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

saying that they had to wait until they knew for sure what they were dealing with.

Well, Nina thought that they’d know for sure faster with Marston’s help. He knew more about this stuff than pretty much anyone, after all. Regardless, she didn’t want to get kicked off the case entirely. Then where would she be? So, for now, she just had to keep her mouth shut, as much as it pained her.

None of that mattered now, however. Her only concern was finding Mikey, the image of his wailing, terrified little face from the security footage seared into her brain, there every time she closed her eyes.

When they got back to the police station after their meal, she had to resist the urge to march straight back to that lounge area and rip those parents a new one for holding out such important information on them for so long. Osborne, seeming to anticipate this urge in her colleague, ran out to greet them as soon as she heard that the agents had returned.

“Now, don’t freak out,” she warned, and Nina glowered back at her.

“I have half a mind to…” she started to say, her fists clenching at her side.

She and Osborne were standing near the door leading back to the interrogation rooms and that lounge area while Marston and Holm were chattering with the detectives over by the whiteboard, trying to find out if anything new had happened since they left the station.

It hadn’t, of course. If anything came up, all three of their phones would’ve been ringing off the hook. But hope sprang eternal.

“I know you do,” Osborne said sternly. “But it won’t help anything. You know that.”

Nina growled and clenched and unclenched her fists some more. The good doctor was right, of course. They’d worked together on that case in Ohio where that mother didn’t tell them about the boyfriend, and Nina had completely lost it then when Osborne wasn’t looking. The mother had stopped cooperating with them entirely after that. And it was all Nina’s fault. She didn’t want that to happen again, for Mikey’s sake as much as her own.

“Alright, alright,” she sighed, shaking her head to clear it and then wiggling out her arms, trying to release some of the tension. “But please tell me you at least made it clear that they could’ve killed their son, pulling a stunt like that.”

“Not in so many words, but they know,” Osborne assured her, her expression turning dour now. “I just hope they’re not holding anything else back now.”

“Do you think they could be?” Nina asked, her brow furrowing in concern.

“Who knows?” Osborne muttered, shaking her head. “I had a feeling there was something they weren’t saying before, but I was thinking something along the lines of them not being home as much as they said or sending him to daycare when they said they didn’t. Sometimes parents are weird about stuff like that and hold back the information. I never thought it was something like this, though. I didn’t get the hunch from them I got with that God awful woman in Ohio.”

Osborne had been invaluable on that case, Nina remembered. It was the first one they’d worked together, and Osborne had been suspicious of the mother the whole time. She never really thought it was a stranger abduction.

That the psychologist’s intuition wasn’t serving her as well on this case troubled Nina. This whole thing seemed muddled. Both planned and unplanned, first a stranger case and now a custody battle. None of it was sitting right with her.

“What’s your gut tell you?” Nina asked the other woman.

“My gut tells me that we don’t know enough yet,” Osborne admitted, her mouth set in a thin line.

“Great,” Nina sighed, her voice dripping with sarcasm, though she appreciated the psychologist’s honesty. That they didn’t know enough was important information, in and of itself.

“I’d better get back to them,” Osborne said, pointing behind her toward the lounge area. “They’re going to wake up any second now that I’m gone, I imagine. That would be my luck.”

“Had to drug ‘em again?” Nina asked, though she already knew the answer. No parents in this situation would sleep this early in the evening on the day their child was abducted otherwise.

“Unfortunately,” Osborne said with a curt nod. “They got very distraught when I… made things clear to them.”

“Well, that’s good at least,” Nina shrugged. “That might mean they weren’t behind this after all.”

“That is my hunch, but I was wrong earlier, so I’m not making any more predictions,” the doctor promised. “As for whether it was the biological father or a true stranger abduction, I wouldn’t know where to begin answering that question.”

“That’ll be up to us, then,” Nina said, nodding to the other woman in gratitude and then making her way back over to the MBLIS agents while Osborne returned to the parents’ side.

Predictably, there wasn’t any more news about Mikey, not from the Coast Guard and not about the biological father. The police hadn’t been able to reach Jackson at his residence in San Diego, and when they contacted law enforcement out there, a detective had found that the man was gone, his breakfast left half-eaten on the kitchen counter. The man’s fiancée was nowhere to be found, either, though they didn’t have her name yet. Jackson didn’t seem to use social media at all.

This troubled Nina and she didn’t seem to be the only one.

“If he was behind all this, why would he leave behind half his breakfast this morning?” Holm asked as he, Marston, and Nina all congregated at a desk in the corner after debriefing with the detectives.

“We also have to take into account the time difference,” Marston pointed out. “By the time Jackson was eating breakfast, Mikey was probably taken already, unless he got up to eat in the middle of the night.”

“Fair point,” Nina said, pointing the ball of a pen at him thoughtfully. “So if it was his food, he wasn’t here in North Carolina when