Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13)

by Matt Lincoln

  I knew he had no beef with me still looking for Mikey. That was why I was here, after all. MBLIS was on this case because Charlie took the boy into international waters. But Nina? He clearly wanted her working with him on taking down the whole gang, and I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  “Well, do you have everything under control here, then?” Nina asked him, signifying that she was with me for now, and that was final.

  He nodded.

  “Alright, then,” I said, turning to her. “Let’s go find Mikey.”

  26

  Ethan

  Together, Nina and I drove back out to the water, where we met Prior and Andrews back by their docked boat, along with several other men in similar uniforms who I didn’t recognize. There was also a forensics team and a second, larger boat next to the first one.

  “Those must be the guys they were waiting for earlier, so they could take the forensics team back out to those caves,” Nina said as we parked and began to walk down to them.

  “Got here pretty quick,” I said, nodding.

  “Well, I told Osborne about the wrappers and everything, and she got a team down here pretty quickly,” Nina explained. “She wants to find Mikey as much as we do.”

  “I imagine after spending so much time with the parents, probably even more,” I remarked. Osborne struck me as a stern enough woman, but she seemed to have a good heart.

  “Yeah, I know she’s a bit icy, but she got in this line of work for a reason,” Nina said. “She really does care.”

  Prior and Andrews waved to us as we approached, looking more than excited to see us.

  “Good, you’re back,” Prior said when we joined the group. “We heard one of the perps broke out at the police station?”

  “More like he was broken out,” I said darkly, noting that though the young Coast Guard men looked concerned, they also appeared a little excited by the whole thing. This was probably the most action they’d seen in their careers, at least while stationed in this sleepy little corner of the country.

  The men’s eyes widened at this.

  “That’s enough about that for now, though,” Nina said quickly before they could ask any more questions. “We’re running short on time, and we need to find Mikey. Do you have any more news for us?”

  “Well, we were just about to take this team out to that cave and see if they can get any DNA or whatever off of those wrappers and stuff,” Andrews explained, gesturing to the forensics team.

  “You have the details for our lab techs at MBLIS?” I asked them. “They’ll want to see this data.”

  Yeah, Bonnie and Clyde, as we called our lab techs, would want to be all over this. With things being so slow with the Holland case lately, I knew they were itching for something more concrete to do.

  “Agent Marston, I assure you that we’re more than capable…” the nearest forensics tech, a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, began to say, but I held up my hand to stop him.

  “I’m sure that you are,” I said, forcing a smile. “We just like to be thorough, is all. You’ll understand.”

  Bonnie and Clyde were the best in the business. No matter how capable these guys were, or any forensics team for that matter, the two of them had a knack for pulling things out of data that no one else had a chance of finding.

  “Of course,” the man said, nodding to me, though he didn’t exactly look ecstatic about the whole thing.

  “Alright, so where do you want us?” Nina asked Prior and Andrews, who exchanged a look.

  “Well, while you were gone, we sent another team out to some of the caves on that map,” Andrews said, pulling it back out and illustrating for us. Sure enough, more of the red circles were crossed out now, indicating that they were already searched and deemed dead ends.

  I felt my stomach sink as I saw that they were the caves closest to the ones where the wrappers had been found. The ones where we had most hoped we could find Charlie and Mikey. Of course, they still could’ve been there, without leaving a sign, if they already moved on down the shore by the time the Coast Guard arrived.

  “Alright, then,” I said, gritting my teeth together and attempting to swallow my discomfort. “What’s next, then?”

  “Well, there are two larger sets of caves left,” Prior explained. “We’ve already got our guys heading to the ones farthest away from here since it’ll take you longer to get out there. If you two can go to the remaining set, we should be able to finish them all tonight while still letting us take these guys out to the first scene.”

  “Got it,” I said, nodding and exchanging a look with Nina. Somehow, it was all feeling even more real with our only two remaining options staring us right in the face.

  “Are there any more?” Nina asked hopefully, though I was sure she knew as well as I did that if there were, the Coast Guard men would’ve told us by then. “Any other options after these caves?”

  Prior and Andrews looked at each other again, and then to an older man in a Coast Guard uniform standing to their left.

  “I’m afraid after this, our main option is to start looking on the ocean floor,” the man said, his mouth set in a grim, firm line.

  I nodded, that pit in my stomach making a raging comeback for the third time that day.

  “We understand,” I assured them. “And we really appreciate all of your help on this case.”

  “Hey, we couldn’t have done any of this without you,” the older man said, reaching out and shaking my hand. “We’re always glad to lend a hand to MBLIS.”

  Nina and I took Prior and Andrews’s boat then, waving farewell to the others as they sped off across the water in the opposite direction, toward the first set of caves where all those wrappers had been found.

  It was a calm night, and we could see the stars as clear as day in the sky above us, next to a sliver of a moon.

  Nina interlinked her arm with mine as the boat whirred along.

  “Whatever happens, I’m glad we got to meet up again,” she told me, and I smiled down at her.

  “Me too,” I murmured, pressing my lips to her temple. “Even if you are still holding out on me about Lafitte’s ship.”

