Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) Matt Lincoln (chrysanthemum read aloud .txt) 📖

“N-no, I wouldn’t even know how to use a gun,” Jackson said, and he sounded honest to me. “I’d probably end up shooting myself by accident.”

He laughed nervously, though the humor didn’t reach his eyes. By the look of him, with his pale skin, anxious demeanor, and haphazard clothing, I thought he was probably right about that. I doubted Jackson saw much of the world outside of a lab.

“Do you mind if we check on that?” Nina asked him. We would anyway, of course, but whether he gave permission revealed something in and of itself.

“Um, yeah, yeah, do whatever you want,” Jackson said, looking a little surprised again. “Just—just don’t waste too much time on me, okay? You need to find Mikey. You need to find him.”

“We’re doing the best that we can,” I assured him. “We promise.”

“But you can’t promise that you’ll get him back,” Jackson said, and it wasn’t a question. He may be nervous, but he was clearly an intelligent guy.

“No,” I said quietly. “We can’t promise that, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t be honest if we did.”

“And you don’t want to give us false hope, I understand,” Jackson said, nodding and sniffling and looking down at his hands. “I understand.”

“Agent Marston, can I talk to you in the hall?” Nina asked, glancing over at me.

I nodded and followed her back out the door, leaving Jackson still sitting there behind the one-way window, where we could see him, but he could no longer see us.

The hall was empty but for the two of us.

“I’m starting to think that this guy didn’t do it,” Nina murmured when the door was safely shut behind us.

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing hard as that sinking feeling in my stomach grew more profound. “Me neither.”

“Which means…” her voice trailed off as if she didn’t want to speak the words.

I nodded. She didn’t have to tell me what this meant. This was in all likelihood a real stranger abduction, and now we were back to square one in our investigation, whereas Mikey had lost nearly another day. This wasn’t good.

“We should probably have him talk to the parents,” I said with a sigh because I didn’t actually want to force this family drama. “See how they interact. Then we can probably rule this possibility out for the most part and have the police in San Diego look into Jackson’s movements in the past few days and rule him out definitively.”

“Yes, I think that would be best,” Nina said, nodding slowly and checking the time on her phone. “Let’s go tell the police now.”

So we left Jackson waiting for us and headed back out into the main room of the station, where Chief Raskin had returned, looking even wearier and his eyes even more bloodshot than they had been the previous day.

“Howdy, agents,” he said, saluting us when he saw us, a fresh cup of coffee in his hands. “What’ve you got for us?”

So we relayed our conversation with Jackson to him and our suspicions that, in all likelihood, this was a stranger abduction after all.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Chief Raskin sighed when we were finished, running a weary hand across his face in a now-familiar gesture. “Kind of feels like starting over, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it does,” I said, not able to find a way to sugar coat it.

“But it’s not, really,” Nina said quickly. “We have a better idea of what we’re dealing with, or at least what we’re not dealing with. We can put our contacts in San Diego on the case of ruling out Jackson entirely, and we can focus all of our energy on the stranger abduction angle now. The first order of business is trying to find this boat the Coast Guard supposedly saw and getting a better description of it. I’d say it’s more likely than not that they really saw the kid, now. We know a stranger probably took him, so the international angle is more likely.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Raskin said, nodding slowly. “Well, we’ll get right on the San Diego thing for you. I’ll make a few calls. I’ll try to see about the boat, too. The only description we’ve got is pretty loose, though. There are a million white motorboats out there. Without a make and model, it’ll be hard to know where it came from. There’s one boat shop down by the water. We already checked to see if anyone rented anything out yesterday, but there was nothing in the owner’s log. Everyone cleared out pretty early after this whole mess went down.”

“Thank you,” I said, nodding to him and making a mental note about the boat shop. “We just need to chat with the parents—all three of them—one more time, and then we’ll join the search ourselves.”

Raskin and his officers and detectives nodded to us in return, and Nina and I headed back to retrieve Jackson from the interrogation room. He looked like he was about to burst when we found him.

“Is there any word?” he asked, practically leaping out of his chair when he heard the door open. “You were gone a while, is there anything new?”

“We’re still looking,” I assured him, which was, no doubt, not the non-answer he wanted, but he nodded and grumbled something resembling thanks to me, anyway. I decided I didn’t dislike him so much after all.

“We think it might be time for us all to have a talk with Annabelle and Curt,” Nina said, and Jackson visibly winced.

“I don’t think they’ll want to talk to me,” he said quietly. He left unsaid that he probably didn’t want to talk to them, either.

“Well, you’re all this boy’s parents, so you’re going to have to figure out how to get through this thing together,” I pointed out, and the man just hung his head and nodded as Nina opened the door for him.

Holm and Dr. Osborne were talking to Curt and Annabelle, who were still sitting on the couch when we found them.