing everything that we can.”
“I promise you that both the FBI and MBLIS have their absolute best agents on this case,” Dr. Osborne said quietly, reaching out to place a soothing hand on Annabelle’s knee. “If anyone is going to find your son, it’s them.”
I figured that this was true enough. If anyone was going to be able to track down this poor boy, it was Nina. And Holm and I were the best agents that MBLIS had.
Jackson practically read my mind, and not in a good way.
“You said that other agent, the other man, he got shot, th
ough,” he pointed out. “So he’s not going to be able to help find Mikey anymore, is he? You said he’s in the hospital and probably has to stay the night.”
“As soon as Agent Holm is cleared by his doctor, he’ll be back on this case,” I assured them all quickly. “Sooner, if he has his way, I’m sure. He’s not off the case.”
“How can he get back on if he’s not off?” Jackson asked, catching me up in my turn of phrase. “That’s not how that works. So are they going to send someone in to replace him, or what?”
“I… not at this time,” I said, not having expected this to be an issue that any of the parents would even pay attention to, let alone care about, given how much else they had going on right then. “Agent Gosse and I are perfectly capable…”
But Jackson wasn’t having it, and he cut me off.
“So you don’t have your best agents on it, do you?” he challenged angrily. “If he’s one of your best, and you’re not going to replace him, you’re down a whole man! One of the best men, too. How’s that supposed to help you find my son?!”
This was, by all accounts, the wrong thing for Jackson to say at that moment, given how tense things already were in the room, given the recent news, and how tense things were between himself and Curt and Annabelle, given their history.
“Your son?” Annabelle cried, aghast at him. “Your son! Where were you the first seven years of his life, then? Where were you when we needed you? Nowhere, that’s where. Running away. Curt was there, though. Curt’s his father, so get out of here with all your proclamations about how this agent needs to be helping your son.”
I had to stop myself from groaning out loud and dropping my head into my hands. So we were back to this—full circle, yet again, just like with Justin.
“Alright, alright,” I said instead of groaning, holding both my hands up to silence Jackson before he had a chance to respond, and Curt and Annabelle before either of them had a chance to add anything else. “We’ve been over this before. The past isn’t what matters now. It’s Mikey. Going over old wounds isn’t going to help find him any faster, and if you want to talk about wasting any time, well, this is a case in point right here.”
