The perfect look

He clearly wasn’t worried about someone hearing her calls for help or smashing the window and seeing her down here. Besides, she hadn’t heard anything like a car driving by, a plane passing overhead, or an alarm going off in the distance.

At night, through the window’s smeared dirty glass, she was able to see the flashing pink and blue neon sign in the far distance for a place called Bare Essence. The style of the sign suggested to her that it was probably a strip club. But considering she wasn’t an expert on places like that, the information wasn’t of much use.

She was also pretty sure he didn’t want her dead, at least not yet. It wasn’t for a lack of willingness to kill. Back at her foster parents’ house, before he drugged her but after he gagged her and tied her up, he’d carried her quietly into the living room and sat her in the corner so she could watch as he killed them.

He hadn’t done it stealthily. In fact, there was casualness to him throughout the ordeal. Her foster father was asleep in the easy chair and her foster mother was seated on the adjoining loveseat watching the TV.

Since they were facing away from him, he’d simply gone into the kitchen and come out with two knives, one a smaller serrated variety and the other a large carving knife. He gave Hannah a little wink as he walked around behind the couple and sat down next to Hannah’s foster mother, a bland, gray-haired but generally decent woman named Caryn.

Caryn must have assumed it was Hannah and only glanced over after the show went to commercial. When she saw the strange man with the knife smiling beside her, she opened her mouth to scream. That’s when he plunged it into the side of her throat.

She made an odd wheezy, gurgling sound, as if someone had let the air out of a balloon while underwater. Her foster father, Clint, who wasn’t objectionable but clearly only participated in the foster process at his wife’s behest, stirred slightly but didn’t wake up.

As Caryn’s blood spurted across the living room, some of it spraying on Bolton, he got up and wandered over to Clint. The man didn’t react so Bolton grabbed the remote control and began turning up the volume until it was so loud Clint couldn’t help but awaken.

“Too loud,” he muttered grumpily.

When he didn’t get any response, the man rubbed his eyes and looked at the screen. It was only then that he realized his view was blocked by a shortish, pudgy man with patchy brown hair and a double chin. Bolton smiled widely, revealing front teeth desperately in need of dental work, as several of them jutted in different directions. His bright, intense brown eyes never blinked.

Then, as if a starting bell had gone off at a horse race, he leapt forward and sank the carving knife into the center of Clint’s chest. Hannah couldn’t see her foster father’s face, only the back of him as his body stiffened briefly and then sagged back into the chair. He never made a sound.

Bolton looked over at her and shrugged as if to say, “I thought there’d be more to it.”

Hannah knew she should be freaking out. And she was sure that reaction would come. But in that moment after Caryn and Clint were butchered, she didn’t have much of a reaction at all. She wished she could have but it just wasn’t in her, not after everything else.

Only two months earlier, she’d gone through something equally traumatic. She and her adoptive parents had been kidnapped from their San Fernando Valley home and transported to a big mansion near downtown L.A. That time the perpetrator was an older man, likely in his fifties, and he was much less playful. Later she would learn that his name was Xander Thurman and that he was a notorious serial killer.

But at the time, all she knew was that she’d been brought to this strange house by this strange man. He tied her to a chair and made her watch as he proceeded to torture her adoptive parents. He left for a while before returning to finish what he’d started. Then a woman—Hannah later discovered she was a criminal profiler named Jessie Hunt—came into the house, apparently looking for him. He surprised and attacked her, knocking her out.

While she was unconscious, he strapped her arms to a ceiling beam. When she came to, he tortured her as well. The two of them engaged in a vicious verbal back and forth that was mostly lost on Hannah. Eventually, the woman’s quick thinking gave her the upper hand, which led to a ferocious fight that left the man dead and the woman in awful shape.

Hannah managed to free herself and get help. She didn’t remember much of the night beyond that, other than that the EMTs had to sedate her because she started to lose it. When she woke up, she was in the hospital. After questioning by multiple detectives, she was sent briefly to a group home and then to live with Caryn and Clint.

The next several months were a blur. She tried to go to school but found focusing difficult. The county got her a tutor to home school her and that went a little better. She cut her hair pixie-short so that when she looked in the mirror, she wasn’t reminded of the girl from the family photos, the photos of a family that no longer existed.

It didn’t really work. Her hair was still sandy blonde, her eyes were still green, and her long legs still made her look like a baby giraffe. She was still Hannah, whatever that meant.

Somewhere in that period, a detective came to follow up on the statement she provided the day after the attack. She repeated what happened, only this time it felt like she was reporting it from a distance, like she hadn’t actually been a participant in the events that destroyed her family.