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

“No,” she agreed. “We can only hope it’s the cave thing.”

“It looks like that’s our best option,” I agreed. “Did you talk to the Coast Guard about that?”

“Yes,” she confirmed with a nod. “When that ship comes into shore for us, they’re going to send a guy to debrief us on the area and the caves and other possible hideout places around here that they could be using. Then we’ll go from there.”

“They already got guys looking through those places?” I asked.

“They’re starting now,” Nina said. “They looked through some of them already, but their focus since Mikey was taken has been on spotting the ship out at sea, mostly in international waters. That’s where we assumed we would find them based on the little information we had at the time.”

“These cases can change at the drop of a hat,” I sighed, shaking my head. “One comment at the end of our conversation with that old man, and our whole tactic changes.”

“That’s the thing about these,” Nina said, meeting my eyes. “You never know what little detail is going to end up being important. Take that guy’s blog, for example. I only talked to him for a minute and put it at the bottom of my pile of things to look into. And he turned out to be the only one who had put two and two together correctly.”

Her brow furrowed like she was angry with herself for not seeing this connection any earlier. I reached out and placed my hand over hers across the table.

“Look, it’s not your fault,” I assured her. “It’s not any of our faults. We’re doing the best we can, and for all we know, someone else wouldn’t have even put that random guy’s blog in their to-do pile at all, even at the bottom. Same with talking to that old man. Most people would’ve just dismissed him as a crackpot, too. We’ve said it before, and it’s true. If anyone’s going to find Mikey, it’s us.”

“And if we don’t find him?” she asked, meeting my eyes again, and I could see the worry there—the same worry which had been threatening to overtake me all day.

“Then we’ll know we did everything we can,” I assured her, applying some gentle pressure to my hand over hers. “Us, and the police here, and the police in Atlanta and San Diego, and the Coast Guard. We’re all doing what we can for this kid. This is a really bad situation, though. The odds were never in his favor from the start, knowing what we know now.”

This was true enough. If Mikey turned out to still be alive at this hour, it would be no small miracle. It was a needed miracle, though, for the boy and for all three of his parents.

Nina gave me a small smile, then shook her head as if she was coming back to herself and pulled her hand out from under mine gently, giving it a squeeze on her way out.

“You’re right, Ethan, of course, but we have to keep hope up,” she said, all uncertainty now gone from her face. “If we don’t, well, who will? We’re more likely to find him if we think he’s still alive out there, and as far as I’m concerned, he is.”

I nodded and smiled at this.

“Yes, me too,” I assured her. “We need to set an example for everyone else. I have a feeling we’ll find him tonight when we go out on the water. We have to. The clock is ticking, and he’s waiting for us to get there.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said, looking anxiously at the time stamp on her phone.

“Did the Coast Guard say anything else?” I asked. “About another sighting, or about the boat’s description, or anything?”

Of course, I knew that if anything this major had come up, she would’ve told me already. But still, I had to ask. It was part of keeping that hope alive, in some small way.

“Only that they were grateful for such a detailed description,” she said, shaking her head. “They were only looking for a generic white boat before, and now they have a better idea of what they’re dealing with.”

“I guess all that time spent looking on other islands, and with Diane contacting foreign countries to tell them to be on the lookout of this guy wasn’t good for much in the end,” I reasoned. “In all likelihood, they’re back in American waters, or… well, we don’t need to talk about the worst-case scenarios again.”

“The Coast Guard did say that if we don’t find them in the next day or so, they’re going to start looking for shipwrecks on the ocean floor,” Nina added. “I know we’re trying to stay positive, but that’s an important thing to mention for our timeline.”

I pursed my lips at this new information. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all, really. If the Coast Guard started doing that, it was a signal that they assumed Mikey was dead. The other agencies would follow suit, then.

Sure, Holm and I would be allowed to stick around for a few more days just in case before heading back to Miami to pick things back up on the Holland case, but that would just be a formality, so it didn’t look like we were giving up. Nina and Dr. Osborne would probably stick around for a little longer, a couple of weeks maybe, but most of their focus would be turned to taking down the whole criminal trafficking organization in Durham, not on finding Mikey anymore.

The police would keep the case open, and they’d keep looking for a while. Maybe locals would start organizing their own search parties, and the media would stay on the story for another month at least. But eventually, everyone but the parents would move on, leaving them with no choice but to hire those private investigators and make the rounds on any news station that would still take them, begging for someone to keep