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

better go out and find this kid tonight, with or without me. Don’t worry anymore about the Hollands or me or anything else. All that matters is that boy. He’s waiting for you.”

23

Ethan

We assured Holm that we would do everything we could to find the boy tonight, but his words brought that sinking feeling back to my stomach in full force. It’d been abating some now that we had some actual solid information about the case, but dread was starting to fill me all over again, though it was of a slightly different kind this time.

Before, I’d been most worried about all the endless possibilities of what might be happening to Mikey, who could’ve taken him, where he could be now. Now, it was the lack of possibilities that created that pit in my stomach. Our options were dwindling, as were Mikey’s right along with them. Either they were hiding out there somewhere, or they were dead at the bottom of the ocean floor. Those were the only truly plausible options at this stage in our investigation.

From the hospital, Nina and I drove back to the bay area, parking in a lot about a half-mile down from the boat rental shop. I wondered if Mr. Samuels and his nephew were still there. I doubted it.

It was dark out now, as the sun had set while we were talking to Holm. This was just yet another reminder of how fast time was passing and how little we had left before people started to give up on that little boy. I resolved not to be one of them.

Together, Nina and I walked down to the bay where a Coast Guard boat was coming into shore. Two men greeted us there in their uniforms.

“Are you Agent Gosse?” one of them asked Nina, and she nodded, holding out her hand to them each in turn.

“Nina Gosse,” she said. “And this is my colleague, Ethan Marston with MBLIS.”

I nodded to them and then shook their hands.

“Good to meet you, Agent Marston. We’re glad you’re here,” the second man said as I greeted him.

“You going to let us come out on your boat with you?” I asked, squinting at it in the dark. It wasn’t large, but it would do. Four would be a crowd aboard, though, so we might have to take them up on their offer to take it ourselves and let them wait for another one to arrive. We’d cover more ground that way, too.

“You can do whatever you want, Agent Marston,” the first man told me. “You’re in charge here, as far as we’re concerned.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, giving them each a grim smile. “Now, what are your names?”

“I’m Luke Prior, and this is Matt Andrews,” the first man said. Prior was blond, and Andrews had brown hair. Other than that, they could be brothers, with the same sleek, muscular swimmer’s build and broad shoulders. They looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties, the both of them.

“Hi, Luke, Matt,” Nina said. “Good to meet you. Find anything in those caves along the shore?”

Prior and Andrews exchanged a look.

“Well, actually,” Andrews said. “We did find something that we thought you might be interested in. Not the kid, obviously, but there were some food and wrappers and stuff.”

“Food and wrappers?” I asked, shaking my head in confusion. “You mean someone was there? I imagine a lot of people visit these caves. We ran into some college kids earlier who said as much.”

“Yeah, but the thing is, Luke recognized some wrappers,” Andrews said, pointing to his companion and waiting for him to finish the story.

“Yeah, so basically, I’ve lived in this town for a while now, and old Mr. Samuels has let me take one of his boats out now and then for a solo fishing trip on my days off,” Prior explained. “And this one time, one of the first times I did that, I got a little lost and didn’t have any food. So I had to dig into the emergency supplies on the boat.”

“You think the food was from one of Mr. Samuels’s boats?” I asked, jumping on this new piece of information. “What makes you think so? Is the food different from what you could buy in any supermarket around here somehow?”

“Yeah, well, Danny, Mr. Samuels’s nephew, he’s really on top of this sort of thing,” Prior said. “So he orders this stuff in bulk on the Internet, and it all comes in these little white packages without anything but the name of the food and basic ingredients in boldface black type. Not like anything you’d pick up at a supermarket. And that’s what we found in the cave.”

I exchanged a look with Nina.

“But you didn’t find this Charlie guy or Mikey?” Nina asked them, and they both shook their heads.

“We scoured every corner of those caves, I swear,” Andrews assured us. “And we sent another team in after us just to get another set of eyes on it. But there wasn’t anything else there.”

“Did you take the wrappers from the cave? Do you have them?” I asked, and they both shook their heads for a second time.

“We didn’t want to mess with the scene,” Prior explained almost apologetically. “We’re not trained in doing that kind of stuff, like preserving it right or whatever. We didn’t want to make things harder on you guys.”

“But we left the second team there at the scene,” Andrews added quickly before I had a chance to say anything else. “We didn’t want someone else to come along and tamper with it accidentally, either, so we left them there until you can get a forensics team out to look at it or whatever. We also wanted someone there in case they came back. The guy and the kid, I mean.”

“Do you have any idea how long that stuff might’ve been sitting there?” Nina asked, her brow furrowed in deep thought. “Was there any food left over? How old was it?”

“No,