by Matt Lincoln
“Agent Marston is correct,” Dr. Osborne added quickly, also before any of the parents could say anything else. “We need to focus on the task at hand, all of us, and keeping as good of spirits as possible is important for everyone, including Mikey. We’re going to need to do another press conference about all this soon, I’d imagine, and having all three of you there could help.”
“All three of us?” Curt gaped as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You can’t be serious! We’re not going out there with him!”
I really did groan this time, running a hand over my eyes.
“Guys, who is this helping?” I snapped, unable to stop myself. “Now I get that you all have legitimate concerns about each other surrounding this custody case, but there’s not going to be a custody case if you don’t get Mikey back, do you understand?”
They all looked around at each other like they were expecting someone else to say something, but no one did. There was nothing else to be said.
“I think Agent Marston summed that up nicely,” Dr. Osborne quipped when Curt and Annabelle looked to her for guidance.
“Look, the important thing is that Mikey has three people who really care about him and want him home,” I said, adopting a kinder tone than the one I had used before now. “How can that possibly be a bad thing? Some kids don’t even have two, let alone three.”
I thought back to Nina and my interview with Justin and how he’d talked about those street kids in Durham who nobody would really miss if they disappeared, taken by the traffickers. Perhaps Mikey really was lucky in that regard, after all.
The parents all looked at each other almost sheepishly. Finally, Annabelle gestured toward a more comfortable chair on the other side of both of us.
“You can sit here, Jackson,” she suggested kindly, though I could see that it still pained her. “There’s no reason for you to be all huddled up over there any longer.”
“Th-thank you,” Jackson stammered after blinking at her for several moments as if he thought this was too good to be true. “I appreciate it.”
Slowly, he stood and crossed over to sit in the chair almost gingerly, like he was afraid it might break beneath him or that the invitation would disappear as quickly as Annabelle’s more welcoming attitude had appeared.
“Good,” I said, nodding to each of them in turn. “And as for Agent Holm, I assure you that he will be back to work as quickly as possible and that if we need anyone else, we’ll call for them in a New York second. Until then, Agent Gosse and I have this covered. Alright?”
I met each of the parents’ eyes and then Dr. Osborne’s. The tension in the lounge area had dissipated somewhat, though it still hummed with everyone’s anxiety and probably would for some time.
“We have this covered here, Agent Marston,” Osborne assured me with a small smile. “We appreciate the update, but we’ll be fine. You just go find Mikey for us.”
19
Ethan
From the lounge area, I headed straight back out to the main area of the station to find Nina, just like I said I would.
I didn’t see her at first, just some detectives and officers. This was the same set that had been there when I arrived the previous day, so they must’ve traded off again so the second group could get some sleep.
“She’s in there,” a guy in a half-tucked-in suit said when he saw me, jutting his thumb in the direction of a desk in the corner.
Then I realized that she’d been there all along, hunched over that desk with a laptop and several files in one hand and her phone in the other. Her dark clothes and hair blended her into the wall behind her, which was a navy color.
“Hey,” I called, waving and crossing over to her.
She nearly jumped in surprise when she saw me, then reached over and cleared some more files off a chair that sat at the side of the desk adjacent to her. I gratefully took the seat.
“That bad, huh?” she asked, no doubt seeing the weariness on my face.
“Well, we had to have another chat about who’s really Mikey’s parent, and who cares more about him, and then why Jackson wasn’t there until now, so yeah, it was pretty bad,” I sighed, allowing myself to drop my head into my hands at long last.
“Ugh,” Nina groaned, wincing out of empathy. “See, this is why I let Osborne handle all this stuff. I’d just mess it up.”
“Well, we all have our strong suits,” I chuckled, trying to imagine Nina having a go at diffusing that situation back in the lounge. She probably would’ve just rolled her eyes and rage quit on them, not that I would have blamed her if she did. I certainly wanted to do that at the moment.
“I’ve been busy, too, it turns out,” Nina said, gesturing at the laptop screen.
I leaned in to get a better look at it. She was on what looked like some kind of true crime blog, with blood-red calligraphy as a logo at the top, and I suddenly remembered what she had said earlier about that blogger she ran into at the mall.
“That guy from the mall?” I asked, unable to disguise my surprise. “That turned out to be something after all?”
“Well, he didn’t have anything to do with it, obviously, but he knows about those street kids in Durham,” Nina explained. “He’s from there, remember? Anyway, I talked to him a bit on the phone—and man, can he talk—but he started noticing a while back that there were a lot of missing kids turning up in the area with a lot of similarities in the cases.”
“This is the guy with the blog all about missing kids, right?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow at this.
“Yes, it is, and before you say it, I thought he probably saw what he wanted to see at first, too,” Nina said, pointing at me before I had a chance to say anything else. “But then I talked to the Durham police, and well… it all lines up with what Justin told us. All of it. So I’m going to send a Durham detective back to talk to him about it all. He’s on his way now. He was shocked the blog guy was onto something, but he’s glad he knows now.”
