“I was thinking about something after you left,” she said with less certitude than Jessie was used to.
“What was that?”
“You said Mick came from an abusive background, right?”
“Yeah,” Jessie confirmed, noting silently that Hannah had adopted use of the girl’s nickname when discussing her. “Her dad was a drinker. It was so bad that she got emancipated at sixteen.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. “In one of my first sessions with Dr. Lemmon, she suggested I start writing in a journal, so I could get my thoughts down—the ones I wasn’t comfortable sharing out loud. But the truth is I was already doing that. I started a few days after our father killed my adoptive parents. I wrote furiously just to get the thoughts out of my head. I probably went through five or six journals before she ever brought it up.”
“Uh-huh,” Jessie said, nodding. She wasn’t certain where Hannah was going with this but didn’t want to interrupt.
“I was wondering…what if Mick did the same thing?”
“Kept a journal?” Jessie asked.
“Yeah. Think about it. Her mom dies. Her dad is a nightmare. She’s living at a Catholic school with nuns watching her every second. Then she leaves and starts doing porn. She seems like the kind of girl who might have some stuff she wanted to get off her chest.”
“That makes sense,” Jessie said noncommittally.
“I thought so,” Hannah said, now leaning in. “If she did keep a journal, I’d be willing to bet there’s a lot of material in there that might be useful to someone investigating her death. Assuming you knew where to find it.”
Jessie sat with the idea for a moment, letting it sink in. After several seconds, a possibility formed in her head. She turned to Hannah.
“You’re a genius,” she said.
“What?” Hannah said, blushing.
“I think I know where to go and it can’t wait until tomorrow. So for the second time this evening, I’m going to say goodnight and suggest you get some sleep.”
She got up and headed over to the counter to collect the things she’d placed there only minutes earlier.
“Where are you going?” Hannah asked.
“I’d tell you,” Jessie said. “But then I’d have to kill you.”
Hannah frowned but said nothing. Jessie was impressed with her restraint so she threw her a bone.
“But, little sister, if this pans out. I promise I will tell you.”
She caught a quick hint of a smile on Hannah’s face just as she shut the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The girl waited until she was sure the coast was clear.
Only then did she carefully walk into the room where the laptop rested, its silver branded emblem glinting in the dull overnight moonlight. She made her way over to the dresser and stood there silently for several more seconds. When she was sure the thumping she heard was coming from her own heartbeat, she lifted the screen and turned the laptop on.
The glow from the screen illuminated the entire room and she felt like she had been trapped in a prison yard spotlight. But no one appeared or said a word so she punched in the password that she’d secretly learned and waited for the screen to fill up. It didn’t take long.
Her finger hovered over the touchpad for a second longer to make absolutely sure she wouldn’t be interrupted. Then she clicked the play button.
After a second of buffering, the movie kicked in. Michaela Penn, aka Melissa Mackenzie, aka Missy Mack, wore a Catholic schoolgirl uniform with an unusually short skirt and had her hair in pigtails. She was skipping down a hallway when she was chastised by a man in what was clearly supposed to be priest attire but looked more like a black turtleneck with a piece of white tape on the collar.
“Young lady, I’ve warned you about skipping in the halls for the last time,” he scolded. “Now get in this room and accept your punishment!”
As Missy shuffled into the room and the “priest” closed the door behind her, Hannah Dorsey switched windows and pulled up Mick’s Instagram page. She’d been looking at the girl’s social media ever since Jessie left the first time that evening and had only just hopped back into bed before her half-sister unlocked the apartment’s front door.
Now she was back at it. As the porn played in the background, she toggled among all of Mick’s various feeds, trying to soak up as much as she could about the girl. She somehow felt a deep connection to her.
Hannah had gone through Jessie’s file on the girl and learned that she was exactly forty-nine days younger than Mick. Their schools were 6.4 miles apart. Mick’s GPA was 3.8 when she graduated. Hannah’s was 3.9 when she had to leave school because of her parents’ murder. Mick’s apartment was 4.7 miles from Hannah’s old house.
By checking some of Michaela’s photos, she learned that they actually knew at least three of the same people. One of the girls from Hannah’s school who had graduated last year had even been in a movie with Mick called Valley Gals Shall. It wasn’t great.
Of course, those surface connections weren’t the true reason Hannah had developed what she would acknowledge was an obsession with the other girl. It ran much deeper than that.
Both of them had been forced to grow up fast. Hannah was painfully aware that most girls she’d gone to school with were fixated on their favorite YouTube influencers and where they could find the best juice bar. She and Mick didn’t have that luxury.
Their lives were defined by dead caregivers, abusive or psychotic fathers, and the crushing sense that there wasn’t a single person in their lives that they could truly trust. That’s the world she and Mick lived in. Or in Mick’s case, died in.
Hannah looked at these photos of the dead girl and knew that they were part of an act, an image she projected to the world to protect herself from the damage it wanted to inflict on her. She could see it in the vacant, dead-eyed stare Mick offered the camera in her sex scenes. She saw it in the plastic, forced smile on her face in her social media posts. She saw it in the way Mick’s hands always seemed to be curled into tight fists, as if she might have to strike out at a threat at any moment. Hannah recognized all of it. It was like she was looking in a mirror.
*
By the time Jessie got to Michaela’s apartment, it was well past 2 a.m.
She’d considered stopping at Van Nuys Station to get the key but decided the request would draw unwanted attention. Instead, she put on a pair of latex gloves and used a technique she’d learned at the FBI Academy to jimmy the lock. Then she ducked under the police tape and stepped inside.
The apartment was dark and had a faint, rusty smell, which she recognized all too well as the scent remnant of blood. Jessie stood in the hall and took the place in. She tried to imagine Michaela standing beside her, deciding the best place to hide a journal that held her deepest, darkest secrets.
The obvious place to start was her bedroom. She walked to the end of the hall and used her foot to push open the door, which was only slightly ajar. Stepping in, she looked around, trying to think where a seventeen-year-old girl might hide something so precious.
She worked her way around the room, opening dresser drawers, crawling under the bed, and carefully sifting through the contents of the closet. She couldn’t explain why, but she had the distinct sense that she wasn’t the first person to do this in the last twenty-four hours. Something about the way items rested on counters, desks, and the closet floor suggested that they had been reviewed and replaced, not always in their original location.