Thread of Hope (The Joe Tyler Series, #1) (26 page)

He fumbled with the tissues, pulled down the sun visor and muttered something at his reflection.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he tried to clean up his bloody face.  I was done trying to understand the rationale behind a high-school prostitution ring.  After talking to both Derek and Kristin, it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to find a reasonable explanation for what they were doing.  Whether it was because I was that out of touch or because this was an entirely different type of group of kids I was dealing with, it didn’t matter.  I wasn’t there to solve their problems or help them realize how screwed up they all were.  Their parents could deal with that.

I was there to find Meredith and to help Chuck.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” I said to Derek.  “You mention my daughter again and you won’t walk normally for a very long time.  I don’t care who you are or how old you are.  You even think about making a remark about her, you won’t know what hit you.”

He flipped up the visor and dropped the tissue into his lap.  He shot a quick glance in my direction.  “Okay.”

I let that hang in the air between us, as much to settle myself down as it was to reinforce it with Derek.

“Do you know where Meredith is?” I asked.

“No.  I swear.”

“Last time you saw her?”

“At school.”

“When?”

“Two days ago.

“When exactly two days ago?”

He threw up his hands.  “Dude, I don’t know.”

“Think.  When exactly?”

He let out a frustrated sigh and turned toward the window.  I waited him out.

“Fourth period,” he finally said.  “Government class.  Right after lunch.  She was waiting for me. Walked to my locker with me, then she went to English.  That was the last time I saw her.”

“Talk to her after that?”

“No.”

“Emails?  Texts?  IMs?”

“No.  Nothing.”

I stayed quiet for a moment as we drove, waiting to see if he offered anything else.  He didn't.

“You guys fight a lot?”

He shrugged.  “Not really.”

“Not really?”

“We argued, I guess.  But nothing that wasn't normal.”

“What's normal?”

He sighed.  “I don't know, man.”

He massaged his cheek where I’d hit him the first time.  His nose was red and swollen where I’d hit him the second time.  He had to be hurting, but it seemed as if he was thinking about something other than his face.

“What happened in the pool house that day?”

He jerked in my direction.

“I know her father didn’t touch her,” I said.  “You went in there after him, but he hadn’t touched her.  You hit her and then lied to Matt and Megan, telling them she’d already been hit when you got in there.  Why?”

He shifted in the seat again, so he was looking straight ahead.  I let him get his thoughts in order.

“She said she was going to quit,” he said slowly.  “She was done.  I said that was fine.  Honestly.  But then she said she wanted me to be done with it.”  He shook his head.  “I said no way.  I was making too much money.  I was staying in.”  He glanced at me.  “So she said she was going to tell everyone about the whole thing.  I snapped.  I slapped her in the face.”

There was no reason for him to lie to me at this point and I believed him.  He was scared of me, he had nowhere to go and there was something different in his voice now.

“I apologized about a hundred times,” he said.  “I’d never hit a girl before.  And I haven’t since.  I just freaked out.  Took the whole weekend before she said anything to me again.  She said she forgave me, but I’m not sure she really did.”

I stopped at a red light.  “I’m confused.  So she quit then?”

He shook his head.  “No.  That was the weird thing.  When she started talking to me again, she said she didn’t really want to quit.  I was afraid to argue with her anymore, so I let it go.  She’s been working since then.”

The light turned green and we started moving again.  There was something about the last thing he said that made me think he hadn’t finished his thought.

“Derek,” I said.  “No more lying.  Remember?”

“I’m not lying.”

“Then what aren’t you telling me?”

He pulled his hand away from his face and took a deep breath.  “I’m not lying.  She’s been working again ever since that day.  She’s never said anything again about quitting.”  He paused, glancing in my direction.  “But she started working for someone else, too.  She went from wanting to quit to working nearly every night.”

My jaw tightened.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

His facial features softened.  He didn’t look like the mastermind behind a prostitution ring.  He just looked like a confused teenager.  “She was freelancing.”

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.