Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) by Matt Lincoln (top books to read txt) 📕

I thought back to Nina and my interview with Justin and how he’d talked about those street kids in Durham who nobody would really miss if they disappeared, taken by the traffickers. Perhaps Mikey really was lucky in that regard, after all.

The parents all looked at each other almost sheepishly. Finally, Annabelle gestured toward a more comfortable chair on the other side of both of us.

“You can sit here, Jackson,” she suggested kindly, though I could see that it still pained her. “There’s no reason for you to be all huddled up over there any longer.”

“Th-thank you,” Jackson stammered after blinking at her for several moments as if he thought this was too good to be true. “I appreciate it.”

Slowly, he stood and crossed over to sit in the chair almost gingerly, like he was afraid it might break beneath him or that the invitation would disappear as quickly as Annabelle’s more welcoming attitude had appeared.

“Good,” I said, nodding to each of them in turn. “And as for Agent Holm, I assure you that he will be back to work as quickly as possible and that if we need anyone else, we’ll call for them in a New York second. Until then, Agent Gosse and I have this covered. Alright?”

I met each of the parents’ eyes and then Dr. Osborne’s. The tension in the lounge area had dissipated somewhat, though it still hummed with everyone’s anxiety and probably would for some time.

“We have this covered here, Agent Marston,” Osborne assured me with a small smile. “We appreciate the update, but we’ll be fine. You just go find Mikey for us.”

19

Ethan

From the lounge area, I headed straight back out to the main area of the station to find Nina, just like I said I would.

I didn’t see her at first, just some detectives and officers. This was the same set that had been there when I arrived the previous day, so they must’ve traded off again so the second group could get some sleep.

“She’s in there,” a guy in a half-tucked-in suit said when he saw me, jutting his thumb in the direction of a desk in the corner.

Then I realized that she’d been there all along, hunched over that desk with a laptop and several files in one hand and her phone in the other. Her dark clothes and hair blended her into the wall behind her, which was a navy color.

“Hey,” I called, waving and crossing over to her.

She nearly jumped in surprise when she saw me, then reached over and cleared some more files off a chair that sat at the side of the desk adjacent to her. I gratefully took the seat.

“That bad, huh?” she asked, no doubt seeing the weariness on my face.

“Well, we had to have another chat about who’s really Mikey’s parent, and who cares more about him, and then why Jackson wasn’t there until now, so yeah, it was pretty bad,” I sighed, allowing myself to drop my head into my hands at long last.

“Ugh,” Nina groaned, wincing out of empathy. “See, this is why I let Osborne handle all this stuff. I’d just mess it up.”

“Well, we all have our strong suits,” I chuckled, trying to imagine Nina having a go at diffusing that situation back in the lounge. She probably would’ve just rolled her eyes and rage quit on them, not that I would have blamed her if she did. I certainly wanted to do that at the moment.

“I’ve been busy, too, it turns out,” Nina said, gesturing at the laptop screen.

I leaned in to get a better look at it. She was on what looked like some kind of true crime blog, with blood-red calligraphy as a logo at the top, and I suddenly remembered what she had said earlier about that blogger she ran into at the mall.

“That guy from the mall?” I asked, unable to disguise my surprise. “That turned out to be something after all?”

“Well, he didn’t have anything to do with it, obviously, but he knows about those street kids in Durham,” Nina explained. “He’s from there, remember? Anyway, I talked to him a bit on the phone—and man, can he talk—but he started noticing a while back that there were a lot of missing kids turning up in the area with a lot of similarities in the cases.”

“This is the guy with the blog all about missing kids, right?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow at this.

“Yes, it is, and before you say it, I thought he probably saw what he wanted to see at first, too,” Nina said, pointing at me before I had a chance to say anything else. “But then I talked to the Durham police, and well… it all lines up with what Justin told us. All of it. So I’m going to send a Durham detective back to talk to him about it all. He’s on his way now. He was shocked the blog guy was onto something, but he’s glad he knows now.”

“So he’d talked to the blog guy about this before?” I asked.

“Yep,” Nina confirmed with a nod. “And the detective did just what you or I probably would’ve at first and dismissed him as a crackpot with an obsession with these kinds of cases looking for his fifteen minutes of fame. Turns out every once in a while, these guys actually have something valuable to give us, after all.”

I thought back to that supposed reclusive hermit of a fisherman in Scotland who Interpol ignored when he said he’d seen the Hollands.

“Yes, I think that might be important for us all to remember,” I agreed, nodding slowly. “So these children in Durham, Justin called them street kids? Were they really?”

“A mixed bag, really,” Nina sighed, pulling open one of the files to reveal a set of pictures of children ranging the gamut in age, though I noticed that most of the older ones were girls.