Текст книги "Thread of Hope"

Автор книги: Jeff Shelby

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SIXTY-SEVEN

I walked outside, the interior of the Jordan home feeling toxic and ugly.

I’d asked Olivia a few more questions. It immediately occurred to me that perhaps she had done something with Meredith, but I let go of it almost as quickly. She was interested in protecting her place in the Jordan family and was not going to jeopardize that. She may not have cared for the sight of her daughter, but I doubted that she played any part in her disappearance.

The afternoon sun was high and prominent and the heat weighed on me, unwanted. I sat down beneath the sprawling portico, slipping into the shade.

I was trying to be sympathetic to Olivia Jordan’s situation, but failing. I knew that my own loss played into those feelings, but I didn’t think that if Elizabeth was still with me and Lauren, and we were still married, that I’d feel any different. I didn’t know what had drawn Olivia into prostitution and I didn’t care. She'd made the choice and had to live with it, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. But she'd made the choice. I didn’t see how taking out her frustration on her daughter helped.

By all accounts, Meredith was a good kid. I knew that wasn’t the entire story, but it appeared that she had friends and people liked her. Regardless of the choices she was making now, she didn’t deserve to be looked at as an ugly talisman by Olivia.

And no matter how long Olivia thought she could keep her secrets buried, she was wrong. Secrets don’t stay buried.

They just wait to be dug up.

SIXTY-EIGHT

I was halfway back to Coronado when my cell chirped.

“I checked with vice here,” Mike Lorenzo told me. “Nothing on Olivia Jordan. She runs clean.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

I wasn’t. “I just finished talking to her. She’s screwed up, but she gave it up awhile ago. Pretty sure about that.”

“Gotcha. I did get something else, though” he said. “Not sure if it matters or not.”

“Alright.”

“I called my buddy Tully over in Vegas again, just asked him to poke around her name, see if anything shook out,” he said. “He dug up one thing.”

I pulled over to the side of the road. I kept forgetting that California was a hands-free state and I didn’t want to get stopped while I was paying attention to Mike’s call.

“He tried to track back to her, see if any of her old connections were still live,” he explained. “Turned up the name of the piece of crap who was supposedly her pimp. Tommy Lutton.”

Her manager, Olivia had called him. Thomas. She’d even tried to dress up his name.

“But his ticket was punched awhile back,” Mike said. “Found dead in an alley behind a Denny’s.”

A dull flash fired inside my head. “Oh yeah?”

“Couple of bullets in his face,” he said. “Shooter never found.”

My stomach clenched. “When was this?”

More pages flipped. “Awhile back, actually. Maybe sixteen years? Can’t find the date on here.”

I didn’t need the date. Olivia had been adamant that he would never bother her again. Now I knew why.

“Joe?” Mike asked. “Joe?”

“Yeah, I’m here.”

He paused. “That do anything for you?”

I watched cars fly by on the highway, a knot in my stomach. I wasn’t a cop anymore, but the instinct to act like a cop was always with me and influenced everything that I did. I was certain that Tommy Lutton’s death was not a coincidence and that Olivia Jordan had, at the very least, played a part in it. Maybe she hadn’t pulled the trigger, but she was involved. But I wasn’t sure what was to be gained, either, by exposing her. It wouldn’t help Chuck and it wouldn’t help me locate Meredith.

“No,” I finally said. “That doesn’t do anything for me.”

SIXTY-NINE

Gina Coleman was waiting at my hotel for me.

“Charges are dropped,” she said.

I looked around the hotel lobby. “Where’s Jordan?”

“Probably trying to find someone to choke,” she said. “He’s furious.”

“Good for him.”

“I get that you feel like you got screwed,” she said. “And I’m not even saying you didn’t. But you agreed to help find Meredith and it hasn’t happened.”

“I can’t just snap my fingers.”

“No, you can’t. But you show up at his house and pull that power play, you can’t expect him to be happy about it.”