  She chuckled into my shoulder as if she knew that I couldn’t let that opportunity pass me by.

  “Don’t worry, Marston,” she said, pulling away from me just a bit. “All in good time.”

  I wanted to press her further but thought better of it, just enjoying the calm of the water after a hectic two days in which I barely found a moment to rest.

  When I’d wished for a case or a bit of action amidst all the paperwork, this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. But either way, I was glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with Nina again. I just hoped something would come of it for Mikey’s sake.

  We chugged on like that for the better part of an hour, and then two, barely talking and just enjoying one another’s presence. We didn’t discuss the case. There was a lot to talk about, but for some reason, we just let the words rest in the air between us, sitting there as the minutes ticked by, an ever-present reminder of the race against the clock.

  I thought back on everything that had happened the past few days, wondering if we could’ve done anything differently. Did we waste too much time looking into Jackson and the other parents? No, I knew that I would do the same thing all over again with the information we had. It was just the most logical thing to do at the time.

  Still, hindsight was twenty-twenty, and I wished that we hadn’t spent so much precious time chasing down leads that turned out to go nowhere.

  “We’ll keep looking, you know,” Nina murmured into the night, breaking past my thoughts. “I know what that Durham detective said, and the Coast Guard, too, but if we don’t find him tonight, we’ll keep looking. You and Holm aren’t planning on going anywhere, are you?”

  I could hear the grin in her voice as I stared down at the boat’s motor, softly whirring in the night.

  “No, not for a while, at least, if we don’t find him
,” I promised. “Though at a certain point…”

  “I know,” she said, finishing my thought for me when I didn’t. “At a certain point, your boss will need you back in Miami, and it’ll be time to move on. I know.”

  “You’ve worked cases like this before,” I said, and she nodded. “Does it always feel like this? Like everyone’s just going to give up on the kid before it’s time?”

  “Yeah, it does,” she sighed, hanging her head over the edge of the boat and peering down at the water as if she didn’t want to look at me anymore. “Every single time. It always feels too early, even when it isn’t. You get invested in these kids, you know? Every good agent does. It’s impossible not to.”

  “So you’ve been on cases where you didn’t find the child before?” I asked, and there was a period of silence before I heard her sigh.

  “A few,” she said. “More times than not, we find them, though.”

  She didn’t offer up more details, but I pressed her anyway. I couldn’t help it, as my anxiety was starting to get the better of me.

  “Even at this hour?” I asked. There was more silence.

  “Not usually,” she finally relented.

  “How many times has it gone on this long where you found the kid?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.

  “I…” she started to say, but she didn’t finish. Her non-answer was an answer in and of itself, I supposed.

  “I see,” I muttered, staring down at the motor again.

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Nina said quickly. “This is an odd case, so it wouldn’t be out of the question to have an odd result, as well.”

  I knew as well as she did that she was straining here, though. The oddities of this case made it less likely that we would find Mikey, not more. Charlie took him out of desperation, and he could dispose of him out of desperation, as well.

  “Anything from the forensics team?” I asked her. We’d been waiting on results for some time now, and since we were traveling farther than them, the hope was that they would have some preliminary results before we even reached our own destination.

  More than anything, we were hoping for proof that Mikey had been in that cave. That he had been alive sometime today, and that Charlie hadn’t just disposed of him the second they got on the water.

  Nina checked her phone. There was nothing there. But as if on cue, my own phone began to buzz. I looked at the caller ID and shook my head in surprise.

  “It’s Clyde, one of our lab techs,” I explained, glancing up at Nina.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Come on, answer it, then,” she said eagerly, motioning for me to do so.

  “Clyde? Hey, Clyde, this is Marston,” I said, putting a finger in my other ear so that I could hear him speaking over the whir of the boat’s motor.

  “Marston? Marston, good, I’m glad I caught you,” Clyde said, his voice coming in a bit muffled from the bad connection out on the water. We were close enough to shore that I still had one, though.

  “What is it, Clyde?” I asked hurriedly. “Did the forensics team get you their results?”

  “Yep, and Bonnie and I found something they didn’t,” he said. “Some trace DNA from your kid. They just found saliva from your perp, which was pretty obvious, but I can see how they missed the trace DNA.”

  “Trace DNA from Mikey,” I repeated, glancing up at Nina excitedly. “You found trace DNA from Mikey. Now, what does that mean, Clyde?”

  “Well, it could mean a few things,” Clyde said, equivocating like a true scientist. “It could mean that he was there, eating the granola bar we found it on. That’s the best-case scenario for his sake, obviously.”

  “Well, yes, but what else could it mean?” I asked, scrunching up my face in confusion. I remembered one of the lab techs maybe explaining trace DNA or something to me before, but I’d forgotten what any of it meant, if I’d ever understood it in the first place.

  Nina was standing and practically hopping in front of me now, wanting to hear what was going on for herself. She was waving her hands in between us wildly.

  “Hold on, Clyde, before you answer, I’m going to put you on speakerphone so that Agent Gosse can hear you, too, okay?”

