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

She gave me a wry grin at this, and I chuckled, though I secretly prayed that they wouldn’t. As much as I wanted more movement on the Holland case, I also didn’t want to miss out. Although maybe that meant that I needed to get my priorities straight, too.

“Ready to go?” I asked Holm, and he nodded.

We both waved on our way out the door.

“Bring us back a postcard,” Birn called after us.

I dropped Holm off at his place briefly, and I ran home to my houseboat to pack some clothes and other items before heading to the airport to board our flight, a private MBLIS plane.

Thankfully, there were no screaming children to greet us this time around, given that this plane wasn’t open to the public. I sipped on seltzer water, my tablet propped up on the small desk between Holm and me as we floated through the clouds toward North Carolina.

“What’cha looking at?” Holm asked me, diverting his attention from where he had been peering out the window at the bright blue early summer sky beneath us.

“News reports about this whole thing,” I said, shaking my head as I scrolled through an article about the parents going on the news, pleading for anyone with any information to come forward and bring their son back to them.

I scanned the photographs for any sign of an FBI agent. I only saw one person who might fit the bill: a woman in a skirt, blouse, and suit jacket who always seemed to be standing right next to the parents. The police detectives always had guns at their sides to identify them, and they stood a little further away, but this woman could be hiding her weapon somewhere and disguising herself in plain clothes.

It was possible, however, that the FBI agent involved wasn’t anywhere near the parents but was out there somewhere hunting down the perps. It was a tough call. The parents were an important part of dealing with a situation like this, and panicked parents could also make matters worse inadvertently by offering an enormous reward or revealing details about the investigation on television. There was a fine line between working the case and preventing further damage from within.

“What do they say?” Holm asked, leaning forward and trying to peer over at my tablet’s screen. “What are we dealing with here?”

“It is a weird case,” I said, shaking my head again as I clicked on an article about the perps. Or rather, perp. It seemed that only a description of one was released to the media.

“How so?” Holm asked, craning his neck to try to see, so I shifted the tablet to give him a better view.

“See this here?” I asked, pointing at the blurry, cropped security footage picture of a man with acne scars on his cheek, dark hair, and a hazel-colored jacket. “This is the picture of the perp that’s been circulating in the media. The guy looks like a lone wolf, right?”

“Sure does,” Holm agreed, scowling at the picture. “I’d like to clock him a new one. I’ll tell you that.”

The guy did look like a creep, even without the information we had about him, I decided. But that was beside the point.

“Me, too, but that’s not what I mean,” I said quickly. “This is the only picture that keeps appearing in any of the articles. There’s only the mention of this one guy, but nothing about the other perp. Diane said there were two, right?”

“Yeah, she did,” Holm confirmed with a nod, his brow now furrowed in confusion as he followed my reasoning. “She said that he was all geared up in a ski mask and stuff, right?”

“That’s right,” I said, nodding. “But there’s no mention of that in any of the official reports from the police or the FBI. Nothing. Some witnesses who were interviewed by the media said something about a man with a gun, but people seem to be chalking that up to eyewitness testimony being shaky at best.”

“Now they come around,” Holm huffed. “Usually, they’ll run with anything on a story like this.”

“I know, that’s what’s so weird,” I said. “The police and the FBI must be keeping the second perp quiet for some reason. It would make sense, in a way, if they think this is more organized than a lone-wolf operation. People are already panicking. It’d be so much worse if they thought there was some kind of child sex trafficking operation going on.”

“God, do you think there is?” Holm asked, his eyes widening.

I knew my partner was smart enough to know that this was a possibility, but it wasn’t exactly fun to think about. My stomach churned just at the thought, and I began to regret eating all that rich food at the diner earlier.

“That’s what we’re going to need to find out,” I said quietly. “Another reason they probably didn’t release any of this to the media is to avoid tipping any organization off that we may know about them. We have the upper hand in that way, for now, though until we find that kid, we’re going to be racing against the clock. That’s the most important thing here.”

“Usually, these aren’t stranger situations,” Holm said, biting his lip and shaking his head. “Usually, it’s someone known to the kid who took him. But in those news conference photos, it looks like they’re operating under the assumption that the parents had nothing to do with it, and they don’t know anyone who could’ve done this.”

“Both things could be true,” I mused, leaning back in my chair and running a hand across my face as I pondered this. “It’s not unheard of for law enforcement to treat it as a kind of Schrodinger’s cat situation, and getting the parents in front of the cameras can reveal a lot about their own psychology. Even so, the parents were with him when it happened, and all reports say they were distraught. I doubt they’re