“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.