Текст книги "Thread of Hope"

Автор книги: Jeff Shelby

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FIFTY-FOUR

“Jon’s getting impatient,” Gina said as we walked up the stairs to Meredith’s bedroom.

I’d dropped Derek off at home the night before with a stern warning to keep his mouth shut and to not get cute and try to disappear. He’d rubbed the last spot on his face where I’d hit him and promised he wouldn’t do anything stupid. Then I’d called Gina and arranged to meet her at the Jordan residence early the next morning.

“I’m sure he is,” I said to her. “He can always go to the police, like I told him initially.”

“I think he already has.”

“Meaning?”

“Not officially. But he’s got some friends. I think he’s put out some quiet feelers, asked them to keep an eye out.”

I immediately wondered who he’d gone to. Meredith was eighteen. Normally, the cops would take a report and wait a few days before they moved on it. Maybe with Jordan’s name, though, they might move a little quicker. If he’d tossed my name out, it was hard to tell how they might’ve reacted.

Gina pushed open the door to a room at the end of a long hallway. A queen bed under a lavender comforter was centered against the far wall beneath a collage of photos of Meredith and her friends. A window seat ran the length of the wall opposite the door, drawers built into the bench from one end to the other. A large desk sat opposite the bed, a laptop and several framed photos artfully arranged on its surface. The carpet was vacuumed and, save for the photos, there wasn’t much that indicated it was a room inhabited by a teenage girl.

“This is her room,” Gina said. “Now tell me why we’re in here.”

I went over to the desk and sat down in the chair. I glanced at the pictures. A family portrait, Meredith and her parents dressed in white, standing in front of a Christmas tree. A picture of Meredith and Meg, lounging on the beach. A formal picture of her and Derek at a dance, both of them with flushed cheeks and glassy eyes.

“You have any clue that Meredith was a prostitute?”

“That’s not even a little funny, Joe.”

“You’re right. Wasn’t meant to be.”

I popped open the laptop and hit the power button.

“What are you talking about?” Gina asked.

“So you didn’t know then?”

She came up next to me at the desk. “If you’re telling me that Meredith has sex for money, then no, I didn’t know that. Is that what you’re saying?”

I nodded.

“How do you know this?”

I told her about Derek and his entrepreneurial endeavors.

Gina listened to me, but the expression on her face told me that she didn’t necessarily believe me.

“He told you all this?” she asked. “And he’s the pimp?”

The computer booted up. A picture of Meredith and Megan, hugging, served as the background on the screen. “Yep.”

“How do you know he’s telling the truth?”

“Because I saw it in action.”

“You saw it?”

I told her about what I witnessed in the hotel. About going up to the room.

She stayed quiet.

“But there’s another piece,” I said.

Her expression went from concerned to dour. “What’s that?”

When Derek said freelancing, I assumed he meant Meredith was working without a pimp, going out on her own. But I was wrong.

“There’s somebody else,” Derek had said as we pulled up at his home. “She’s working for somebody else besides me.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t even supposed to know. I saw an email on her computer for a set-up that I knew wasn’t from me.” Derek slumped in his seat. “At first, she tried to play it off like it was something else. But then she told me. Yeah, it was for another set-up and it was none of my business. She said she wanted to make some more money and there was nothing I could do about it. I got pissed and left. When I saw her at school, I told her I was sorry for getting pissed. She blew me off, said it was okay. I tried to get her to tell me who was setting her up, but she wouldn't. Said if I asked her again, she’d never talk to me again. So I didn’t ask.”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“About three weeks ago,” he said. “I’m not sure how long it was going on before I found out.”

Gina digested all of that, her eyes growing wider by the second. She had not been feigning ignorance when she said she didn’t know about Meredith.

“So I wanna try and get in her email,” I said, clicking on the email icon on the lower part of the screen. “See what I see.”

“You have to tell Jon,” she said.

“I know that.”

“He’s going to…I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

“Which is why I want to get as much information as possible.”

Gina let out a long breath. “He won’t believe you.”

“Which is also why I want to get as many hard facts as I can before I talk to him.”

The email program loaded up on the screen and asked for a password. “Shit.”

“What?”

“She’s got her email password protected. Think Jordan would know it?”

