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

to the station. There were only a handful of cars on the whole collection of streets in the area.

“Was it like this when you got here?” I asked Nina, gesturing at the empty streets.

“No way,” she said, shaking her head. “This place was packed earlier, and so was the mall. You know how it is, a big case like this hits the news, and all the crazies flock in. One guy even had this weird true-crime blog where he tracks every missing kid case in the region.”

“That sounds… kind of fishy,” Holm pointed out, and I had to agree. Why would someone take such an interest in child abduction cases?

“That’s what I thought,” Nina said with a nod. “I’m going to look through it later when I get a chance, see if I can find anything useful. He didn’t fit the description of either of our perps, though, so I let him go. He could’ve just been a crackpot. Get all kinds of those with serial killer cases, so why not this, too?”

“I guess so,” I chuckled, shaking my head in wonder. It took all sorts, I supposed.

Nina pulled in front of a small restaurant stuck between a gift shop and a comic book store. There was a dancing crab on the front door. There was one other car nearby, and I only saw a single table that was occupied through the broad front window.

“Had lunch here earlier,” Nina said as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “Owner said he wasn’t going to shut down, even if no one showed up, so I told him I’d probably come back, make sure he had somebody to serve, at least.”

Sure enough, when we all walked into the restaurant, a cheerful-looking middle-aged man behind a bar at the bag looked up and waved.

“Back so soon, Agent Gosse?” he asked as we approached him. “And you brought friends, too. I appreciate the business.”

“Well, if you’ve still got some of those fresh crab legs, I’ll be coming back as long as I’m here,” Nina assured him, flashing the man a half-grin.

“Come now, how about a window seat?” the man asked, leading us up a step to a table right in another window off to the side of the restaurant. We could see the thin outline of the ocean in the distance from there.

“This is perfect, thank you,” I said, nodding to him as I sat down next to the window. Nina took a seat across from me, and Holm sat facing the window between us.

The man quickly returned with glasses of water and menus for all of us. We all ended up ordering the crab legs, on Nina’s recommendation, and a steaming pile of buttery lobster biscuits soon appeared in the middle of the table to tide us over until the main course arrived.

“We’re eating well today, eh, Marston?” Holm asked, chomping down on one of the biscuits before Nina or I had a chance to get a crack at the basket.

“Sure are,” I chuckled, still a little full from our big meal that morning at Birn’s cousin’s diner, though I reached for the biscuit basket just the same.

The biscuit was as buttery as it appeared, and it melted in my mouth.

“So what’ve you been up to?” Holm asked when he was done licking his buttery fingers, arching an eyebrow at Nina. “Marston says you might be working the Holland case without us?”

“Well, I was working something,” Nina said cagily, though she avoided the question. “Then I got called out here when all the commotion happened this morning.”

Holm narrowed his eyes at her and opened his mouth as if to press the issue on the Holland case, but I spoke before he got the chance.

“We heard you had an altercation with one of the suspects at the mall this morning?” I asked, though I wasn’t about to drop the Holland issue entirely. I’d talk to Nina about it before the night was done, but I wanted to get the most pressing business out of the way first, and that was Mikey’s case.

“Sure did,” Nina said sullenly. “Some idiot ran into me, though, and I couldn’t catch the guy. Typical of him to show up. Lots of these lone-wolf types can’t bear to stay away from the crime scene. They’re too proud of what they’ve done or nervous about not knowing how the police are working the scene or both. The problem is, the video makes it seem like there was some other guy with him, so none of it’s quite adding up.”

I exchanged a knowing look with Holm, and then together, we launched into a retelling of everything we’d learned in our conversation with the boy’s parents. By the time we were done, the biscuits were gone, and there were steaming crab legs sitting untouched in front of each one of us.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Nina managed, and I thought I could almost see the steam of anger coming out of her ears. “These parents, I swear. It’s like half the time they don’t even want their kids back.”

“You worked a lot of these cases?” Holm asked her.

“A few,” she sighed. “And it’s always the same. Well, this is the worst example of it, but still, it’s always the same.”

“You mean you’ve had something like this happen before?” I asked, a little surprised even though Dr. Osborne had told us that it isn’t uncommon for parents to withhold information in an investigation like this.

“Yeah, I worked one in Ohio a while back where the mom neglected to inform us about an old boyfriend who thought she wasn’t taking good enough care of her kid. It turned out when he left her, he took the boy with him, and she expected us to not need this information. The whole thing was a mess.”

“Sounds like the boyfriend might’ve had a point,” Holm muttered, reaching out and grabbing one of the crab legs but not moving to crack it open with one of the mallets the restaurant owner