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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 MelissaMackenzie, 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.
After twenty minutes, it became clear that the bedroom was a dead end. She returned to the living room and slowly spun in a small circle, hoping she might notice something she’d missed before. Nothing leapt out at her.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Hannah had been on to something. It just made emotional sense that Michaela would need some sort of safe outlet for her thoughts.
It has to be here somewhere.
She sat down in the middle of the floor and tried to picture Michaela doing the same thing. She pictured the girl here alone in the days before Lizzie moved in. This was her place. She had the run of it before she’d decided to have a roommate. She knew all the secret hiding spots. She knew the places Lizzie wasn’t allowed to go.
And that’s when an idea occurred to her. Lizzie had said the rent was cheap because she really only used the one bedroom. But the reality was that she generally had free rein. Knowing human nature, if there was some spot that Michaela had told her not to go, that very request would have made such a place tempting.
But there was one part of the apartment Lizzie was unlikely to snoop because there was simply no reason to: her own room.
Jessie got up and went to the bedroom. The door was open. The room was fairly spartan, which reflected both Lizzie’s finances and the transient lifestyle of a college student.
She hadn’t done much to personalize it, though she did have that cross over her bed, reflecting her acknowledged religiosity. There were two framed watercolors on the wall. In the far corner between the window and the closet was a framed Gustav Klimt print of the iconic The Kiss.
Compared to some of the other Klimt works in the rest of the apartment, this one was fairly tame. In the painting, a couple embraced chastely. Still, Jessie found it odd that it was in Lizzie’s room. The piece was clearly more Mick’s style.
