Thread of Hope jt-1

by Jeff Shelby

  “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 wai
ted. 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.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  One of the first things I told people when they asked for my help was that they had to take care of themselves first. Take care of themselves, take care of their spouse, take care of the children still in the home, take care of their lives. If you allow those things to break down, the rest comes crumbling down around you.

  I learned that the hard way. My marriage to Lauren collapsed before either of us had realized what happened. We were so focused on the enormous crack that had fractured our lives that we missed the fissures that radiated out from that initial crack, me far more than Lauren.

  To get anything done, I had to take care of my own life first.

  So I drove to Lauren’s house.

  Our old home.

  The one where I'd last seen Elizabeth.

  I parked across the street and got out. I didn
’t cross the road, just stood there, my back against the car, as if some invisible forcefield was between me and the house.

  The house was originally a one story, but we'd built an upstairs addition. Beige stucco with big, wide windows. A giant tree in the center of the front yard. Small cracks in the short driveway that had grown longer and wider since I’d last seen them. Fresh flowers, blues and reds and yellows, bloomed along the narrow path to the front door. The grass was green, the windows were spotless and the paint on the trim looked fresh.

  I tried to remember other details about what it looked like when I lived in it. Was it the same color? Were those the same kind of flowers? Was the tree always that big?

  The only thing I knew for certain was the lawn in front of me was the last place I’d seen Elizabeth.

  I wanted to walk to the door and knock, but my legs wouldn’t move. My stomach cramped, the anxiety gripping the muscles inside and squeezing them. Heat radiated up the back of my neck and into my head, tiny beads of sweat lining up along my forehead, just beneath my hairline.

  It physically hurt to stand there and look at the house. I was making a mistake.

  My hand slid along the car door, found the handle and grasped onto it, as much for balance as to open it. I heard a car coming from down the street and turned in that direction.

  A dark blue Toyota Camry slowed as it approached. I stood up straighter, tried to look normal, not as if I was about to pass out in the street, and attempted a smile and a half-wave at the driver.

  The driver was Lauren and my hand stayed frozen in the air.

  She pulled the car into the driveway and sat there for a moment before she got out, looking at me, expressionless.

  She wore a black pant suit with a red blouse and black pumps. A thin gold chain hung around her neck, standing out against the red of the blouse. Her hair was down and I didn’t see any earrings. A flash of light at her right wrist revealed a watch the same color as the necklace, a watch I remembered giving her.

  She stood there for a moment, looking as unsure as I felt. She opened the driver-side rear door and pulled out a leather satchel and placed it over her shoulder. She shut the door and stared at me.