“She probably has it protected because of him.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know it.doesn’/p

“We can ask him,” she said. “And I might know someone who could break it.”

“Who?”

“Let me worry about that.”

I shrugged and scanned through the files on the computer’s desktop. Mostly school projects and some other random but meaningless files. If she was smart enough to protect her email account, any files that might help us were probably on a portable hard drive. With her. But I couldn’t imagine what she’d have in any sort of digital file. Email addresses or text messages, those would be the things that might help us.

I snapped the laptop closed. “Let’s ask him about her phone records, too. Take a look at those.”

Gina nodded, but something crossed her face and she looked hesitant.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Meredith’s a smart kid,” she said. “You saw that with her grades. If she wanted to hide something, she’d figure out how to do it.”

“So you don’t think we’ll find phone numbers or emails that might help us? That she would’ve covered her tracks that well?”

Gina thought about that. “Yeah. I think that’s accurate.”

I stood and looked around the empty room. It seemed so sterile, so generic. Teenaged rooms usually had their own personality, their own vibe. Meredith’s did not and it made me feel sorry for her.

“You’re probably right,” I said to Gina. “But we need to check anyway.”

We walked out of Meredith’s room, down the long carpeted hallway and out of the massive Jordan home.

“I’m going to see Chuck,” Gina said, as we walked down the steps to our cars.

“Oh yeah? Good.”

“This afternoon.”

“Good.”

She wanted something else from me, but I wasn’t sure what. I stayed quiet.

“Is he any better?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“What you said…” She glanced away from me. “The other day, about not really giving a shit about him. It’s not true.Oh y

“Okay.”

She moved her gaze back to me. “I’m serious. I care about him. A lot.”

“Okay.”

“Stop saying okay,” she said, irritation pinching her face.

I started to say exactly that, then caught myself and didn’t say anything.

The irritation faded in her features. “I don’t think Chuck did anything to Meredith. I don’t. All of that came out wrong. Yeah, they were spending a lot of time together, but I know there has to be an explanation for that.”

“I believe that, too,” I said.

“And what I said about Jordan, about being sure of what you know before you go up against him?” she said. “That’s the truth. You do need to be sure about taking him on.” Her mouth twisted and untwisted. “But you and I? We’re on the same page. Because I’m sure about Chuck and if I’ve gotta choose between him and Jordan, I’m choosing Chuck. Every time.” She waved her hand in the air between us, like she was shooing a fly. “And I just wanted you to know that.”

The morning sun was warm on my neck as I studied her. I wasn’t much into trusting people any longer in my life. Trust had disappeared the day Elizabeth did. But Gina seemed sincere in her words and she hadn’t given me a reason to distrust her.

“Is it okay to say okay now?” I asked.

A thin smile forced itself onto her lips. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

She took a deep breath, seemingly relieved to have cleared the air. “Have you learned anything else about Chuck? About what happened?”

Before I could answer, my phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out. I looked at the number on the readout and my breath caught. The familiar cold and dread I felt every time that number showed up on my phone consumed me like a bitter cocktail forced down my throat.

I waited a moment until my breathing found its rhythm again.

“I haven’t,” I said to Gina, then held the phone up in her direction. “But this might help.”

FIFTY-FIVE

A couple of times a year, just when I’m beginning to think the pain is subsiding from suffocating to tolerable, I get a phone call that goes like this.

“Joe?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Hey Mike.”

Mike Lorenzo is a cop, was my mentor and we have known each other now for a dozen years. I would recognize his voice if it was one in a thousand.

“Got a call,” Mike says.

The familiar fluttering begins in my stomach. I would use every ounce of my strength to crush it, but it is Pavlovian now and there is nothing I can do to quell it.

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“Similar description,” Mike says. “Enough for me to take a look.”

Sometimes it’s a description, sometimes it’s an unidentified victim, sometimes it’s something else.

“Okay,” I say, even though it is anything but.

“Just wanted you to know,” Mike says. “Didn’t want you to catch wind of it elsewhere.”

“Appreciate that, Mike.”

“I’ll let you know.” Mike will pause. “You doin’ alright?”

He never asks where I am, what I’m doing, what my plans are. Just if I’m alright.

