by Matt Lincoln
I studied both Curt and Annabelle closely. They both seemed tenser, more uncomfortable than they had before, if that was even possible under the circumstances.
“Sometimes, you don’t even realize how angry these family members are until they show up and take the kid,” I added, studying their reaction, watching them grow even tenser with each word I spoke. “The parents might not even realize how much tension is there until the police are already involved.”
“Annabelle, maybe we should…” Curt said as he turned to face his wife, his voice trailing off as if he was afraid to finish his thought.
“What? What is it?” I asked, a little sharper than I’d intended.
I exchanged a look with Dr. Osborne, who was leaning forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees now, full of interest. Clearly, she had no idea what they were talking about, either.
“It’s extremely important that you’re forthcoming with us, Curt, Annabelle,” Osborne said, looking at each of the parents in turn with an almost scolding gaze. “I thought I made that very clear.”
“It’s just… I…” Annabelle stammered, seeming to be at a loss as to what to do.
“Annabelle,” I said slowly, my tone warning. “This is a very serious situation. If you don’t tell us everything, you might never see your son again.”
This had the desired effect, and the woman burst into tears as her husband wrapped both his arms around her, taking his turn comforting her.
“We… we understand,” he managed. “It’s just that… well, we’re worried we might never see him again, anyway.”
I blinked at him, taken aback.
“Huh?” Holm asked, echoing my own thoughts. “How does that work?”
“Well, it’s just that… well, I’m Mikey’s father, it’s just… not technically,” Curt admitted, which didn’t do a lot to clear things up.
“What do you mean you’re not technically his father?” Dr. Osborne asked, her tone just as stern as her face now.
“Well, Curt and I met in college,” Annabelle said, raising her face from her hands now to reveal that her cheeks were all red and splotchy, and the whites of her eyes matched them. “We’d been good friends for a long time. Then, in graduate school, I got pregnant with Mikey, and the father—another student in my program—didn’t want anything to do with it. He quit the program, and I was alone. Then Curt and I reconnected after I got my Ph.D., and Mikey was still a baby then.”
“I’m the only father he’s ever known,” Curt said, his jaw set firmly. “I don’t know what this guy’s thinking.”
“The biological father turned back up,” Holm said. It wasn’t a question. That was the only logical conclusion to this story.
“God knows why,” Curt spat. “Never a word in seven years, and then all of a sudden he shows back up, expecting everyone to be all gung-ho to let him take our kid.”
“Well, people grow and change,” Holm reasoned.
“Not that much,” Curt said bitterly.
I would probably feel bitter, too, if that happened to me… if some other man showed up and tried to take my kid away. I could see the other guy’s side, too, though. Maybe he wasn’t ready before, but now he was. That was allowed. It was one of those situations where no one was exactly wrong, but everybody usually lost.
“Why didn’t you tell us about all this before?” Dr. Osborne asked, her tone almost accusatory. “This could’ve saved us a lot of time.”
“Jackson wouldn’t do anything like that,” Annabelle said defensively. “I hate him for doing this to me—to us, really. He was always a bit immature and flighty, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s just a quiet science nerd like me. He didn’t take Mikey. There’s no way.”
“What do 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 ch
aracter 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 a deferential nod to me. “I’ll keep working on the parents, and if we get ahold of Jackson, I’ll want to talk to him, too, straightaway. Until then, I think it’s probably best if you discuss the other details of the case with my colleague.”
10
Ethan
Holm and I went to update the detectives and police officers before doing anything else. They were predictably not pleased with what Curt and Annabelle had withheld from us all until now.
“You’ve got to be kiddin’ me!” Raskin exclaimed, shaking his head when we informed him and his men and women what we’d learned out by the whiteboard bearing all the details of the case. “This was vital time wasted when we could’ve been looking for the kid’s real dad.”
“Curt is his real dad,” I pointed out. “He just has two.”
“Three parents,” Raskin sighed, placing his hands on his hips. “Aren’t two bad enough?”
I chuckled, thinking that he might be right, in a way. If the bio father ended up not being the perp… well, I didn’t even want to go down that road yet. That would complicate things even more for everyone. There would be another terrified parent to deal with, and we’d be back to square one.
I shook my head to clear it. No, I thought it had to be the biological father. It was too perfect of a setup. A custody case, an overly protective mother and stepfather, a jilted father just potentially desperate enough to pull a stunt like this. As worried as Curt and Annabelle were about their custody case, and understandably so, I could never see a judge taking the boy away from the only loving parents he’d ever known full time.
After updating the police, Holm and I, realizing that the FBI agent wasn’t back from her survey of the town yet, decided to go look for a hotel while we had a few free moments. There was no telling when that would come next.
As we were making our way through the parking lot, a car pulled in, and I caught a glimpse of a familiar shock of spiky black hair as the short, skinny woman inside crawled out of the driver’s seat.
“Nina?” I called out to her, stunned.
“Hey, Marston, Holm, you made it!” Nina Gosse called back to us as she beamed and waved, making her way to where we stood by the station’s front doors.
“W-what are you doing here?” I stammered, unable to connect the dots, given my surprise.
