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.”