Jeff Shelby - Thread of Hope

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.”

“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.

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.