“Yeah,” I lie. “I’m okay.”

“Good to hear,” Mike says. “I’ll be in touch if it’s anything.”

We hang up and I know he won’t be in touch because it won’t be anything. It never is. Not once in eight years has it ever been anything. The only time he will call will be the next time he gets something that tells him to take a look. The fluttering will stick around for a day and then slowly die off until the next time it’s summoned.

She would be sixteen now, my daughter. A junior in high school, driving, dating boys and spending too much time on the phone. Every high school, every unsteady driver, every surly teenage male and every cell phone reminds me of that.

But she is gone. No matter how many times Mike calls me, I know that she is gone. If I hadn’t accepted that, I would be dead, gone in a much different way than Elizabeth.

So I can’t look for her anymore. I let Mike do that.

Instead, I look for other people’s children. I try to help them. Because I know what they are going through, how excruciating it is, to experience the disappearance of a child. I know how to do it now and looking keeps me occupied.

Because I know Elizabeth’s not coming back, won’t ever call me on the phone and say “Dad. I’m okay. Come get me.”

That call won’t come for me.

But sometimes I can make it happen for others and I pretend that is enough for me right now.

It has to be.

Because I have nothing else.

FIFTY-SIX

“You look good,” Detective Mike Lorenzo said.

“You’re a liar,” I answered, squinting into the sun. “But thanks.”

We were sitting in the left field pavilion at Petco Park, the Padres playing an afternoon game, getting run over by the Cardinals. The stadium was maybe a quarter full, the city once again demonstrating their apathy for a team that had always played second fiddle to the Chargers. Mike had always been one of the few who saw them as a first fiddle.

He’d gotten the message I’d left for him at the station and when he called at the Jordan home, he’d asked me to meet him at the park not just because he loved baseball, but because he knew it was probably the most private place we could get together. Not that he was doing anything wrong meeting with me, but we both knew being seen on the island would get too many tongues wagging.

Mike dug into the bag of popcorn in his lap. “Fine. You look better than I thought you might.”

“Must’ve thought I’d look like shit.”

“Just about,” he said, before shoving a handful of the popcorn into his mouth. “Thought I got your message wrong when I read it.” He glanced my way. “Shoulda known you’d come back for your buddy, though.”

I shrugged.

“Bazer left me a message, too,” he said, brushing the salt from his hands and smiling wryly. “Said I should steer clear of you.” He set the bag of popcorn on the ground between his legs and the smile grew. “Oops.”

I laughed.

Mike was the only detective on the Coronado force and had held that title for almost twenty-five years. My intention had been to get in line for that spot when he retired and I’d told him that my first year on the job. He’d been unimpressed, having heard it too many times before, but after a few months of my pestering him, he began to take me seriously and we became close friends, despite the fact he was old enough to be my father.

And being the only detective on the island, he’d drawn my daughter’s case.

“Here’s what I know, Joe,” Mike said, keeping his eyes on the field. “Two guys jumped your buddy. Based on the doctor’s report, he never saw them coming.” He pointed to the back of his head. “Took a shot back there with something pretty heavy. Crowbar, bat, I don’t know, but definitely something other than a fist.”

“Something smaller if they caught him on the beach,” I said, seeing the game but not really watching it. “Be a little tough to run down a guy in a public place with something big.”

Mike nodded. “Yeah, most likely.”

The crowd feigned enthusiasm for a Padres two-out single. “You said two guys jumped him. Jane told me there were no wits.”

“Officially, there weren’t,” Mike said. “But I got a guy who saw a little bit.”

Probably a kid messing around with drugs on the beach. Mike was like that. No reason to ruin a kid for smoking a joint where he thought he wouldn’t get caught. But somehow Mike tracked him or her down, promised to keep him out of it if he or she could convey what they saw. It was one of the reasons he was good at his job. He had no taste for the stuff that didn’t matter. His ego didn’t need it.

“Any description?” I asked.

“Generic stuff. Big, but not huge. Athletic.”

“Could he I.D. if he saw them?”

Mike paused. “Maybe. You further along on this than me?”

The crowd groaned at a weak pop fly that ended the inning. “Where are you?”

“All I got is a guy who, off the record, saw two other guys jump your friend,” he said. “That and a handful of nothing.”