“You think he expected me to be happy about kicking the shit out of my friend?” I asked. “Sending two assholes to cut him down for something he didn’t do in the first place?”

She started to say something, but I cut her off.

“The same guy that you allegedly give a shit about,” I said.

Her cheeks reddened. “I didn’t know.”

“Sure.”

Irritation flared in her eyes. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you know. Bother you at all?”

She stepped in closer to me, the red having spread to most of her face. “Of course it bothers me. That’s why I just quit my job.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Nothing to say to that?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “No wiseass comeback, no sarcastic rebuke questioning my loyalty?” She clicked her tongue. “You must be tired.”

She'd caught me off guard and I deserved what she was giving me.

“I’m sorry you had to quit your job,” I said.

“Sure you are.”

“I am.”

“Fuck you.”

She turned and headed for the lobby doors.

I stood there for a moment, not sure what to do. She was angry at me for a couple of reasons, but she was also clearly angry about quitting. She needed time to cool off, but I didn’t want to waste the time.

I followed her outside. “I am sorry about your job, whether or not you believe it.”

She was standing in front of the hotel, arms crossed, annoyance set like concrete on her face, her eyes like hollow-tipped bullets. Aimed at me.

“But I still need your help,” I said. “Chuck still needs your help.”

“Chuck is clear,” she said, the concrete cracking a bit.

“No, he won’t be clear until Meredith is found and she clears him,” I said. “It’ll stick to him until she says it was a lie, charges or no charges.”

She thought about that.

“Did you know Olivia Jordan was a hooker?” I asked.

The concrete shattered completely. “What?”

“I need your help,” I repeated. “Come inside and let me tell you what I know. Please.”

After a moment, she nodded and we went inside and sat down at a table in the hotel cafe. I explained what I’d learned from Mike and from Olivia, leaving out the part about Olivia having possibly killed her pimp. I watched her expression the same way I’d watched Olivia Jordan’s. If she was aware of anything I was telling her, she fooled me.

“That is really hard to believe,” she said when I’d finished.

“Tell me something,” I said. “It’s been bugging me since Olivia told me. Wouldn't Jordan have checked out Olivia before marrying her? Wouldn’t he have done some sort of look into her background?”

She cocked her head to the side, running it through her mind. “I don’t know. Now? For sure. It’s one of the things I spent the majority of my time on. Anyone that was working for him, we did lengthy background checks on.” She squinted, like she was trying to see into the past. “But back then? I don’t know. He hadn’t amassed his wealth yet and his company wasn’t nearly what it is today. It’s hard to say. I’ve never for a second thought that their marriage was a sham.” Her eyes came back to their normal gauge. “I think he loves her. You don’t normally run your prospective fiance through the system, you know?”

I did know. I thought back to when Lauren and I were engaged. If anyone had suggested that I needed to check her history, I would’ve thought they were insane. But I wasn’t putting together a multi-million dollar fortune and I hadn’t met my future wife, by chance, in Las Vegas.

“He had security people before you, right?” I asked.

“I met the guy I replaced,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know anything about the ones before him. I’m not sure how long ago he created the position.” Her mouth twisted into a frown. “And it’d be a little hard for me to find out now.”

An elderly couple moved slowly through the lobby toward the check-in desk, a bellhop lugging two large suitcases behind them.

“Was he pissed?” I asked.

Gina hiked her shoulders and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. I guess.”

“Did he argue? Want you to stay?”

“At first, yeah,” she said. “Offered me more money, apologized, blah blah blah. Then he got mad, told me fine, I was done as of right then. Made me give him the keys to the car and he took off.”

“Keys to the car?”

“It’s leased to the company,” she said, waving a hand in the air. “Wasn’t mine to begin with.”

“And he just left you here?”

“Actually, he left me in Coronado. I called a taxi to get me here.”

