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

“He did,” Nina sighed. “Wasn’t his kid, though. And anyway, I had a better impression of these parents. I didn’t really talk to them myself—that’s not my strong suit—but Osborne seemed to think they were decent parents.”

“I think they are,” I said. “That’s what’s so strange about it to me. They seem like good, attentive parents who love their kid. So why do this? Why withhold information like this? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Osborne would say it’s not supposed to,” Nina pointed out. “That it’s not conscious, or something like that. That the fear and pain make people do stupid things.”

“Yeah, she said something like that to us,” Holm muttered, and Nina nodded in his direction.

“Well, there we go,” she said. “I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong, though. Maybe they did engineer this whole thing.”

“What?” I asked, shaking my head in confusion. “How do you figure that?”

“People do weird things during custody cases,” she explained, grabbing a crab leg of her own and beginning to beat at it with the mallet. “It wouldn’t be the first time a parent staged a kidnapping just to get the upper hand.”

“Wouldn’t that be this Jackson guy’s plan, though?” Holm asked. “To make the legal guardians look bad in front of the judge?”

“Could be,” Nina said with a nod. “And I agree that’s probably our best theory. But we can’t rule these parents out yet, either. Desperate people do wacky things. They might’ve thought that Jackson had something on them, something about their relationship, or their jobs, anything really, and panicked and thought that getting Mikey out of here and starting a new life with him somewhere was their only way out. As I said, it wouldn’t be the first time. Most of these cases end up being something like that, strange as it may seem.”

“They didn’t say anything about something bad like that,” Holm mused. “Though I suppose that doesn’t mean much, at the end of the day.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how quick I’ll be to trust them after this,” I agreed. “They could easily be hiding something else if they were hiding this.”

“At least we have a decent place to start now,” Nina said. “I assume you have the detectives trying to track down this Jackson guy?”

“Yeah, they were already able to find him on the Internet,” I said, thinking back to our meeting with the police after we spoke with the parents—well, two of them, anyway. “He works at some research university in Southern California. They’re trying to get ahold of him now. They’ll call me when they have something, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a while.”

“What makes you say that?” Holm asked.

“Because my money’s on Jackson having the kid,” I explained. “And I doubt he’s going to be picking up the phone anytime soon if he does.”

“Fair point,” Holm relented. “So, what about this whole Coast Guard thing? What do you make of it?”

Nina sighed again and cracked open another crab leg.

“I’m not sure,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m the one who took the call. The guy seemed sure that he saw Mikey, and the man whose face we plastered all over the news, the one I saw at the mall. He was certain of it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. People get a glimpse of something all the time and then convince themselves it’s more than it actually was, especially in a stressful situation like this.”

“You still called us,” I pointed out.

“Of course I called you,” she scoffed, grinning at me. “You think I’d pass up an opportunity to work with you two again? It was the perfect set up.”

“So you have doubts that the kid’s actually at sea?” Holm asked.

“Of course I have doubts, I always have doubts,” Nina shrugged. “Wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t. The thing that really sticks out to me is that at the mall, the guy wasn’t wearing that brown jacket from the video anymore. I figured he must’ve seen himself on the news and tossed it. It would be the smart thing to do. But the Coast Guard guy said he was wearing the jacket when he saw him, and that was after the mall.”

“Which makes you think that he just might’ve seen a man vaguely matching that description and a little boy out on the boat and then jumped to conclusions when he saw the newscast back onshore,” I finished for her, nodding knowingly. “That would make sense.”

I thought back to that morning when Diane had told us about the Scottish fisherman who spotted the Hollands in a similar manner off the coast of Scotland. Interpol had ignored him for weeks, thinking much the same as Nina and I had just said, that he had extrapolated more to what he saw than was actually there once the news reports about Chester and Ashley were fresh in his mind. This was a better reason than any not to discount any eyewitness accounts just because they might sound implausible at first glance.

“What are you thinking about?” Nina asked me, noticing that I was deep in thought.

I exchanged a look with Holm and made a decision. Nina was with us in New Orleans. The Holland case was, in a way, as much hers as it was ours. I doubted anyone would care if we shared this new information with her. For all we knew, she already knew it and was working the case with another team of FBI agents somewhere other than Miami.

So I launched into another explanation, this one of the whole Scotland and Interpol situation that had eaten up so much of our morning before catching this case.

Nina gave no indication that she knew what we were telling her already, but she didn’t stop us from relaying the information, either. In fact, she seemed even more engrossed by this story than by the one about Mikey’s parents keeping their custody case from us.

“I think I follow your meaning,” she said quietly when I