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

involved, but given the statistics, you’re right that we should keep an open mind about it.”

“Could be only one parent knew about it, so the other had a genuine reaction,” Holm suggested. “I heard about a case like that overseas a few years back.”

“Yeah, that was a nasty one,” I said, wincing again at the memory. “The mother had her own kid killed, and the father didn’t know a thing about it. It took so long for the authorities to crack the case because he just kept going on publicity tours, quit his job even, trying to find his kid, and they never considered the possibility that one of the parents could’ve done it because his reaction was so genuine. But it was her all along.”

“An open mind, then,” Holm said with a curt nod, leaning back in his own seat and looking more than a little green. “We just need to figure out what happened to this kid.”

“I know,” I said, gazing out the window some more. “We’re going straight to the police station when we arrive. We’ll see if we can meet with the parents and talk with the FBI agent and detectives on the case. We’ll have a better idea of where we stand then. In the meantime, the Coast Guard’s out looking for the kid, and so are the police and state troopers on land.”

“I kind of want to join the search myself,” Holm said, his tone troubled. “Directly, I mean.”

“We will,” I assured him. “But we have to get our bearings first. The last thing we want is to waste time looking in all the wrong places when a little investigating would’ve pointed us in the right direction.”

8

Ethan

Holm and I were met at the gate by a young officer who looked like an all-American kid, if a bit bedraggled, with his golden blond hair tousled beneath his cap and a worried, anxious look in his eyes.

“Agents Marston and Holm?” he asked us as he rushed over, taking our bags despite our protestations.

“The one and only,” Holm grinned. “Or two, I guess. And you are?”

He held out his hand to the young man, who shook it and then mine, shifting my light suitcase to his other hand briefly.

“Officer Ryan Hollister, sir,” he said. “Man, are we glad to have you here.”

“That bad, huh?” I asked, worry percolating in the pit of my stomach as we followed the young man out into a private parking lot near our gate, where his police car was waiting for us by the door with its hazard lights on.

“We’ve never seen anything like this here, sir,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes were about the size of a couple of golf balls. “And the media’s everywhere, and the parents are freaking out, of course. You could say we’re a bit out of our comfort zone on this one.”

He placed our luggage on an empty seat and opened the passenger and backseat doors for us, and I climbed in the front while Holm settled in the back next to our luggage.

“There’s no harm in admitting that,” I assured him as he got behind the steering wheel. “Most departments three times your size would be out of their depth, but that’s why we’re here.”

“The FBI been any help?” Holm asked.

“Oh yeah, they sent two people,” Officer Hollister said brightly as he pulled us out of the parking lot and onto a nearby interstate, headed in the direction of his small town not far from there. “I’ve only really talked to the psychologist, though. The other agent, the one who was at the mall, she hasn’t been in the station much. Lots of tracking down the bad guys, I guess.”

I noticed that the young officer looked a little envious at this. Maybe he had aspirations for becoming a detective.

“Ah, yeah, she ran into the guy in the mall, right?” Holm asked, leaning forward as Hollister pulled into the left lane.

“Yeah, that was rough,” the kid sighed, shaking his head and peering back at Holm in the rearview mirror. “She nearly caught him, but some idiot in the crowd got in the way, I guess, ran right into her, and knocked her over. When the perp shot at her, everyone freaked out.”

“Why was there such a big crowd?” I asked. “They didn’t shut the mall down after the kid was taken?”

“Tried, but there weren’t enough of them and too many people who wanted in,” Hollister sighed. “It was mostly mall security at that point and a couple of officers. Everyone else was out looking for the kid or back at the station with the parents.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Holm grumbled. “The security part, I mean, not the crowd. I don’t get why anyone would want to be near a crime scene like that.”

“It’s like watching a car crash,” I sighed, shaking my head. “All morbid curiosity and no common sense. Probably would’ve caught the guy if it weren’t for the crowd, though he may not have been there in the first place if it weren’t for them giving him a chance to blend in, so I guess it’s all a wash at the end of the day.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Holm said, and I got the sense that he had another way. I didn’t exactly disagree.

“How are the parents?” I asked Hollister. “Is the FBI psychologist getting through to them?”

Sometimes parents were the opposite of helpful in these situations, even if they didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping itself. They were distraught, or enraged, or trying to run the investigation themselves, questioning everything the police and assembled experts said or did. Any reaction was understandable in my mind, given the situation, but the FBI was right to send an expert to deal with them. That was probably the woman I had seen in the picture, I realized, always hovering near the mother and father of the missing boy.

“They’re understandably upset,” Hollister said, pursing his lips. “I can’t even