I smiled. “I’m not much further. Let me think on it before I pass anything along.”

Mike watched me for a moment, then nodded. He waved at the soda guy and bought one for each of us. He handed me mine.

“Based on what I’m hearing,” he said, taking a long drink from the paper cup. He wiped his upper lip. “You think this is tied to the Jordan girl.”

“You think correctly. Were you in on her report?”

Mike shrugged. “Not much to be in on. I saw the complaint, thought it was a little foggy, didn’t figure there was much to it. Either he hit her or he didn’t.”

“He didn’t.”

He crunched on a piece of ice. “Whatever. Why do you think the two are tied together?”

As we watched the game, I gave him the basics of what I’d learned over the previous couple of days. An entire inning passed before I was done.

Mike set down his now empty paper cup. Something crossed through his expression that I couldn’t read.

“You’ve been busy,” he said.

“I don’t like to waste time,” I answered. “Learned that from you.”

He grinned. “Makes me feel old when you say shit like that.”

“You are old.”

He laughed. “Doesn’t mean I like to be reminded of it.” He paused. “You realize that if the Jordan girl is hooking, it’s not gonna help your buddy.”

“How’s that?”

Mike frowned as a blast of music thundered through the park for a moment. He waited until it was done. “You said yourself that he was spending a lot of one-on-one time with the girl.”

“So?”

“So the first thing that’s gonna be tossed out there is that he may have been using her…services. Would be the very first thing I’d look at it, if it were me.”

It was typical Mike. Finding things in the cracks before I’d even found the crack. I wondered if I’d stuck around if I ever would’ve been as good of a cop as he was.

“Not saying that was the way it was,” Mike said. “But it’d be one more thing in the column against your friend.”

“I get it,” I said.

We watched the game for awhile. The Padres couldn’t score, loading the bases with no one out, then ending the rally with a pop out and a double play. Some things hadn’t changed in the years I’d been gone.

“The prostitution thing sound real?” I asked.

Mike hesitated, then nodded. “Probably. Rich kids with too much free time and small brains.”

“Anything ever cross your path?”

“Not officially. I’ve heard whispers, but nothing solid.” He started to say something, then stopped. The same look I’d seen before flitted through his eyes.

“What?” I asked.

He glanced at the scoreboard. “Come on. Let’s go. And I’ll tell you something.”

“Tell me what?” I asked, standing.

“Tell you something about the Jordan family that you don’t know.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

“You meet Mrs. Jordan yet?” Mike asked as we walked out of the stadium gates.

“Yeah.”

“What’d you think?”

We walked around a slow-moving family, a toddler dragging a Padre pennant behind him. “Trophy wife. But not dumb. Gave me only what I asked for. And she wasn’t nearly as concerned about her daughter as her husband is.”

Mike nodded, pulling out a Blackberry, scrolling through it, then jamming it back in his pocket. “She’s a big deal around here. Lots of charity work, volunteer shit. The whole I’m-rich-and-sharing-it-with-the-world kind of thing. Does it quietly, not publicly. But everyone knows.”

“Their house on the island is a buy in, isn’t it?” I asked.

Mike raised an eyebrow. “Is it? I don’t know. Hadn’t heard that.”

I told him about the island house I’d driven by and the Rancho Santa Fe compound.

“Sounds about right, I guess,” he said. “Not enough room to show off, probably.” He glanced at me. “Not illegal, though, and not unheard of, right?”

I nodded.

We crossed the street against a red light and a car had to slam on its brakes to avoid hitting us. Mike smiled at their angry faces, waving at them like they were old friends.

“You ever think your buddy was the ringmaster?” he asked.

“What?”

“The one in the hospital,” he said, stepping up on the curb and pointing toward a crowded parking lot off to our right. “You ever think maybe he was this girl’s pimp?”

“No,” I said immediately.

He gave me a small smile. “Think about it, Joe.”

That was what he’d always said to me when I was a cop. He’d show me a file, ask me what I thought and when I’d give him an off the cuff-and inevitably wrong-answer, he’d tell me to think about it, to slow down and to look for what I wasn’t seeing. The more he said it, the more I anticipated it and the better I got at giving him the right answer.

