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

had already found was kind of validating, in a way, not that I condoned such behavior.

That being said, I was just tired at this point. When my photojournalist friend Tessa Bleu and I had found a bunch of artifacts related to the Dragon’s Rogue at a beaten-down old house in Virginia, we thought we were close to getting to the ship I had been in search of for so long. Even more exciting was the fact that the Hollands were looking for it, too, so now my personal obsession had become professional. I thought that I could kill two birds with one stone and would be chasing leads left and right until I inevitably found Chester and Ashley Holland and the old pirate ship in one fell swoop.

I should’ve known that it wouldn’t be like that. I knew better after my long career with MBLIS and my long career with the Navy SEALS before that. In reality, cases of this scale required a lot of slogging through paperwork and chasing down what looked to be exciting leads only to meet dead ends left and right and every other direction you could think of.

In a way, I’d been lucky to have so many cleanly wrapped up cases in recent times. I was overdue for something like this. Still, I was starting to get frustrated, and I wasn’t the only one.

“Morning, boys,” Diane said dryly as she emerged from her office and made her way over to our desks, talking low enough that the FBI agents didn’t notice she was there yet.

I flinched. I’d been so deep in thought that I’d barely registered Diane’s presence until she was right next to me.

“Scared, Marston?” Holm snickered at me.

“Har, har,” I said again, rolling my eyes.

I glanced up at Diane. She had bags under her eyes, much like the ones I saw reflected back at me whenever I looked in a mirror. Holm wasn’t looking much better, either, and the FBI agents had been like that already when they arrived. Diane looked worse than usual, though, aging her up a few years. This wasn’t exactly a problem, considering she already looked ten to fifteen years younger than she actually was.

“What time did you get home last night?” Holm asked her, clearly noticing the same thing I had.

“Home?” she repeated airily. “What’s that?”

“Fair point,” Holm chuckled.

I was spending less and less time in my houseboat as of late, though I at least had managed to go home each night. Diane and Holm, along with some other MBLIS agents, hadn’t been so lucky, having to sleep at the police station while they were tracking down the man who attacked them. I wasn’t a part of that investigation, though.

“You didn’t sleep here, did you?” I asked, my brow furrowed in concern.

“Sleep?” she asked in an even drier tone now. “What’s that?”

We all laughed, then, just as our colleagues Lamarr Birn and Sylvia Muñoz were walking through the front door.

Birn and Muñoz had been with Holm and me when we first found out about the Hollands down in the Keys. It had been their case, technically, but Birn went and got himself kidnapped early on, and Holm and I had to go down and help Muñoz find him. It had been a harrowing experience, to say the least, missing one of our own. It had happened once before when Holm was in a similar situation. Suffice it to say that it didn’t get easier with experience.

The FBI agents barely noticed the other MBLIS agents’ arrival, and the two of them elbowed through the masses just as I had to get to their desks right next to mine and Holm’s.

“Another day, another headache,” Birn grimaced as he plopped down in his seat and glowered over at the FBI agents.

“Honestly, Diane, when are we going to get rid of them?” Muñoz asked, taking her own seat across from Birn. “We work better separately than together.”

This was true enough, most of the time, at least.

“We do that, and we lose this case in an instant,” Diane said, her tone and expression characteristically grim. “They already want it all for themselves. We know as much. But technically, we got there first, and I’m not going to let them forget it.”

She gave the FBI agents a dirty look of her own, which was about as critical as our boss was going to get about our new ever-present office mates.

“Hey, they’re not all bad,” Holm pointed out. “That woman we met down in NOLA, Nina Gosse, wasn’t so bad.”

My partner winked at me, and I felt my face flush a bit. I had a habit of picking up women on our missions that Holm liked to tease me about, and New Orleans had been no exception.

“You said she contacted you while you were in Virginia, right?” Birn asked me.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “I mean, well, I contacted her first. The FBI’s headquartered in Virginia, and I knew she spent some time there after she wrapped things up in New Orleans, so I was wondering if we could get together. But she wasn’t in town.”

“She hinted about being on this case, though, right?” Holm asked, leaning forward across his desk and whispering, so there was no chance of the FBI agents hearing him. We weren’t sure how much Nina had gotten involved, and she’d been cagey about the whole thing, so it was good not to get her in trouble with her superiors for talking to me at all. Holm knew this as well as I did.

“Hinted, yeah,” I said slowly, remembering what she had told me. “And something about Lafitte’s ship…”

Jean Lafitte was a storied old pirate connected to the New Orleans area whose long lost ship had been a nautical mystery for what seemed like forever. It turned out that the Hollands had found it off the coast of one of the smallest Keys below Florida and sent it off with a drug kingpin from New Orleans as a bribe for the hotel owners’