Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) - Matt Lincoln (ebook reader library .txt) 📗

you think?” I asked Curt, as the man didn’t look quite as certain as his wife.

“I don’t know him as well as she does,” he said, averting his eyes from mine.

“Tell me what you think anyway,” I said.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again, as if afraid to respond. Finally, he spoke.

“I didn’t think so, not until you said all that about families in these situations,” Curt admitted. “And I never liked the guy. Never. He walked out on his kid. My kid. So now, I don’t know anymore.”

“Is he suing for custody?” Dr. Osborne asked.

“Yes,” Annabelle said, her voice small again as she nodded weakly. “He transferred to another program after he left ours, I guess, and he got his Ph.D. and now works as a research scientist out in California. He has a lot of money, and he’s getting married soon, and he wanted to take Mikey with him out there for the summer. We wouldn’t allow it.”

“Has he met Mikey?” I asked.

“No,” she said shortly, shaking her head. “We wouldn’t allow that, either.”

I sighed. It didn’t sound like anyone had really handled this situation well, to put it mildly.

“Can you write down his full name and address for us?” Holm asked, pulling a notebook and pencil out of his jacket and passing it over to Curt.

The man nodded and began scribbling away.

“You didn’t answer my question before,” Dr. Osborne said. “Why didn’t you tell us about this?”

“Well, Jackson’s suing for full custody of Mikey!” Annabelle cried as if this should make everything obvious to us now. “How are we supposed to win if the judge finds out Mikey got stolen away from us right under our noses while we should have been watching him?!”

She broke down in sobs now and buried her head in her hands again while her husband tried to soothe her.

“You can’t have honestly thought that someone wasn’t going to find out anyway,” Holm said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I don’t know,” Annabelle wailed, and Curt just hung his head.

Holm and I exchanged a bewildered expression. No matter how long I did this job, something always managed to come along and surprise me. The sheer stupidity of it all really was staggering. Surely they had to know that this Jackson character would be a prime suspect in their son’s kidnapping. But then again, after what they’d been through, I doubted they had much time or wherewithal to think or reason much at all, and I couldn’t really blame them for that. I remembered being told that they’d even been sedated earlier since they were so distraught.

We took all the biological father’s details from Curt and Annabelle, and Dr. Osborne comforted them some more, which was interesting to watch since she didn’t strike me as the nurturing type. In the end, she just ended up giving them each some pills and telling them to get some rest and that we’d talk to them some more later.

Then the three of us reconvened in the nearest interrogation room, leaving an officer with the parents in case they came up with any more spontaneous revelations to share about their home life.

“You see that a lot?” Holm asked as soon as the interrogation room door closed behind us, jutting his thumb back in the direction of Curt and Annabelle.

“More often than you’d think,” Osborne sighed, sinking back into the chair nearest to the door as Holm and I made our way around to the other side of the interrogation table. “Though even I have to say that this is a bit extreme.”

“Families often withhold important details in these scenarios?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at this. “You’d think they’d say anything that might help them get their kid back.”

“It’s not that simple,” Osborne said, shaking her head. “Of course, they want their child returned to them, more than anything. But there’s also often a lot of shame about losing a kid like this, especially in plain sight, when the parents were supposed to be watching them. I doubt any of it’s conscious, but it’s not exactly surprising that sometimes they’ll withhold important details to make themselves look better, or seem like a more rock-solid family, and rationalize it away as if those details couldn’t actually be important to the investigation.”

“I assume we’re all in agreement that this Jackson character should be the focus of our investigation?” Holm asked, squinting down at the crumpled sheet of paper Curt had given him. “Hell, the kid could be halfway to California by now.”

“Not if the Coast Guard actually saw what they think they saw,” I said thoughtfully. “Unless they’re planning to sail all the way around Mexico to get there.”

“I doubt they’ll be heading to California at all if the biological father did take the boy,” Osborne remarked. “He’ll have to know we’ll come after him, eventually. Going back home won’t do him any good. He’ll want to hide out somewhere, even adopt new identities, if this was planned at all.”

“You think it might not have been planned?” Holm asked.

“These are often impulse abductions,” Osborne said with a nod. “Say the bio father shows up and tries to meet his son again, only to find them gone. A neighbor tells them where they went, and he goes after them. Maybe he takes a friend with him or hires someone to make it seem like a stranger abduction. So sort of planned, but still on impulse.”

“I imagine that this all could explain some discrepancies in the case,” I said, nodding slowly. “This Jackson fellow could be the man in the mask, and the other guy could be a friend or a hired gun. We’ll have to check and see if he has any weapons registered to him in California, or even in Georgia if the whole thing really was that impulsive. Then see if the weapon matches the one on the video if he has one. I suppose he could’ve bought it illegally, though.”

“These are all important considerations,” Osborne said with