But another thing he’d taught me was to stick to my guns when I thought I was right. “He’s my best friend, Mike. Not possible.”

Our pace slowed, as we worked our way through a maze of cars.

“We’ve got a girl who got knocked around,” he explained. “A girl who you think was hooking. And we’ve got a guy in the hospital who was spending a large amount of time with her. You say he wasn’t using her services.” He clicked his tongue. “All I’m telling you is what it’d look like to me if you weren’t vouching for the guy.”

It was his polite way of telling me he’d be checking out that angle. That was fine. He could look all he wanted. I wasn’t buying it.

“The wife,” I said. “We were talking about Jordan’s wife.”

He nodded. “Right. The wife. You remember a cop I used to know up in Oceanside? Tully?”

I thought for a moment. I recalled the name, but nothing else. “Vaguely.”

“Good cop. Good guy. Little bit older than me, didn’t like being a cop as much as me,” Mike said. “OPD was looking at cutbacks, offered him an early get out and he pulled the pin. Moved out to Vegas and started working security for one of the Strip hotels.” He waved a hand in the air. “Bellagio, MGM, I don’t remember. But one of the big ones.”

We came to the front end of a maroon Chevy Caprice and Mike stopped, turned and sat down on the front end. The car lurched beneath his weight.

“Anyway, couple of months ago, I went out there for a night, following up on something I was working on,” he said. “He and I got together, had a couple of beers, just shootin’ the shit, that kind of thing. And he asks me if I know Jon Jordan.”

The streams of people were growing now, snaking away from the stadium and toward the parking lots. Game was over.

“I told him I knew of him, but hadn’t crossed paths with him,” Mike explained. “But somebody like that starts throwing money around Coronado and San Diego and it’s hard not to notice them.”

“Right.”

“Turns out Jordan got started in Vegas. Not exactly sure when, but he got involved in real estate out there and that was how he started stuffing his wallet. Built some condos or something, then invested in some of the off-strip hotels, helped bring them up to speed.”

I knew that from what Olivia told me. “Yeah. Then he came to San Diego and started building.”

“Sure.”

Mike was dragging the story out and it was starting to test my patience. “Okay. So?”

“He met Mrs. Jordan in Vegas.”

I waited. Again, I already knew this from my conversation with Olivia. Mike just smiled at me, his arms folded across his chest, like he’d told me everything there was to tell.

“I don’t get it,” I finally said. “Who cares where they met? What does that matter?”

“He met her in one of the hotels he was invested in,” Mike said.

“I know that,” I said, annoyed. “Olivia Jordan told me that herself.”

He raised an eyebrow. “She tell you that her work was hooking?”

Several groups of people strolled by us as I processed that.

“Hotel security in Vegas, they keep databases on everything and according to Tully, they’ve got records all the way back to the dinosaurs,” Mike said. “With more information than you’ll ever wanna know. Anyway, he’s going through the database one day, just checking names and faces, her name stops him because it gave her current address as San Diego. He poked around a bit, got a chuckle out of a Vegas hooker marrying some real estate magnate and them moving off to San Diego to live happily ever after. He made a mental note to ask me. At the time, it didn’t mean much to me.” He shrugged and unfolded his arms from his chest. “Everybody’s got their shit to deal with, right?”

I nodded slowly, working the information over in my head. “And now I’m asking about her missing daughter and wondering if the girl is a prostitute.”

“Kind of weird, no?” he asked, but I knew the question was rhetorical.

I sat down on the hood next to him. “You think she’s pimping her kid out?”

“I don’t think anything,” Mike said. “There’s nothing to suggest that she's still in the game or even knows that her daughter might be following in her high-heeled footsteps. As far as I know, Mrs. Jordan hasn't been in business down here. The charity stuff is for real. I’m just telling you because of what you told me about the daughter.”

He was right, of course. Nothing was concrete. But I wasn’t buying the coincidence. The story was odd, but the daughter of a former prostitute turning to prostitution herself seemed like more than happenstance.

Mike eased himself off the car. “I’ll check with a couple of vice guys at SDPD, see if anything’s there. Like I said, I haven’t seen or heard anything on the island. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t going on elsewhere.”

