The sun lifted into another perfect California sky, but his guitar spoke only in minor chords—of rainy heartache and a thunderous mad desire to love someone who didn’t want to be loved. They rang down the hillside until they were silent. Rang down the hillside and were silent. “I lived a lie before I met you,” Clay sang, “I was blind, and I was numb too. But then my walls went crashing, when I saw your soul in passing. When everything I feel is not enough, I can’t seem to touch you close enough….”
Slowly the progressions got under his fingers, the jigsaw of separate parts coalesced into a coherent structure, and before long, there it was. The song he’d been trying to articulate for weeks, capturing what he felt for Savannah Marquez, was born on the morning airwaves. “There’s No End to This Wanting,” he called it, and his gut told him it was decent. Dare he say good? Undoubtedly the best song he’d written without Rocco Boyle looking over his shoulder. Too bad I won’t ever play it in front of people, he lamented.
As it turned out, though, Clay was wrong. He would play the song again, and in front of quite a lot of people. That night, in fact, he would be introducing it to the world.
24
HORROR BUSINESS
Songwriting had calmed him, distracted him, but it was only ointment to the sunburn, and soon Clay’s paranoia was itching him again. Savy hadn’t returned his calls, so Clay resorted to dialing the guys. Fiasco didn’t bother picking up, and Spider, half-asleep, seemed to take the panicked edge in Clay’s voice as additional evidence of his crack-up. “We’re meeting today at the hotel. You’ll see her there.” And Clay tried to verbalize his desperation—that Savy had gone looking for Mo in the seediest parts of town, had gone in alone—while skipping the bit about an extra-crispy rock star crawling from his pool. “Sucks,” Spider told him. “But this happens every few months with Mo. I love the guy, but he’s a hopeless junkhead.”
Clay drove aimlessly, down into canyons and through one Los Angeles neighborhood after another. He saw Savy standing at bus stops, Savy pumping gas, Mo jumping hurdles on a high-school track. Around mid-morning, he hit a Jack in the Box, but wasn’t able to swallow any of the grease. He needed someone to talk to, someone who’d listen to this whole spooky, perverted tale without judgment. And there was only one candidate that came to mind.
His next appointment with Dr. Alexander was scheduled for late that afternoon, but Clay phoned his office at the stroke of nine. He expected the answering service, but to his surprise Payton himself picked up. “Clay? Everything well?”
“Um, definitely not. There’s some stuff I haven’t been telling you. I think I’m ready to though. Could I come in earlier… like, asap?”
Payton was as casually astute as ever. “Sounds like you should. Come by at ten.”
Clay thanked him and was sitting in his waiting room twenty minutes early. The room was small and library-quiet and Clay felt as safe here as he did anywhere. Here, he wasn’t a budding musician, or a jilted lover, or someone hunted and haunted; here, he was just another client, with his choice of seats and a decent selection of magazines.
Tossing his feet on the coffee table, Clay skimmed two articles in Rolling Stone, and contemplated how much he could tell Payton before Payton called the men with butterfly nets. Ten o’clock had come and gone before he noticed the computer tablet at the far end of the coffee table. Open to the LA Times. He had never seen a tablet in Payton’s waiting room, but it was possible the day’s first appointment had forgotten it.
Hoping to find something on Karney’s disappearance (hadn’t anyone else seen a burned mummy in a hospital gown?), Clay changed seats for a better look. The tablet was open to a story titled missing girl found dead after week-long search. Clay saw the picture accompanying the article and his breath caught. His blood turned to sand in his veins.
It was her. The girl. The groupie. His succubus.
There was no flesh missing from her face, but Clay knew those eyes and that dental-perfect smile. She looked younger in the photo, her hair girlishly braided, and she was wearing a school uniform. Clay held the paper close…
Los Angeles—The five-day search for a missing Carlsbad teen has ended in tragedy. The body of Annie Strafford, 18, was found near a jogging path in Griffith Park this morning. Her family first reported her missing last Saturday after she failed to return home from a party. A suspect, 18-year-old Curtis Johnson of Oceanside, is already in custody.
Under questioning from Carlsbad detectives, Johnson confessed to bringing Strafford to his family’s home and eventually tying her to a bed and cutting her face. He has been charged with kidnapping and aggravated assault. Johnson and Strafford were both seniors at the prestigious Midvale Prep in Solana Beach and had been dating for over a year.
“[Johnson] was the nicest guy,” said Dana Gordon, a friend of Strafford’s and Johnson’s. “Annie liked him. But they didn’t always get along.”
Their relationship came to a head at an October 27th Halloween party they attended in Carlsbad. The two were seen dancing around midnight and disappeared soon after. According to Johnson, he brought Strafford to his home, since his parents were on vacation in Europe.
Clay scrolled hard, almost knocking the tablet off the table.
Johnson admitted that he and Strafford were both intoxicated. When Strafford refused to have intercourse with him, Johnson became violent. “The suspect confessed
