Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13), Matt Lincoln [ebooks children's books free TXT] 📗

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.

I blew a raspberry as I stared at it—a file for a middle-aged woman in Maine who was friends with Chester and Ashley before they disappeared. She’d been dodging my calls.

“That’s a happy thought,” Birn said sardonically, swiveling back around in his seat and reaching for one of his own papers, though they weren’t stacked on his desk like mine were. Rather, they were spilling all over the place across it, even branching out into Muñoz’s territory a bit, though she didn’t seem to mind.

A phone rang, the sound emanating from Diane’s office, and with a huff, she disappeared back inside.

“I don’t know what she has to complain about,” Muñoz said bitterly after she had gone. “At least she can get away from them by locking herself in there.”

This was true enough, though I had more than an inkling that Diane was also sleeping in her office more nights than not, which meant that she was even more overworked than we were. Not good news, considering how uninspiring that work had been lately. This case had predictably turned out to be a marathon instead of a sprint. No one had been on another case in ages.

“Hey, so what about that map you told me about?” Holm said, whispering as he leaned forward again. “The one from the Hawthorne house.”

The Hawthorne house was where we found all the artifacts from the Dragon’s Rogue, along with the carcass of a fake version of the ship the Hollands had intended to use to get me off their trail.

The map was another story, seemingly hand-drawn by the pirate Grendel. My hope was that the marked locations on it along the eastern coast of the United States and its surrounding islands, and even parts of Canada, would lead me to the Dragon’s Rogue once and for all.

“What about it?” I asked, hardly paying attention as my eyelids began to droop at the thought of spending another long day going through files and trying to get in touch with people who had no intention of talking to me.

“Well, you kept saying weeks ago that you were going to go to every location and figure out where that ship is,” he said, his excitement growing as he spoke.

“It’s not that easy, Holm,” I sighed, shaking my head and looking up at him from the Maine woman’s file. “For one thing, it’s a really old map, and the marked locations aren’t exactly what I would call exact. I’ll need an expert to help me figure out where they are.”

“So do that!” Holm cried, though not loud enough that the FBI agents could hear. “Tessa’s friend can help you, right?”

He was speaking of George, the old man who Tessa Bleu had enlisted to help me track down Grendel’s journal in the first place while I was in New York covertly helping MBLIS deal with some funding issues caused by the mob there.

“Yes, but I’d need to go see him to do that,” I sighed. “I already had Percy look at it while I was in New Orleans, too. His expertise is books, though, so he couldn’t tell me much. He did confirm I have the real journal now, though.”

Percy was a friend of George’s who helped me figure out that the first journal sent to me from Virginia was a fake. He was a nice old man, and I’d been glad to see him again and overjoyed that I had the real journal this time, but it disappointed me that he couldn’t help with the map.

“What are you two whispering about over there?” Birn asked us with a mock tone and look of suspicion.

“Leaving us out of anything fun?” Muñoz added, calling out to us past her partner.

“More fun than anything we’ve got going on here these days,” Holm shot back with a twinkle in his eye.

“Ah, they’re talking about that ship again,” Birn said with a knowing nod. “When are you going to let us in on all that action, eh, Marston?”

“What’s