She ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and black coffee, hoping the sandwich was on the menu despite not having its own cartoon. She didn’t want to have to ask the waitress for a few more minutes to decide. This was Donny’s Diner, not the goddamn Ritz.

“Five minutes for the sandwich,” the waitress said. “I’ll go get the coffee now.”

Jessica flipped the laptop screen back up and peered over it at the woman while she busied herself making the drink. She was a straight-from-a-bottle redhead in her late forties whose name was Nancy, according to the plastic tag that hung at a lopsided angle and seemed to deliberately point at her heaving bosom. Nancy’s breasts looked real, despite the close proximity to Tinseltown and its plastic surgeons, but still managed to look porny as they strained to escape from the one-size-too-small uniform.

Turning her attention back to the laptop, Jessica tucked a stray strand of short blonde hair behind her ear and checked her emails. There were no new additions to the inbox since she’d last looked this morning.

No inquiries from frantic parents or concerned spouses wanting help in tracking down missing loved ones. No surveillance work tailing a member of the staff on behalf of a suspicious employer. Not even a request for one of those honeytrap jobs that basically involved encouraging men to hit on her in hotel bars before confirming to distraught wives that they were, indeed, married to lying, cheating douchebags.

She almost always turned those ones down unless she was really broke. And Jessica hadn’t been broke for a while. Not since the insurance money had cleared and the house sale had gone through. These days, she usually advised the honeytrap clients to spend their hard-earned cash on a good divorce lawyer instead.

With nothing that might push her in the direction of her next move, Jessica went back to the missing persons websites and ate the grilled cheese sandwich once it arrived. She was idly contemplating having one of the stale doughnuts when a breaking news alert popped up on the screen with a muted ding. The sentence was brief and to the point. She sat back heavily against the booth’s hard vinyl seat and sighed, all thoughts of dessert now forgotten.

She turned to Nancy. “You might want to take that down now.”

The waitress looked up from behind the counter, where she had been emptying loose change into the cash register. “Sorry, hon—did you say something?”