“Nice.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just as well,” she said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t do it anymore, not for any amount of money.” She paused. “I think I always knew it was them that attacked Chuck, in the back of my mind at least. But when you laid it out for him at the house and I saw those assholes lying on the ground, I knew I was done.” She stared at me. “I knew I was done.”

I had underestimated her and I felt badly about that. Jordan didn’t deserve her.

“I’m sorry it shook out like that,” I said.

“I’ll survive,” she said with a tight smile. She leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the table between us. “So where do we go from here?”

The bellhop led the elderly couple and their luggage toward the bank of elevators.

“There are two big questions that we don’t have answers for right now,” I said. “Who told Meredith about Olivia? And who else besides Derek was Meredith working for?”

“You think one and the same?”

“Maybe. But I’d think one at least might tie to the other. Were you able to find out anything about her computer password?”

“No. Jon didn’t know it. He was going to give it to some computer guy he works with to have him check it out.”

“What about her cell phone records?”

“He was getting them pulled for me,” she said. “Not sure what he’s gonna do now.”

“I need to go talk to him,” I said. “There has to be something in her cell records, either a number she called or texted, that might point us to one of the answers.” I paused. “I need to tell him what Meredith was doing, too.”

She let out a hissing sound through her teeth. “Better you than me.”

“You wanna come along?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have stuff you need to get from his place?” I asked. “Might go quicker if I’m there to run interference.”

“I wanna go see Chuck,” she said, her mouth settling into a firm line.

“I can drive you.”

“No,” she said. “You go. I’ll find a ride over there.”

I was going to offer again, but the look on her face told me she wanted to be alone in prepping to see him. I could understand that.

“Look,” I said. “If you’re not working for Jordan anymore, there’s no reason you need to stay in this. If you wanna spend some time with Chuck, look for a job, whatever, I understand.”

She stood and rubbed her palms together like they were cold. “I’m in. Regardless of how I feel about Jon, I like Meredith a lot and I’m worried about her.” Something flitted through her eyes.

“What?”

She stared at her hands for a long moment before moving her gaze to me. “And I owe Chuck.”

SEVENTY

“You could’ve saved us both a lot of time if you’d told me we were gonna need to talk again,” Jon Jordan said. “Or did you just come here to order me to do something else?”

He was still in the driveway of his home, sitting in the passenger seat of the BMW. A small pile of papers sat in his lap and he was rifling through a black book.

“Making sure Gina can’t claim the car as hers?” I asked.

He pulled a white card from the book, zipped it back up and threw it in the glove box, slamming it closed. “She no longer works for me. The car is no longer available to her.”

“Afraid she’ll try to steal it?”

He slid out of the car, shoved the car door shut and glared at me. “What do you want?”

“Gina asked you to pull some cell phone records,” I asked. “Did you do that?”

The glare lost a fraction of its intensity. “Yes. They’re inside.”

I followed him in, down a long hallway toward the back of the home. We turned into a small office with bookshelves, several easy chairs and a neatly maintained desk.

He grabbed several sheets of paper off the top of the only pile on the desk and thrust them at me. “Here.”

I pointed at one of the chairs. “You’re gonna wanna sit down.”

The anger flashed again in his eyes. “You know what, Tyler? Unless you’ve got something to tell me about Meredith…”

“I do,” I said.

He lowered himself into the chair across from me and the anger had morphed into an expression of equal parts hope and desperation.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain what Meredith was doing. I didn’t like Jordan, but I hadn’t know him outside of the context of our situation. What he’d done to Chuck was wrong, but at the core of all of his actions was the fact that his daughter was missing and that he believed Chuck had hurt her. He was wrong, but I tried to put myself in his situation. If I thought I knew who was responsible for my daughter’s disappearance, what would I have done?

Far worse than what he had done to Chuck, I knew. Far worse.

I tried to be mindful of all of that as I explained to him that his daughter had entered the world of prostitution.

He didn’t react the way I anticipated. I expected a lot of anger, some denial, something close to a complete meltdown.