  “Oh, uh, okay,” Clyde said, sounding a bit surprised at this as I removed my phone from my ear and pressed the button so that his voice came out tinny and even more muffled, though both myself and Nina could hear him now. “Hello, Agent Gosse, pleased to meet you… er, hear you, anyway.”

  “You too,” Nina called into the receiver. “What were you saying about trace DNA?”

  “Right, well, like I was just telling Marston, the forensics team in North Carolina found your perp’s DNA on one of the wrappers—pretty straight forward, saliva. They didn’t find the other evidence. When they sent it to us, Bonnie and I found the trace DNA on one of the other wrappers. That belongs to your missing kid.”

  “So that means he was there, right?” Nina asked excitedly. “He was there in the cave with Charlie. He wasn’t dead yet. Do you know how long ago that was? Can you tell?”

  “Well, hold on, not so fast,” Clyde said, chuckling nervously, the sound crackling over the poor connection. “That’s possible, sure, but there are some other possibilities, as well. There’s a reason the first forensics team didn’t find this evidence. It’s slight and might not mean what we want it to.”

  I could see Nina’s face fall in real-time.

  “Oh, okay,” she said, clearly deflated. “What else could it mean, then?”

  “Well, the only thing we know for sure is that Mikey came into contact with that wrapper somehow,” Clyde explained. “He touched it, brushed against it, something like that. We don’t know when or why. There’s no saliva or anything like that.”

  “So basically, Mikey could’ve touched the wrapper sometime when they were out on the water, and then Charlie could’ve taken it into the cave and eaten it later,” I surmised, my stomach sinking slightly again at this.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Clyde agreed. “But it could also mean that Mikey ate the granola bar in that cave. I mean, you said that the food was all locked away with rescue supplies, right? So why would Mikey come into contact with it if your perp didn’t intend to give it to him to eat?”

  As Clyde spoke, the line began to crackle more as the reception grew weaker.

  “Clyde, is there anything else?” I asked him. “You’re starting to break up a bit.”

  “No, that’s pretty much it,” he said. “We’re still sorting through the rest of the data, but I wanted to try to catch you before you got to those caves. That’s what the forensics team told me you were doing. I hope this helps you some.”

  “Yes, it does, thank you, Clyde, and thank Bonnie for us, too,” I assured him.

  “Will do, Marston,” he said. “Good luck.” And with one more crackle, he clicked away.

  Nina and I stood there in silence for a few moments as I maneuvered the boat around a corner, creeping us closer to our destination.

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” she murmured after some time, sinking back into a sitting position along the side of the boat.

  It was, at the very least, a glimmer of hope.

  “Odds are, that was Mikey’s granola bar,” I said, nodding slowly as I thought this over. “Clyde hinted as much. He didn’t want to say for sure, of course, but I could tell he was leaning that way.”

  “Yes, I thought that, too,” Nina said, the hint of a smile tucked behind the corners of her lips. “Why would he have touched it if he didn’t eat it? I just wish we knew when.”

  “I doubt that it was before they were first spotted on the water,” I reasoned. “Prior and Andrews said there are some waves and stuff in the cave where they found the stuff. I bet it would’ve washed away back then. Also, Charlie seemed to want to get out of there quickly. He was panicking yesterday. He probably wouldn’t have thought about eating for hours, at least.”

  “Ye
ah, I think you’re right,” Nina said, some, but not all, of the excitement returning to her sharp, pixie-like features now. “They wouldn’t have thought about having to eat for a while, at least. It wouldn’t make sense to hide in a cave right away, either, especially since they were seen out on the water later that day. I bet they were there sometime today, which means that he didn’t kill Mikey right away. He could still be alive.”

  “Yes, yes, he could,” I said, meeting her eyes and smiling despite myself.

  Mikey was still out there somewhere. I had never been more sure of it. We were going to find him tonight. We had to find him tonight. He’d fought this long to stay alive. The least that we could do was not give up on him yet.

  I glanced up ahead of us and then down again at the map Prior and Andrews had given us. We were coming upon what looked like some caves along the shore ahead on our right.

  “I think this is it,” I said, glancing back over at Nina to find a familiar glint waiting for me there in her eyes.

  “Alright, then,” she said. “Let’s go in and get him.”

  27

  Nina

  Nina’s whole body was thrumming with nervous energy as Marston led their boat into the first cave in the set of several. The boat was small, and the hum of the engine low, but it wasn’t so small or unobtrusive that they wouldn’t be noticed if someone was in the cave.

  Nina pulled out her gun the second they turned inside, just in case. She noticed Marston doing the same, though he was mostly occupied with maneuvering the boat around the narrow corners of the cave and the channel leading up to it.

  She pulled out a flashlight from a kit Prior had pointed out to her and shined it around the whole area, scanning the small cave with her eyes and ears.

  The cave was a mostly open area, with water flowing all around. There didn’t look to be any natural resting spots on rocks or anything. It was just like a small lake with no beach around it. If they wanted to hide out in here, it would have to be on their boat, and she didn’t see one anywhere.