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

and dark inside. The doors were closed and appeared to be locked.

“Is this where it happened?” Nina asked, remembering that the boy had wandered in front of a store before he was taken, though which shop it was hadn’t been clearly visible in the security footage.

“A little further down there, by that tree,” Smith said, pointing behind them at a potted plant that Nina wouldn’t quite consider a tree several paces away from the store’s entrance. She recognized the side of the pot from the background of the security footage.

She walked briskly over to the plant and began to sift through the mulch inside with her hands. Sometimes, perps left things in places like this or in garbage cans that they needed to discard quickly. She knew that the police had already looked through the trash, but she wasn’t sure if they’d thought of the tree.

“What… what are you doing?” the woman stammered, giving Nina another skeptical look.

“Looking to see if they left anything here,” she explained gruffly, digging her arms as deep into the pot as she could.

She came up empty-handed, however, except for some dirt. She wasn’t surprised, considering that the security footage didn’t show the perps dropping anything in there, but it was worth a shot considering that the whole plant hadn’t made it into the video’s frame.

“Okay, then,” Smith said slowly, and Nina was pretty sure the woman thought that she was just some crackpot who managed to make it past the caution tape and the security guards.

She pulled out her FBI badge and showed it to her.

“Proof, just in case you think I’m crazy,” Nina said, flashing her a lopsided grin.

Smith blinked at the badge and then nodded, seeming to accept this evidence, though she still seemed a bit put off by Nina, who was clearly not what she would’ve expected. Nina kind of liked this. The way she had a tendency to surprise people was one of her greatest assets.

“Alright, then,” she said, shaking her head and giving a shaky laugh.

“So you were in the store when it happened?” Nina asked, urging her to tell her side of the story.

“Oh, yeah, I was checking out,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the opportunity to talk about it. “My German Shepherd ate my gym shoes. I needed new ones. He’s a good dog, really. He just got left alone for too long that day. My fault, really.”

“I’m sure,” Nina said dryly, motioning for the woman to move it along.

“Right, so, I was buying the shoes, and then I heard someone scream behind me,” she continued. “I thought it was a little girl at first, and then I saw that it was a boy, a little younger than I thought. I’d say he was six or seven. That guy in the brown jacket was carrying him.”

Nina perked up at this. The more visible man in the video had been wearing a brown jacket.

“You saw him?” she asked, a little sharper than she’d intended. “What did you see? What did he look like?”

“Oh, I didn’t get a great look at him,” the woman said, scrunching up her face as if trying to remember. “Just that he was white and pretty thin. His cheek looked kind of weird, the one that was facing me.”

Nina had to admit, she was impressed. She’d thought this woman an attention-seeker, and those types tended not to give the most reliable eyewitness testimony, instead inflating their own memory and giving wildly detailed descriptions that almost always turned out to be inaccurate.

Matilda Smith, however, had minimized her own reliability as a witness while providing a sufficiently detailed description of the perpetrator that matched what Nina herself had seen on the security tape.

“Thank you,” she said honestly, nodding to the woman. “That fits other descriptions. Did you get a look at the other one at all?”

“The other one?” Smith repeated, shaking her head in confusion as her eyes widened. “There was another one?”

“Why don’t you tell me what else you remember seeing?” Nina asked in response, not wanting to give the woman any leading answers that could influence her memory or statement at all.

“Well, there were a bunch of people walking around,” she said slowly with a nod. “No one intervened. They probably thought the man was the kid’s father. That’s what I thought at first. I didn’t even think that it could be… well, what it turned out to be.”

The woman looked uncomfortable naming the crime. This wasn’t uncommon in situations such as these. The idea of what could be happening to the child was unmentionable, unspeakable. Nina cringed internally at the thought herself.

“Anything else? When did you realize what had happened?” Nina asked.

“Well, someone mentioned that they saw the man with a gun,” Smith said. “Though she said he was wearing black. I thought I might be misremembering, but now I’m wondering if that was the second guy you mentioned.”

“Who was this other witness?” Nina asked, pulling a notebook and pencil out of her pocket.

“Oh, I don’t know, some lady who worked at the store,” the woman said dismissively. “I didn’t catch her name. I saw her talking to the police earlier, right before I did.”

“Alright, that’s good,” Nina said, scribbling this down in her notebook. She’d get a full report on the witnesses from the police later on.

“I realized what was going on when the parents showed up,” Smith said, her face falling again at the memory. “They weren’t that far away. Just a few feet, ordering food. They didn’t even realize the boy wasn’t next to them anymore. When they realized what had happened, they were both screaming and running around. Then a bunch of us helped them, and the security guards looked for him, but, well, you know…”

“You didn’t see the man in the brown jacket again?” Nina asked.

“No,” Smith sighed, shaking her head. “I looked everywhere, but he was gone.”

“Did you see which direction he went?” Nina asked, knowing the answer already from the footage but wanting to