What I got was a father who was stunned into silence, his shoulders slumping further down with each mini-revelation, the realization that he no longer had a good handle on who his daughter was, hitting him squarely in the gut with the force of a medium-sized bomb.

But he didn’t say a word. He just listened, a distraught expression crystallizing on his face as I told him. I left out the parts about Olivia because I wasn’t sure her past was at all connected to Meredith’s disappearance. Yet.

When I finished, he sat there for a long minute, his eyes away from me, staring out a window on the side wall that looked out on a heavily-treed area of their property. With the index finger and thumb of his right hand, he traced an invisible circle around his mouth and chin, as if he was waiting for a beard that had yet to grow in.

Finally, he turned back to me, his face looking like one I saw in the mirror almost every morning.

“I just want to find her,” he whispered.

He was back to being the defeated father in the parking lot the night he hired me. No bullshit, no arrogance, no attitude. Just a father who wanted more than anything else to see his daughter again. I hadn’t found much to like about Jon Jordan, but I sympathized with him, probably more than he would ever know.

And I was going to find his daughter.

SEVENTY-ONE

Jordan excused himself from the room for a moment and I took the time to scan through the papers he’d given me.

They were phone records from Meredith’s cell phone from the previous three months. Given the time frame I’d put together of when she’d started freelancing, I bypassed the furthest month back and worked over the previous two months. I pulled two pens from the holder on Jordan’s desk and started making circles and notations to detail numbers that were popping up on a regular basis. I figured many of those I’d be able to eliminate quickly, as they probably belonged to friends she spoke to on a normal basis. I was looking for abnormalities, a number that showed up where it shouldn’t have.

“What are you doing?” Jordan asked, startling me as he came back into the room.

“Checking the numbers.”

“What can I do?”

I gave him half the stack. “Mark anything you recognize. Circle numbers that you see called repetitively. Anything that doesn’t look right to you, mark it.”

I expected an objection or a question, but he took the papers, grabbed a pen and went to work.

We worked for nearly an hour, mostly in silence, save for when I asked Jordan to identify a number for me, which he did so without complaint, checking his Blackberry on occasion to verify. When we were done with our respective stacks, we compared what we had and arrived at three numbers that stuck out from the others.

“Recognize any of them?” I asked

He studied them for a moment, then shook his head.

I pointed to the area code of the first one we’d identified. “Not a San Diego area number, right?”

He glanced at it. “No.” He flipped open the laptop to his left, waited a moment, then tapped the keys. “It’s an Oregon number. No info on it, just the origination point.”

I pulled out my cell and started punching in the numbers.

“Wait,” Jordan said.

I looked at him.

“My line is blocked,” he said. “So the other end can’t see who’s calling.”

I nodded. “Put it on speaker.”

He pushed a button on the phone next to the computer and a dial tone jumped loudly through the speaker. He punched in the number and it rang twice.

“Powell’s Books,” a male voice answered.

“I’m sorry?” Jordan said, looking at me.

“Powell’s Books,” the guy said again, not bothering to hide his annoyance. “Can I help you?”

I signaled to him to cut the call and he pushed a button on the phone.

“Meredith read a lot?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, the faint hint of a smile fighting to reach his face. “Constantly.”

“It’s a bookstore up in Portland,” I said. “She’s probably ordering from them.”

I’d spent a couple months up in the Pacific Northwest and remembered drinking coffee and thumbing through books, my eyes on the pages, but not really absorbing anything.

Jordan blinked several times. “I think I’ve seen it on boxes that have come to the house.”

“She has her own credit card?”

“No. She would've used one of Olivia's.”

“We can cross-check the billing against when the calls were made, just to be sure,” I said. “Next one.”

He punched in the numbers and it went immediately to an automated voicemail. He looked at me and I signaled to him to cut the call.