“So he’d talked to the blog guy about this before?” I asked.
“Yep,” Nina confirmed with a nod. “And the detective did just what you or I probably would’ve at first and dismissed him as a crackpot with an obsession with these kinds of cases looking for his fifteen minutes of fame. Turns out every once in a while, these guys actually have something valuable to give us, after all.”
I thought back to that supposed reclusive hermit of a fisherman in Scotland who Interpol ignored when he said he’d seen the Hollands.
“Yes, I think that might be important for us all to remember,” I agreed, nodding slowly. “So these children in Durham, Justin called them street kids? Were they really?”
“A mixed bag, really,” Nina sighed, pulling open one of the files to reveal a set of pictures of children ranging the gamut in age, though I noticed that most of the older ones were girls. “There’s a handful of runaways, a lot of foster kids—man, do those kids go through it, I’m telling you—and some who just look homeless or like vagabonds of some kind. I don’t even know. Anyway, yeah, street kids would be an all-encompassing term for it, I guess.”
She looked sadly down at the photographs, and I thought that it must be hard to work these kinds of cases all the time. I was secretly glad that they only came up once in a blue moon for me. And I’d thought it was bad when those goons grabbed that nosy kid in Virginia and held him hostage for just a few minutes before Tessa and I managed to rescue him. This was about a million times worse than that.
“Damn,” I said, shaking my head in a combination of incredulity and horror. “And no one but a blogger thought to link all these cases together until now? How many of these kids are there? How long has it been since they were taken?”
“There’s about twelve documented cases, all in the past year,” Nina said, pursing her lips as she said this, in a skeptical way. “But who knows what the real number is? These are just the ones where someone noticed they were gone, eventually. They were taken at different places and times, but they all ju
st vanished into thin air. Given who these kids are and where they came from, it wouldn’t surprise me if the real number were three or even four or more times that.”
“You’re probably right,” I said darkly, pursing my lips.
“I have a feeling I’m going to be working on this one for a long while,” Nina said, peering down at the file and shaking her head. “Mikey or no Mikey—at the end of the day, this whole operation is going to have to be brought down, and the FBI is going to want to oversee it themselves.”
“I can’t think of anyone better for the job,” I pointed out, and she gave me a small smile.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “Though with Osborne, I guess we make up for each other’s weaknesses. As for you and Holm, I imagine this is a one and done thing for you once Mikey is found, or…”
Her voice trailed off as she failed to finish her sentence, though she didn’t have to. I knew what she was going to say. That Mikey might not be found, or at least not found alive. There was no reason to say it, though. It was important even—or perhaps especially—for the ones working cases like this to stay positive, not just the parents.
“I suppose so,” I sighed. “Diane will want us back in Miami to keep working on the Holland case as quickly as possible, I’m sure. Though I imagine we’re both in that boat, so to speak.”
I glanced over at her, hoping to catch anything resembling a hint about what she was working on before she came here to find Mikey. But her face was blank, though I caught the shadow of a smirk on her lips as she made herself indecipherable.
“Have you heard anything from Holm?” she asked.
“No, let me text him,” I said, sorry I hadn’t thought of this myself as I pulled out my phone to send him a quick text. A message from Diane was waiting for me there.
Heard about your scuffle with the traffickers, she wrote. Stay safe and update me when you can. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you how quickly the clock is ticking on a case like this.
I sighed as I read this. I knew already, of course, but there was something about seeing it in writing that added even more of a sense of urgency to the whole thing. That was probably why Diane sent it. That and checking to make sure I was okay without directly asking me.
I texted Holm before I messaged her back, knowing that Diane would want an update on him, too. No doubt she’d heard he’d been shot.
Are you okay? I messaged him. Need anything? Someone to pick you up? How long are you going to be there?
To my relief, he texted back quickly, and I realized he’d probably been waiting for a message from Nina or me, hoping to hear how the case was going.
Fine, they’re making me stay here overnight, though, he wrote. I tried to get out of it, but I had to have a second blood transfusion thing. I’ll be out in the morning, or I’ll leave anyway. Word on the kid?
I pursed my lips again. For Holm to agree to stay overnight, even begrudgingly, he must not be feeling very well. He lost more blood than we’d realized. Even so, he was alive and seemingly lucid, which was good enough for me given the circumstances.
Of course, Holm didn’t care about any of this. He just wanted to know about the case.
A few new leads, as well as some on other kids who’ve been taken, I shot back quickly. It turns out it’s a trafficking gang in Durham. No time to explain the rest now. Kid on the ocean with other perp in stolen boat after all. Still working on finding them. I’ll tell you when we know more.
Holm didn’t respond to this, though the message displayed as read, and I knew that he was probably sitting in his hospital bed with that sinking feeling I got when I first found out what was really going on with this case, realizing how much danger Mikey was truly in right now, if he was even still alive.
I flipped back over to Diane’s contact information to message her.
