A short time later, Johnson fled the house. “In the morning he sobered and returned home,” Hernandez added. “Allegedly to bring [Strafford] to a hospital.”
But Strafford was not where he had left her. “Her bindings had been slashed,” Eric Brand, a lawyer retained by the Johnson family, said. “She was alive when he left, but wasn’t there when he returned. Mr. Johnson panicked, thinking she had wandered into the hills behind his home, and he began to look for her.”
The Strafford family have spent the last five days maintaining hope that Annie had escaped and was simply hiding out, in shock or too afraid of Johnson to contact authorities. Now they fear that Johnson hasn’t been as forthcoming as he let on. “Obviously there’s more going on than he claims,” Steven Strafford, the victim’s father, said in a press conference this morning. “Whether [Johnson] ended my daughter’s life that first night or came back to do it later, there’s little doubt he was responsible. What else could have happened?”
Annie Strafford was discovered by joggers at 6am on November 1st. In addition to the wound on her face, her throat had been cut. LAPD investigators have yet to locate a murder weapon, and Brand has stated that his client is not responsible for the murder.
Clay stopped there. His stomach was in a knots and he decided that the moment those knots loosened he would vomit. Projectile vomit. There was a lot that bothered him about the article. Annie’s sexual virtue juxtaposed against the seductive vixen he’d encountered; Johnson’s insistence that he hadn’t killed her and Annie’s inexplicable escape from the ropes. He thought of the knife she’d pulled so quickly on Essie and was convinced it was the same one Johnson had used to disfigure Annie—as well as the one that had freed her from her bindings. The blade had been her defiler and her liberator.
Staring at the frozen image of Annie Strafford, Clay felt a deep sorrow for her. He imagined her strapped to that bed. A sound—late, late at night— across the house. Annie calling out, thankful, relieved. Until a dark figure arrived to stand over her.
The tablet clapped the table as Clay dropped it. He gained his feet, not knowing whether to run toward Payton’s office or out to his Jeep, only that he needed to get moving. And now.
As it was, Payton solved the dilemma for him. The office door drew open, and his familiar voice beckoned him inside.
Clay waited, expecting his nine o’clock to emerge, likely avoiding eye contact. But no one appeared and Payton called out again.
Entering, Clay saw the therapist at his desk, bare feet up, staring dreamily into his aquarium. “I thought you had someone in here.”
“They left before you arrived,” Payton told him.
“I’ve been out there for half an hour.”
Payton grinned. “Some problems are easier to fix than others. Have a seat.”
The fear pressed into Clay. A lump in his throat. A sudden vertigo in the head. He knew the truth, even before his mind could process it. “No.”
Payton’s face turned slowly. It reminded Clay of another Halloween, twelve years before, when Tim, their neighbor in Philadelphia, had come over wearing a demon mask with horns and fangs. Tim had staggered up to Clay, groaning demon-like, and Clay had only looked at him with mild curiosity. “Hey, Mr. McIlrath,” he’d said. And Tim told him, “Nooooooo, you’re mistaken. You’re being visited by the Buzzer Bub!” And Clay told him, “Sure, whatever, Mr. McIlrath.” Because even if it was a good mask, and even if Tim’s voice had dropped an octave to become Vincent Price reborn, there had been no mistaking Tim’s eyes under the mask, one hazel, the other blue. Just like there had been no mistaking the beauty under Annie Strafford’s mask, even if some asshole had destroyed it.
And now Payton’s eyes were telling him something too. “No? What do you mean, no?” the therapist asked. “You’ve got problems, I’ve the solutions.”
“You’re not Payton,” Clay replied, confident now. And the moment the man’s gaze met his own, Clay felt a pressure against his skull. Like a boulder leaning upon the eggshell of his mind. He glanced away, looking helplessly toward the fishtank.
All the fish were dead in there, swirling in the filter’s current. All twelve or fifteen of them, a mass of floating, dancing corpses.
And the thing behind Payton’s face chuckled. “Then who am I? Do tell.”
It was Payton’s voice, and at the same time, not. From months of hanging with Rocco Boyle, Clay’s ear had grown sensitive to the tone and pitch of just about everything, and he was good enough to know his therapist from a talented imposter.
His own voice emerged softly, verging on a friendly falsetto, and that frightened Clay too—it was not how he intended to sound. But his words were clear as he told the creature sitting before him, so calm and so friendly: “You’re the devil.”
Payton’s lips grinned wider, the corners of his mouth stretching. “Boo,” he said.
And the office door slammed shut on its own.
He was falling into a La-Z-Boy before he could stop himself. Those eyes were on him, and Clay’s pulse thrummed and his skin crawled and horripilated, and yet he felt terribly removed from his own body. “You’re the Hailmaker,” he heard himself say, almost pleasantly. “The Man.”
“I’ve been called many things,” Payton’s mouth told him. “Some more clever, some more frightening.”
“We met once before. Back then there was someone calling you the—”
“—Queen Bitch. Yes. You were cringing behind a door.” Payton’s lips pursed