“I’ve got a guy who can run the number for us,” I said, thinking of Mike. “No need to give anything away by leaving a message.”

Jordan nodded, glanced at the third number and dialed it. It rang twice before the voicemail kicked in.

We both listened to Kelly Rundles tell us that she couldn't get to her phone and to leave her a message. Jordan touched the screen on the phone and ended the call. He reached for a rolodex next to the phone and began flipping through the cards, his eyebrows bunched together in confusion.

“What?” I asked.

He found the card he was looking for and plucked it from the roll. He laid it next to the phone bill and spun them both in my direction. “The number I just called isn’t the number she’d given me to contact her.”

I could see in his face something that I felt often enough on my own. Any small incongruity, anything that looked like a tiny step forward provided you with a shot of adrenaline. The feeling that maybe all wasn’t lost, that maybe the answer was closer than you thought.

I looked at both numbers. “When did she give you the one in the rolodex?”

“When the school hired her.”

“Three years ago, right?”

He nodded.

“When was the last time you called her on this number?”

His expression sagged. “Probably a year ago. I generally reach her through the school.”

“She could’ve changed numbers in that time,” I said. “Changed cell providers maybe.”

“You can keep your number.”

I nodded. “Sure.”

I scanned the phone bill again, checking the times that Meredith had apparently called Kelly Rundles. They were all over the map. Morning, middle of the day, several after midnight.

“They were pretty close?” I asked. “Meredith and Kelly?”

Jordan hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Meredith really looked up to her. Kelly has far and away been the best coach Meredith has ever had.” He fought off what looked to me like a grimace. “We encouraged the relationship.”

“Look, this is something to take a look at,” I said quickly. “But it might not mean anything. All of these calls may be legit and she may have just not gotten you her new number. I’ll find out. But don’t start thinking that Kelly had anything to do with what’s going on with Meredith until we know something for certain.”

Jordan exhaled and stood, walking over to a window on the far side of the room. He stayed there motionless, his hands in his pockets, his back to me, staring out the glass.

“Ever get easier?” he finally asked.

“No,” I said. “Not for a second.”

“It’s not even that she’s gone,” he said. “It’s…”

“It’s the not knowing,” I said. “Not knowing what’s going on with her.”

He turned to me, his face pale, the skin drawn tightly around his eyes and mouth. “Yes. The not knowing. It’s…brutal.”

“It is.”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like for you,” he said.

“And I hope you don’t have to.” I stood up, unwilling to get into a conversation about what it actually was like for me.

Jordan pulled his hands from his pockets but seemed unsure what to do with them. He settled for putting them awkwardly on his hips. “What should I be doing?”

“I’m going to head over to the school,” I said. “Get ready for the game.”

“Should I go with you?”

“No. Stay here. I want you to recreate the forty-eight hours before Meredith disappeared.”

“Recreate?”

“On paper,” I explained. “Everything you can remember from two days prior to her disappearing. Try to account for every second of each of those days. Nothing is too immaterial. What time you woke up, what you ate, exact conversations you had with her, what she was wearing. Every detail of every second, as best you can.”

He nodded slowly, probably already trying to line up details. “Alright.”

“I’ll call you after the game,” I said. “We can go over what you’ve got.”

I said goodbye and found my way back outside. The evening air was settling in, cooler than normal for that time of year. Fog hung at the edge of the sky and I could smell the dampness working itself down to the grass and the pavement.

The forty-eight hour diary was to keep Jordan busy. Most likely, it wouldn’t do a damn thing to help us find Meredith. But it would occupy him, give him a task, help him push forward, mute the pain of not knowing where she was for the moment.

Someone-I could no longer recall whom-had given me the same exercise during the first week of Elizabeth’s disappearance. I had scribbled furiously, recording every detail I could remember. It kept me busy, occupied, made me feel like I was doing something toward finding Elizabeth.

As I got into my car, I hoped that I could provide Jon Jordan with a better outcome for his efforts than I had received.