“Thanks.”

We stayed there for a moment, seagulls screeching above us, knowing that an empty parking lot would soon provide them with their own personal buffet.

“About a month ago, I thought I had it,” Mike finally said.

The tone of his voice had changed. The smile was gone and his face wore a somber, exhausted mask. I knew where he was going, but I didn’t say anything.

“I really fuckin’ thought I had it, Joe,” he said, shaking his head, staring at the ground. “Guys out in Imperial Valley found a body. A girl.”

My heart thumped in my chest.

“Definitely not Elizabeth,” he said quickly, as if he could hear my heart. “Teenager, she’d been missing about six months. But they snagged the piece of shit that did her. Someone saw him dumping her body, some shit like that, I can’t recall.”

Mike wasn’t much for profanity, making him a rarity among cops. But when he used it, it came forth in bursts and I’d learned that it signified how high his level of frustration had risen with whatever he was talking about.

“So they snag this asshole, bring him in and the prick immediately gives up another one, a young girl, an illegal, that he’d killed over a year ago,” Mike continued, rubbing at his chin. “Girl was never reported, probably because her parents were illegals, too. The I.V. guys can’t find any family members now.” He shook his head, angry at a multitude of things. “Anyway, cocksucker tells them where the girl’s body is and sure enough, he isn’t lying. Couple hundred feet from the first girl. Motherfucker.”

Two women walking past us glanced in our direction. Mike stared them down until they moved their eyes away. He waited a few more seconds.

“The I.V. guys come back after finding the second girl, wondering if they’ve got some sort of serial killer or Green River fucker on their hands. So they ask him if there are anymore.” Mike paused, rubbed harder at his chin. “And the motherfucker gives them Elizabeth’s name.”

I shut my eyes, tried to slow down my heart, tried to find air to breathe.

“I.V. guys run her name and eventually they call me. I listened to what they had to say, listened to what he told them, decided he was worth a look.” He bit down on his bottom lip. “Almost called you as I was driving out there, then figured I better wait.”

I tried to nod, but the muscles in my neck were locked up and I managed only a small, awkward jerk forward.

Mike looked at me. “Jesus, Joe. I’m sorry. Do you wanna hear this? I just started in and…”

“I’m fine,” I said, my voice sounding strained and small. “Tell me.”

He studied me for another moment before continuing. “So I get in the box with this guy and I thought it was him, Joe. Bad, bad guy. He was giving me details about your house, about the neighborhood, about Elizabeth. He just felt like the guy. He fit.”

Each word was like a newly sharpened razor blade into my skin. Into my heart.

“And then he started going off about how he saw Lauren in the doorway as he drove away with Elizabeth,” Mike said and his voice trailed off.

I shook my head, choked out a dry laugh. “Message board freak.”

Mike nodded.

In the Internet age, message boards had become both a help and a hindrance in finding missing people. If you went to the right places, knew how to filter out the garbage, you could find details and people that could legitimately help your case.

But filtering out the garbage wasn’t that easy. One of the things I learned early on was that both cops and investigators would float phony details out to the public to root out the nut jobs and weirdoes that would try to leech onto cases, either as a supposedly helpful witness or as the perpetrator. If that info came back to you, you knew a liar was sitting in front of you.

Mike and I had thrown several phony bits out to the Internet and one involved Lauren standing in the front doorway, maybe having caught a glimpse of the car that carried Elizabeth away. Lauren never left the kitchen the entire time Elizabeth was outside by herself and no one would’ve seen her in the doorway.

“Motherfucker was telling me what Lauren was wearing, what her face looked like, how she was standing in the doorway, all of it giving him a hard on as he said it to me,” Mike said, a sour expression gravitating upward from his mouth to his eyes. “I broke both of his wrists before the I.V. guys got me off him.”

I stood from the car, took a couple of deep breaths, glanced up at the sky. “Good.”

“It’ll happen, Joe,” Mike said. “One day, something will shake loose. We’ll know what happened.”

I knew that wasn’t true, but I appreciated him saying it. “Check with vice, alright, if you wouldn’t mind, on Jordan’s wife? I’ll let you know if anything turns up on my end.”

Mike nodded and I walked away, images of my daughter clouding my vision.