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CHAPTER EIGHT
By the time Ryan arrived, Jessie had a full head of steam.
She’d spent the rest of the morning getting as much background information as she could on Michaela Penn. He had barely reached his desk before she started peppering him with details.
“Something doesn’t fit with this girl,” she said before he even sat down.
“Good morning, Jessie,” he replied. “How are you?”
“Good morning,” she said, offering a brief smile acknowledging the niceties of human interaction. “How am I? I’m confused. Michaela Penn is a real contradiction. This is a girl who graduated from a prestigious Catholic girls high school a year early while on an academic scholarship. She was legally emancipated at the age of sixteen. All very impressive, right?”
“Right,” Ryan agreed, clearly giving up on the pleasantries.
“But the reason her emancipation was approved was because her father, who now lives up near Lake Arrowhead, was abusive. She was able to prove to the court that she was better off on her own.”
“What about her mom?”
“Her mother died of ovarian cancer when she was seven.”
“No other relatives?” Ryan asked.
“Not in California.”
“Where did she live then?”
“Until she graduated early, she boarded at the school. Since then, she’s bounced around among three different apartments until she settled on the place where she was found last night. None of the others were anywhere near as nice.”
“So how did she afford the new place?” Ryan wondered.
“That’s a good question. Like Lizzie said, she’s a waitress. She works at Jerry’s on Ventura Boulevard. And according to her manager, she only worked part-time. That’s not going to pay for the place she was living in, much less all the art and electronics we saw.”
“Any clues from her social media?” Ryan asked, finally firing up his computer.
“Not so far,” Jessie admitted. “I’ve looked at her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Tumblr, and Whisper accounts, along with everything else I could find. It’s pretty standard stuff—selfies at the beach, pictures with friends at concerts, funny memes, inspirational quotes, tons of smiles; not a mean comment in her mentions. It’s almost…too normal.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. I know people’s social media is curated to project the best possible image. But hers is relentlessly normal—nothing controversial, nothing revealing. It’s just so impersonal. After looking at it all, I didn’t get the sense that I knew her any better than before. It felt like a puzzle with several pieces missing.”
“So there’s nothing in there that would explain why someone would stab her multiple times?” Ryan asked drily.
“No,” Jessie said, not playing along. “Nor why a bunch of cops would try to shut down the investigation before it began. By the way, I talked to Burnside earlier, the officer stationed outside the building last night. He basically begged me to drop the case. It sounded like he was genuinely concerned for me.”
“Maybe he thinks Costabile is going to try to beat you up after school.”
Before she could reply, Captain Decker poked his head out of his office and called them in.
“Hernandez, Hunt, I need to have a little chat, please.”
Jessie glanced at Ryan, who had a look of resignation on his face.
“What?” she asked.
“That’s his ‘ream you out’ voice,” he said as he got up. “I can only imagine what the Valley Bureau people told him.”
“Well, I’ve got a little reaming out of my own to do,” Jessie said, her spine stiffening as she led the way to Decker’s office.
“Great,” she heard Ryan mutter quietly behind her. She pretended not to hear him.
