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

Holm and I both nodded at this, and we climbed back into her sweetly air-conditioned rental car and headed back to the seafood place downtown, where we each ordered a healthy portion of the house chowder to go along with those buttery biscuits.

The owner brought it all to us quickly, saying the soup was already brewing.

“This one’s on the house,” he told us when he brought it all out, along with another basket of the biscuits. “You just find that boy, you hear?”

We ate as quickly as we could, just as the food had arrived. That sinking feeling that had been in the pit of my stomach since questioning Jackson earlier that morning had covered my hunger, but as soon as I smelled those biscuits, I realized how hungry I actually was. I hadn’t eaten anything since we were there at that restaurant last, early the previous evening.

As we ate, we discussed the case, which we hadn’t had a lot of time to do yet that day in the middle of all the anxious searching we were doing. This was the first time we had really stopped to breathe since we left the station. Even in the car going from destination to destination, we’d sat in tense silence, no one wanting to speak about how quickly the clock was ticking.

“So what did the parents—Curt and Annabelle, I mean—say to you while we were talking to Jackson?” I asked Holm as I blew on my first spoonful of piping hot soup. I was a seafood chowder, and I detected chunks of clams, oysters, crab, and other assorted seafood floating around there with potatoes in the creamy mixture. It tasted as good as it looked and smelled, warming that anxious pit in my stomach and abating it momentarily.

“More of the same,” Holm sighed, shaking his head. “They’re a nervous wreck, the both of them, not that I blame them. I’d be the same in their position. Worse, probably.”

“They seemed to have changed their tune about Jackson when they first saw him,” I pointed out. “Or Annabelle did, at least. Yesterday, she seemed to defend him. Said he wouldn’t hurt a fly, didn’t she?”

Nina and Holm both nodded to indicate that I remembered correctly.

“Well, yeah, I guess Osborne talked to them some more about these cases and how they usually tend to go,” Holm said thoughtfully. “And Curt was always a little suspicious, even more so last night. I guess everything just got her convinced, hopeful even, because, well… you know.”

We did know. Things were looking bad for Mikey. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he was taken, and almost twenty-four since he was last seen if the Coast Guard guy was to be believed. And still, there were no new leads if Jackson was to be believed. And no matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, for Mikey’s sake, I believed him. Sure, the guy was a little rough around the edges, but I was inclined to believe Annabelle’s first instinct that he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

The police had also confirmed since we left the station that his fiancée was actually in Germany, and she was panicked out of her mind when they finally got her on the phone. She hadn’t heard anything about any of this, insulated in the bubble of her academic conference. She was on her way to join Jackson now, having hopped on the first flight from Berlin to North Carolina, though she wouldn’t land until sometime the following day.

“Anything from the Coast Guard?” I asked Nina, though I knew that she’d checked her phone before we sat down.

She checked it again anyway, looking almost as eager to see if she had any messages as I was. Her face fell, however, when she looked at it.

“No,” she said, shaking her head glumly. “Nothing since the last report.”

And the last report, we knew, had contained nothing notable, just saying that the only people the Coast Guard had found out on the water today were a lone fisherman who let them search his boat, which was the wrong color anyway, and some swimmers on a private beach not far from there. None of the swimmers had seen anything either, and they were questioned for some time. Just college kids out at someone’s parents’ beach house for the summer. They hadn’t even heard about the abduction yet, not having been into town in a couple of days.

“What’s next, then?” Holm asked as he chomped on a biscuit. They were crunchier today.

There was a long period of silence in which no one seemed to have any ideas. We were running shorter and shorter on time—or, rather, Mikey was running short on it. And there hadn’t been any new leads since Jackson, and that had obviously gone nowhere fast.

As if on cue, Nina’s phone buzzed, and she looked at it so quickly that she nearly toppled her almost full water glass across the whole table when she went to grab it.

“What is it?” Holm asked apprehensively, his whole body suddenly tense. “Is it the station?”

She nodded slowly, her eyes darting across the screen, left to right, and then back to the left again. She didn’t answer, though, and just continued to read until her shoulders slumped, and she banged the phone back down on the table with almost enough force to topple the glass for a second time.

I reached out as if to catch it as it wobbled, but it remained in place in the end.

“Nothing new?” I asked, feeling my stomach sink and the food I’d eaten churn inside me as I hoped beyond hope that I was reading her expression wrong.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not really. Just that they’ve mostly cleared Jackson in San Diego. Atlanta police, too. Neither department was able to find anything on him or his fiancée, no guns in the house, not even a can of pepper spray. They’ve both been at their jobs regularly,