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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jessie tried to keep the laptop’s volume down.
Hannah was in the next room and she didn’t want her teenage half-sister to hear the grunts and moans and wonder what she was watching. Normally, she wouldn’t be watching porn in her bedroom after work on a Tuesday evening. But she was at a loss as to how to proceed.
She still hadn’t heard back from Ryan or Garland Moses about her concerns regarding how Valley Bureau was handling—more accurately, not handling—the case. And while Michaela seemed to have interacted with a bevy of sketchy people, none of them was an obvious suspect.
So she was reduced to watching some of the girl’s films, in the hopes that seeing her alive might spark some moment of insight. But mostly, it was just depressing her.
It was only once she started watching that she realized that, despite having made over a dozen films, all of them were from the last six months. The idea that this was how Michaela had spent the majority of her days since school made Jessie feel hollow and sick at the same time.
The girl’s manner only exacerbated that. Michaela had a different demeanor from all the other actresses in any of the films. The others were always animated, sometimes to the point of being over-the-top, much like she imagined Melanie Mynx probably was. There was lots of groaning and whispered dirty talk. Michaela didn’t do any of that.
Her bearing, even in the middle of acts Jessie hadn’t even conceived of, was detached, even aloof. In fact, that seemed to be her thing. As her prominence in the movies increased, a recurring theme developed. No matter what scenario she was in, she always seemed to play a version of the ice princess.
Invariably, her character was a cold, reticent, even haughty teen who seemed unimpressed and sometimes even bored by the strenuous sexual efforts of her partner, sometimes partners. Everyone she engaged with wanted to be the one to crack the code and get her to warm up. Almost always, when she consented to participate, she came across as deeply disappointed by those she dealt with, consistently underwhelmed by even the most elaborate erotic gymnastics.
Jessie had to admit it was magnetic. Even she found herself wondering whether this guy or girl or that particular position or maneuver would be the one to finally satisfy Missy Mack. In a strange way that Jessie didn’t want to consider too deeply, it was almost as if the girl was retaining some semblance of personal power by refusing to show any enthusiasm about what she was doing. It was almost as if she was saying, “You can do these things to me, but know that I’m mostly humoring you. Your presence serves my purposes, but only barely.”
Hey, maybe watching this crap is helping me get some insight into her mindset after all.
There was something else about Mick that Jessie noticed—something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was only in a scene in which the girl lied to her parents on the phone about being at the library when she was really in the locker room with the star quarterback that it clicked for her. Mick reminded her of Hannah.
Not in the obvious ways. While she didn’t know her half-sister’s sexual history, she got a definite sense that the girl was fairly inexperienced. And of course both of them were seventeen. But it was their manner that was so similar.
They had the same body language—guarded and taut, as if they might make a break for it at any moment. The eyes of both girls went blank, almost dead, when faced with an unpleasant circumstance. Mick’s eyes in all her sex scenes had the same disconnected look that Hannah’s had when she was tuning Jessie out or leaving an appointment with Dr. Lemmon.
And even though Mick was “acting” when she lied to her parents about her whereabouts, her causal comfort while doing it was reminiscent of how easily Hannah seemed to tell falsehoods, almost as if she wasn’t even aware that she was lying through her teeth.
Jessie decided she needed a break from the images on her screen and the concerns they were raising in her mind. She was just about to close her laptop entirely when she heard a voice behind her.
“Ryan not getting the job done for you?”
Jessie spun around, almost knocking the laptop to the floor. Hannah’s head was poking through a crack in the door.
“I thought I locked that,” she said, feeling her face redden.
“You did,” Hannah said, smirking. “But your bedroom isn’t exactly Fort Knox and I used to have overprotective parents. Considering that, you’d think I’d be the one shame-watching porn.”
“It’s actually for work,” Jessie told her, fully aware how lame that sounded.
“Of course it is,” Hannah said, her tone faux-sincere. “Are you about to go on some undercover operation?”
For half a second, Jessie considered fudging her answer. But then she realized that this might be a rare opportunity to connect.
“Actually, I’m investigating the death of the girl on the screen. She was murdered last night.”
Hannah’s smirk disappeared and she pushed the door open.
“Can I see her?” she asked.
Jessie nodded. Hannah came over and sat down on the bed beside her. She looked at the frozen image of Michaela, who was currently in a close-up, her expression one of mild interest in what was occurring off-camera.
“She looks young,” Hannah said.
“She was. In fact, she was the same age as you. She had just graduated early from an all-girls Catholic high school. She lived in Van Nuys.”
“St. Ursula, right?”