Yes, I am hoping to find him before tomorrow. Clock is running out. Talked to Holm. Doing good but being held overnight. All okay with us. Check back in soon.
I then relayed all this over to Nina, who cursed under her breath when she heard the news about Holm.
“Damn, I was really hoping we would have him if this comes to some whole affair on the ocean,” she muttered.
“So was Jackson,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, maybe it’s best if we keep this one to ourselves for now,” she said. “They can be kept in the loop on a need to know basis. We don’t want them complicating things for us.”
“Complicating things?” I repeated, shaking my head in confusion. “The parents? What do you mean? We know none of them had anything to do with this.”
“Yes, but when it gets to this late hour in an investigation like this, families sometimes get desperate and lash out, lose faith in the investigation,” she explained. “They can take important details on the case to the media, hire private investigators, just all around make a whole fuss and inadvertently make it harder for us to do our jobs. And with this case, we’re dealing with even more parents than usual.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding my head at this, my eyes wide at the thought of this happening. “Well, I can’t say I would blame them for getting desperate, but we definitely don’t want any of that. Not yet anyway. But if we can’t find this kid in another twenty-four hours, or at least get a better idea as to what might’ve happened to him, well, maybe we should be thrown off the case.”
“I don’t disagree,” Nina sighed, standing up and motioning for me to follow her. “Though if we can’t find him, I doubt anyone can. Come on. We have work to do.”
20
Ethan
We headed straight back to the boat shop from the station after I borrowed some clean clothes from one of the detectives. We were hoping to catch either the younger or elder Daniel Samuels before he went home for the day.
The area around the boat shop had been excavated as a crime scene for a couple of hours, but then the police quickly left the area, not wanting to draw any more crowds like the one at the mall on the previous day.
We weren’t sure if the boat shop would’ve reopened when we approached, though as we drew closer, I realized that the lights were on when they hadn’t been before.
The closed sign was still flipped, however, and I pressed my forehead against the front door in an attempt to see if there was anyone inside.
All I saw was a bunch of fishing poles lined up for sale, a front desk donning an ancient cash register, and a fridge off to the side containing live bait for fishing, with some life jackets hanging on the wall next to it for good measure.
“Alright, let’s just knock and see if anyone hears us,” I suggested, banging my fist against the door. “Maybe they came back, saw the police, and packed up for the day. They could’ve forgotten to turn off the light on their way out.”
This was a likely enough story, but thankfully, a man who looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, with mousy brown hair and a thinly receding hairline, appeared from a back room behind the cash register and peered at us questioningly.
I pulled out my MBLIS badge and flashed it at him, and Nina did the same with hers from the FBI, indicating that we were law enforcement.
A look of realization dawned across the man’s sharp features, and he nodded and crossed over to open the door for us.
“Must be the nephew,” Nina murmured before he arrived, and I nodded curtly. This was good, considering how the first witness didn’t make out the uncle to be all that lucid, though we would need to talk to him, too, in good time.
The man unlocked the door and ushered us through, locking it straightaway behind us.
“Are you Mr. Samuels?” I asked, holding out my hand to him.
“Just call me Danny,” he said, taking it. “Mr. Samuels is my uncle. And you are?”
“I’m Agent Ethan Marston with MBLIS, and this is my colleague Agent Nina Gosse with the FBI,” I said, gesturing between myself and Nina. “We’re here about the missing boy.”
“Well, I figured that muc
h,” Danny said, scratching the back of his head as he gazed at me. “I heard there was a fight earlier, and when I came back from lunch, some people in uniforms were washing a bunch of blood off the sidewalk right out there. You guys involved in that? Everybody okay?”
“Yes, my partner was shot, but he’s being treated at the hospital now and will be just fine,” I assured him. “Thanks for your concern.”
“That was his blood, then?” Danny asked, raising his eyebrows as he gestured out the window on the front door leading to the spot where Holm was shot. “Damn, I was hoping it was one of the bad guys.”
I hadn’t even noticed that the blood had been washed away since I’d been so intent on getting inside the shop. I probably would’ve noticed it if it was still there, though.
“Well, one of them was shot, too, and it didn’t turn out so well for him,” Nina chuckled. “That was down a bit, though.” She gestured to the right, where I’d shot the perp named Rudy.
“Ah, I came in the other way,” Danny said, glancing in that direction. “Must’ve missed it. I’m glad he didn’t get away, though. Now, what can I do for you?”
“Did you talk to the police when you got back at all?” I asked him, and he shook his head right away.
“No, there weren’t any police anymore when I got here, just those guys in those weird jackets or whatever,” he explained.
“The forensics team,” Nina interjected, and he nodded.
“Yeah, I think that’s what they said they were,” he said. “Anyway, they wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I just assumed it was something to do with the kid ‘cause… well, what else would it be? We hardly even have so much as a traffic violation ‘round here.”
This didn’t surprise me.
“You assumed correctly,” I confirmed, nodding to him. “So, would you mind us asking you some questions about one of your shop’s boats?”