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

being seen by any cameras other than the one from the shoe store or by any witnesses on the other side of the mall from the food court, where the second public exit was. We’d have to confirm with this game store, but the whole thing did line up.

“So you just… took Mikey,” I said flatly, not quite sure what to do with this information. “You just grabbed him in a panic in broad daylight because you didn’t want to piss off your boss and because you were afraid the police would find you.”

Justin bit his lip and nodded weakly.

“Not me, though. I was just an accessory,” he added quickly. “Same with Rudy. This was all Charlie’s idea, remember?”

“And this all… made sense to you?” Nina asked, shaking her head in wonder. “Seriously?”

“Hey, I never said it was a good plan, just that it was a plan,” Justin shrugged. “Well, sort of a plan. More of an impulse after the first plan fell apart, anyway.”

Nina and I stared at each other. This was an insane story, though it did explain some eccentricities of the case: why it seemed both planned and unplanned, organized and lone-wolf, spur of the moment yet in some way professional.

“You must’ve realized what you’d done,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around all this. “You must’ve realized that we would find you eventually, that the whole country would latch onto this case.”

“Well, I don’t know about the whole country,” Justin said defensively. “I don’t know if anyone could’ve predicted that. And, well, to be honest, we weren’t really thinking much at all when we did it.”

“That much is clear,” Nina said, her voice dripping with her customary sarcasm.

“Tell me this, why were you and Rudy in this getup?” I asked, gesturing at Justin’s heavy clothing and the ski cap that Nina had discarded atop the table. “While Charlie was just in regular old street clothes?”

“Well, that was from the Durham operation,” Justin mumbled as if he was afraid to answer the question. “We had to be disguised to avoid detection, but, uh… one of us had to look normal to, uh, you know…”

He didn’t finish his sentence, but Nina did it for him.

“To lure the children in,” she said curtly, her mouth set in a thin line. “One of you needed to look normal to get them to come with you without making a fuss.”

My stomach churned again as the image of the man in the brown jacket from the security footage luring innocent children into a parked van, away from where they played in the streets and into a life of unspeakable violence and exploitation, seared itself into my brain.

“Alright, so you go into the mall, and you take Mikey, stupid as that was,” Nina continued. “What’s next? You know I ran back into your friend at the mall again later, I’m sure, so what happened in the meantime?”

“He’s not my friend,” Justin protested again, and Nina rolled her eyes.

“Your colleague, then,” she corrected, lingering on the word with some disdain, as if she thought of this man as anything but Justin’s colleague, because that would insinuate that they were in some kind of legitimate business venture together, instead of trafficking women and children.

“Right, so I wasn’t involved in that whole thing at the mall,” Justin said quickly. “The second time, I mean. I wasn’t even there. Neither was Rudy.”

“Where were you, then?” I asked, almost dreading the answer.

“We were, uh… with the kid,” Justin said, averting his eyes from mine. I felt my blood boiling some more.

“And where was that?” I asked, swallowing hard and trying not to picture the worst-case scenario. Justin seemed to realize what I was thinking.

“Hey, we never touched him. We’re not like that,” he said, wagging a finger at me through the handcuffs as if he was insulted that I would ever deign to think such a thing. “None of us are, not even Charlie.”

“What do you mean, ‘not even Charlie?’” Nina asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Well, you know, Charlie’s kind of an odd duck,” Justin said with a nervous laugh and a haphazard shrug. “But I’ve never seen him do any of that stuff, he just takes the kids, he doesn’t… well, you know.”

I wanted to vomit. I couldn’t even find my voice to say anything.

“So you and Rudy were with Mikey when Charlie went back to the mall?” Nina pressed again. “Where were you?”

“We were hiding out in the van,” he said. Then, before either of us had a chance to ask, “It’s parked down by the water now. We drove it there to look for you. Before that, we were in the next town over, hiding out in an abandoned parking lot. Went there straight after we took him.”

“So how did Charlie get back to the mall?” I asked, finding my voice again. “And why? Why did he go back?”

“Well, he wanted to see what was going on, didn’t he?” Justin asked as if this should be obvious. “We all did. We got a bit on the radio, enough to know there was a crowd at the mall. Then, Charlie, he got it in his head that he could blend in. Rudy and me both offered to go instead since he was so set on somebody going anyway, and nobody saw our faces. But he insisted on doing it himself. Charlie, he’s one of those, ‘if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself’ folks.”

Nina and I exchanged a look. There were a lot of words I could think of for the stunt this Charlie fellow pulled at the mall with Nina, but “right” or “smart” weren’t any of them.

“Yeah, yeah, I know it didn’t go so well,” Justin said quickly, reading our faces. “But that’s just Charlie, you see. I told you he was weird.”

He shrugged as if that was that, settling everything.

“Right, so what happened after the mall incident?” I asked, skipping right over the part where this