“What do you mean what am I doing here?” she laughed, shaking her head at me as she pulled me in for a hug and then shook Holm’s hand. “I’m updating the chief about my afternoon, and then I was hoping to run into you guys. I guess I got the second one done first, though.”
She winked at me, and I couldn’t keep a grin from spreading across my face.
“Are you the agent on this case?” I asked her, though even as I said it, I knew that there wasn’t any other reason that she would be here.
“Who else do you think called you lazy bums in to work this case with me?” she asked, punching me playfully in the shoulder.
“Hey, who’re you calling lazy?” Holm asked, hands on his hips, with a fake indignant tone.
“You just get here?” she asked me, ignoring the question.
“About an hour or two ago,” I said. “We’ve been talking to everyone on the case, and we had an… um, interesting conversation with the boy’s parents.”
“Uh oh, that doesn’t sound good,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “What’s going on?”
I checked my watch. It was getting on to be around time for an early dinner, considering that we’d skipped lunch. I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since the diner that morning.
“We actually need to update you on a few things,” I said. “Maybe we can go grab a bite to eat and talk over the case.”
“Sounds like a great plan,” she said with a nod. “I can deal with Raskin later. You boys have a car with you?”
“No, an officer drove us here in his patrol car from the airport,” I explained, shaking my head.
“Alrighty then, I’ll drive,” Nina said, hopping back into her car and gesturing for us to climb in alongside her.
Holm made as if to take the passenger seat but then elbowed me playfully in the ribs and headed toward the backseat door.
“You just can’t go one mission without a little romance, can you, Marston?” he whispered in my ear, and I felt both of my ears go beet red as I ignored him and climbed into the car next to Nina.
It was good to see the FBI agent again, and not just because I’d been wondering what was going on with her end of the Holland case if she really was working on it. We’d connected in New Orleans, and I’d wanted to take the time to see her again ever since. I was hoping we could meet up and discuss the Hollands while I was in Virginia near the FBI headquarters, but this was the next best thing.
Besides, other than Holm and myself, Nina was probably the best agent I knew. I couldn’t think of anyone I would want to work with more on such a high stakes case. If anyone could bring Mikey home to his parents—no matter how many of them he ended up having when all was said and done—it was her.
“I noticed a little seafood place downtown earlier,” Nina said as she pulled us out of the parking lot. “You like that, right, guys? It’ll be just like old times down in NOLA. Well, maybe not quite. No one has food that good.”
“Sounds great,” I said, smiling over at her, and I tried to ignore Holm’s snickering in the back as Nina took us out onto the open road.
The downtown was almost as dead now as it had been earlier that day when Officer Hollister had taken us through there on the way to the station. There were only a handful of cars on the whole collection of streets in the area.
“Was it like this when you got here?” I asked Nina, gesturing at the empty streets.
“No way,” she said, shaking her head. “This place was packed earlier, and so was the mall. You know how it is, a big case like this hits the news, and all the crazies flock in. One guy even had this weird true-crime blog where he tracks every missing kid case in the region.”
“That sounds… kind of fishy,” Holm pointed out, and I had to agree. Why would someone take such an interest in child abduction cases?
“That’s what I thought,” Nina said with a nod. “I’m going to look through it later when I get a chance, see if I can find anything useful. He didn’t fit the description of either of our perps, though, so I let him go. He could’ve just been a crackpot. Get all kinds of those with serial killer cases, so why not this, too?”<
br />
“I guess so,” I chuckled, shaking my head in wonder. It took all sorts, I supposed.
Nina pulled in front of a small restaurant stuck between a gift shop and a comic book store. There was a dancing crab on the front door. There was one other car nearby, and I only saw a single table that was occupied through the broad front window.
“Had lunch here earlier,” Nina said as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “Owner said he wasn’t going to shut down, even if no one showed up, so I told him I’d probably come back, make sure he had somebody to serve, at least.”
Sure enough, when we all walked into the restaurant, a cheerful-looking middle-aged man behind a bar at the bag looked up and waved.
“Back so soon, Agent Gosse?” he asked as we approached him. “And you brought friends, too. I appreciate the business.”
“Well, if you’ve still got some of those fresh crab legs, I’ll be coming back as long as I’m here,” Nina assured him, flashing the man a half-grin.
“Come now, how about a window seat?” the man asked, leading us up a step to a table right in another window off to the side of the restaurant. We could see the thin outline of the ocean in the distance from there.
“This is perfect, thank you,” I said, nodding to him as I sat down next to the window. Nina took a seat across from me, and Holm sat facing the window between us.
The man quickly returned with glasses of water and menus for all of us. We all ended up ordering the crab legs, on Nina’s recommendation, and a steaming pile of buttery lobster biscuits soon appeared in the middle of the table to tide us over until the main course arrived.
“We’re eating well today, eh, Marston?” Holm asked, chomping down on one of the biscuits before Nina or I had a chance to get a crack at the basket.
“Sure are,” I chuckled, still a little full from our big meal that morning at Birn’s cousin’s diner, though I reached for the biscuit basket just the same.