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

“Another good question,” Diane said. “At first, pretty far. But then I guess he started seeing them out on the water, too. Not every day at first, but often enough. And then every day, all at the same times and in the same place, like clockwork.”

“On the water?” I repeated, perking up even more at this news. “Doing what? In what? A yacht? A sailboat?”

“That’s the thing, the guy says it’s an ocean liner,” Diane said, her brow furrowed now as she said this.

“A what?” Muñoz asked, unable to hide her skepticism.

“I guess this fisherman goes pretty far out,” Diane shrugged. “And the Hollands are on some ocean liner with a bunch of other people. He said it seemed like they were looking for something in the water.”

Now, this was just too much for me. The Hollands were known nautical enthusiasts, and this sounded straight out of the playbook for how they found Lafitte’s ship in the Keys, painstakingly searching through the water with a team of experts until they found exactly what they were looking for, even though it took months on end.

“That’s them,” I said definitively. “It has to be. Who else would fit that description, doing that?”

“I agree,” Diane said. “That’s what made the Interpol agent look into the case some more. The guy started calling about this ocean liner. It was just strange enough to fit the file, and those details haven’t been released to the media or the public at all. We’re just saying that the Hollands are drug kingpins hiding behind a real estate empire, not that they go digging around the ocean floor for buried treasure in their free time.”

“That would inspire a fair amount of sensationalism,” Muñoz agreed. “It would just make our jobs harder.”

“Agreed,” Diane said, crossing her arms. “And it has the added benefit of tipping us off that this fisherman character might just know what he’s talking about, though I don’t see how we could’ve foreseen that.”

“Has he ever talked to them or anything?” I asked, unable to keep the nervous excitement out of my voice. “Has he gotten a good look at what they’re doing or any idea what they’re looking for?”

It had never occurred to me that the Dragon’s Rogue might not actually be anywhere near the Americas anymore. Could it have ended up right back home in European waters? There would be a kind of symmetry to that, I decided, as well as some irony considering how much time the Hollands and I had spent sorting through the waters closer to our homes.

“He says he tried to talk to them a couple of times, but they’re not very talkative,” Diane said, and I thought I just might explode from my anticipation, my mind reeling with all this new information. “He asked them what they were doing in Scotland once when they were still sticking to the beach, and they just said they were taking an extended holiday. Then out in the water, he asked if they were fishing, and they said ‘something like that,’ but didn’t elaborate.”

“They have to be looking for one of Marston’s pirate ships. They’ve just got to be,” Holm said, and I kind of wished he hadn’t. The FBI liked ribbing me for that stuff even more than my own colleagues did.

No one said anything now, though, not even so much as a snicker, and I realized that the FBI agents were just as excited as we were to be finally getting a breakthrough in this case. Maybe they had been getting more frustrated with the slow pace of things than they had let on originally.

“That was my first thought, too,” Diane said, glancing over at me apprehensively. “Anyway, as I was saying, the Scottish fisherman didn’t talk to them at all after he saw the FBI report on the news. He steered clear of them after that. Still saw them, though.”

I noticed that Diane brushed over the talk of the pirate ships. This struck me as intentional, and I narrowed my eyes at her.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. “What aren’t you telling us?”

She swiveled to me, hands on her hips, and heaved a sigh.

“You don’t miss much, do you, Marston?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Look, I’m not holding anything out on you. I’ve told you everything I know. It’s just that… I know you’re going to want to work this.”

I blinked at her, not comprehending what she was saying.

“Uh, yeah, duh,” Holm said, voicing my own thoughts. “Of course we’re going to work this. Man, I haven’t been to Europe since the Navy. Don’t think I’ve ever been to Scotland, though.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Diane said, looking as if the words pained her to say. “No one’s going anywhere, at least not yet.”

I thought my jaw might drop all the way to the floor, and just like that, the room was abuzz again. Everyone was talking, not just whispering this time, and Diane’s efforts to silence us were proving unsuccessful in this round.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I cried, gaping at her. “You can’t drop that bomb of a lead on us and then pull the rug out from under us like that!”

She shook her head at me, uncomprehending. Everyone was too loud, and she couldn’t hear me.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I screamed again, louder this time, and it carried over all the noise now.

“Look, look, I knew this wasn’t going to be popular,” Diane said, motioning for us all to calm down and listen some more, and the chatter dropped back down to a mere buzz, enough for her voice to carry over it. “But it’s not up to me. This might not even be our case for the time being.”

“What?” Holm cried, sounding even more aghast than I had. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s Interpol,” Dobbs said bitterly, shaking his head. “They’re claiming jurisdiction, aren’t they?”

“They are now,”