to throw around and could clear a path.
“You’re good to go,” Jordan said, coming back on the line. “Check in at the main desk, they’ll sign you in and give you a pass. You have any issues, let me know.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Know anything else?”
“Your home was my first stop.”
“What should I be doing?”
It was an impossible question to answer correctly for a parent whose child was missing. They wanted to be active, to help, to search. But when you didn’t know where to go, it was a fruitless endeavor.
“Stay by your phone,” I said. “Hope she calls. Think about the last few days. Make notes about anything you can think of. Her behavior, her statements, anything that comes to mind, no matter how trivial or miniscule. Put it all down on paper so that you don’t have to keep it in your head. I asked your wife to do the same.”
“Alright,” he said. “I want to meet tonight so I can hear what you’ve learned.”
“That’s fine.”
He named a restaurant and we agreed on eight o’clock.
“Eight tonight,” he reiterated. “I hope you have some information for me.”
I was hoping for the same thing.
FORTY
Jordan told me that he’d called Coronado and arranged for a visitor’s pass for me. What he didn’t tell me was that I’d also find Gina Coleman.
She was sitting in a chair outside the main office, paging through the school newspaper.
She set the paper down when she saw me. “You took longer than I thought.”
“You my babysitter?”
“Depends.” She smiled. “Do you need babysitting?”
“No.”
“Then I’m just along for the ride.” She paused, watching me.
I eyed the turtleneck she was wearing. “How’s your neck?”
She pulled down the collar. There were several finger-sized purple and red marks just to the right of her throat.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She let the collar slide back up her neck. “I’ll live.” She messed with the collar, getting it back in place. “So. How angry are you that I’m here?”
I wasn’t angry. I was expecting something like this. Jordan wasn’t the type to take orders from someone else without pushing back. This was his way of pushing back. If he’d sent one of the two goons, I would’ve been angry. But Gina was competent and had been honest with me thus far.
I shrugged and walked past her into the office.
Lana McCauley was behind the desk. She slid a visitor’s badge across the counter to me. “Mr. Jordan arranged this for you, Joseph.”
“Thank you.”
“Please don’t misuse it.” Her tone was filled with disapproval.
“I won’t. I’m just trying to help.” I hung the pass around my neck. “If I need to see a student’s schedule, who should I speak with?”
“Me,” Lana said, her lips pursed, her thick eyebrows furrowed together. “The student’s name?”
“Derek Weathers.”
Lana tapped at her keyboard.
“What are you doing?” Gina asked, coming up next to me at the counter.
I ignored her.
The printer next to Lana’s computer buzzed to life and quickly spat out a piece of paper. She retrieved it and laid it on the counter in front of me. “There you are.”
“I need a couple of others,” I said.
Her lips pursed some more and her eyebrows furrowed deeper. “Joseph, I’m not sure…”
“I’m trying to help find Meredith Jordan,” I said. “Nothing else. I can have Mr. Jordan call and confirm that again, if you’d like. But I want the schedules.”
She tried to hold my gaze, but couldn’t. I didn’t like putting her on the spot and undermining what she saw as her domain. But I was hired to find Meredith and to help Chuck. I couldn’t worry about ruffled feathers.
She shifted her eyes away from me and began typing. “Names?”
I gave her the ones I wanted and thirty seconds later, the printer produced several more sheets of paper, She pushed them across the counter to me.
I took them. “Thank you, Mrs. McCauley.”
She gave a curt nod in dismissal.
Gina and I stepped out into the hall.
“You were kind of rude to her,” Gina said.
I paged through the papers in my hand. “She wanted to have a pissing contest. If it was her kid that was missing, you think she’d give a shit about printing out a couple of schedules?”
Gina shuffled her feet, but didn’t respond.
When looking for my own daughter, I’d learned immediately to be direct with people, to put the onus on them. Most people didn’t understand the urgency in looking for someone that was missing. It wasn’t my job to make them understand. It was my job to get the information I wanted. If people got their feelings hurt, that wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t looking to make friends. I was looking for a teenage girl no one else could find. That was the only thing that mattered.
“You know the layout of the school?” I asked. “Where the classrooms are?”
“I know it well enough,” Gina said.
I held out Derek Weathers’ schedule. “I wanna start with him.”
FORTY-ONE
Derek Weathers was in Room 246, studying AP English with a teacher named Mr. Ridley. The room was at the end of a long, wide hallway lined with classrooms and blue and red lockers. Painted signs hung on the walls in between the classrooms, exhorting various sports teams. The carpeting that lined the floor appeared to have just been vacuumed. It was quiet.
We reached the end of the hallway and stood across from the classroom door. I was expecting a bell to signal the end of class, but instead it was a series of chimes that sent the students streaming out into the hallway, turning the quiet into an eruption of voices and laughter.
Derek was one of the last students out of Room 246. A blue baseball cap sat backward on his head and a pencil was stuck behind his left ear. He wore a black Rolling Stones T-shirt that showed off the muscles in his chest, tattered cargo shorts and flip flops. A textbook hung from his right hand.
He saw us immediately and froze in the doorway. His buddy Matt nearly ran up his back.
“The hell are you doing, dude?” Matt asked, annoyed, chucking him in the back of the shoulder.
Derek didn’t answer and Matt followed his gaze to us.
“Got a minute?” I said to Derek.
Derek’s face settled into the same cocky sneer I’d witnessed at the hotel. “Not really, bro. Got history now.”
I held up the papers in my hand. “We got you a pass. Bro.”
