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

and the other parents? No, I knew that I would do the same thing all over again with the information we had. It was just the most logical thing to do at the time.

Still, hindsight was twenty-twenty, and I wished that we hadn’t spent so much precious time chasing down leads that turned out to go nowhere.

“We’ll keep looking, you know,” Nina murmured into the night, breaking past my thoughts. “I know what that Durham detective said, and the Coast Guard, too, but if we don’t find him tonight, we’ll keep looking. You and Holm aren’t planning on going anywhere, are you?”

I could hear the grin in her voice as I stared down at the boat’s motor, softly whirring in the night.

“No, not for a while, at least, if we don’t find him,” I promised. “Though at a certain point…”

“I know,” she said, finishing my thought for me when I didn’t. “At a certain point, your boss will need you back in Miami, and it’ll be time to move on. I know.”

“You’ve worked cases like this before,” I said, and she nodded. “Does it always feel like this? Like everyone’s just going to give up on the kid before it’s time?”

“Yeah, it does,” she sighed, hanging her head over the edge of the boat and peering down at the water as if she didn’t want to look at me anymore. “Every single time. It always feels too early, even when it isn’t. You get invested in these kids, you know? Every good agent does. It’s impossible not to.”

“So you’ve been on cases where you didn’t find the child before?” I asked, and there was a period of silence before I heard her sigh.

“A few,” she said. “More times than not, we find them, though.”

She didn’t offer up more details, but I pressed her anyway. I couldn’t help it, as my anxiety was starting to get the better of me.

“Even at this hour?” I asked. There was more silence.

“Not usually,” she finally relented.

“How many times has it gone on this long where you found the kid?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.

“I…” she started to say, but she didn’t finish. Her non-answer was an answer in and of itself, I supposed.

“I see,” I muttered, staring down at the motor again.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Nina said quickly. “This is an odd case, so it wouldn’t be out of the question to have an odd result, as well.”

I knew as well as she did that she was straining here, though. The oddities of this case made it less likely that we would find Mikey, not more. Charlie took him out of desperation, and he could dispose of him out of desperation, as well.

“Anything from the forensics team?” I asked her. We’d been waiting on results for some time now, and since we were traveling farther than them, the hope was that they would have some preliminary results before we even reached our own destination.

More than anything, we were hoping for proof that Mikey had been in that cave. That he had been alive sometime today, and that Charlie hadn’t just disposed of him the second they got on the water.

Nina checked her phone. There was nothing there. But as if on cue, my own phone began to buzz. I looked at the caller ID and shook my head in surprise.

“It’s Clyde, one of our lab techs,” I explained, glancing up at Nina.

She raised her eyebrows.

“Come on, answer it, then,” she said eagerly, motioning for me to do so.

“Clyde? Hey, Clyde, this is Marston,” I said, putting a finger in my other ear so that I could hear him speaking over the whir of the boat’s motor.

“Marston? Marston, good, I’m glad I caught you,” Clyde said, his voice coming in a bit muffled from the bad connection out on the water. We were close enough to shore that I still had one, though.

“What is it, Clyde?” I asked hurriedly. “Did the forensics team get you their results?”

“Yep, and Bonnie and I found something they didn’t,” he said. “Some trace DNA from your kid. They just found saliva from your perp, which was pretty obvious, but I can see how they missed the trace DNA.”

“Trace DNA from Mikey,” I repeated, glancing up at Nina excitedly. “You found trace DNA from Mikey. Now, what does that mean, Clyde?”

“Well, it could mean a few things,” Clyde said, equivocating like a true scientist. “It could mean that he was there, eating the granola bar we found it on. That’s the best-case scenario for his sake, obviously.”

“Well, yes, but what else could it mean?” I asked, scrunching up my face in confusion. I remembered one of the lab techs maybe explaining trace DNA or something to me before, but I’d forgotten what any of it meant, if I’d ever understood it in the first place.

Nina was standing and practically hopping in front of me now, wanting to hear what was going on for herself. She was waving her hands in between us wildly.

“Hold on, Clyde, before you answer, I’m going to put you on speakerphone so that Agent Gosse can hear you, too, okay?”

“Oh, uh, okay,” Clyde said, sounding a bit surprised at this as I removed my phone from my ear and pressed the button so that his voice came out tinny and even more muffled, though both myself and Nina could hear him now. “Hello, Agent Gosse, pleased to meet you… er, hear you, anyway.”

“You too,” Nina called into the receiver. “What were you saying about trace DNA?”

“Right, well, like I was just telling Marston, the forensics team in North Carolina found your perp’s DNA on one of the wrappers—pretty straight forward, saliva. They didn’t find the other evidence. When they sent it to us, Bonnie and I found the trace DNA on one of the other wrappers. That belongs to your missing kid.”

“So that means he was there, right?” Nina asked excitedly. “He was there in the cave with Charlie. He wasn’t dead yet.