Swimsuit (11 page)

“What’s that for?” Julia asked.

“Can’t be too careful,” Charlie said, shrugging off the question. “In case some bad guy is creeping around.”

He raked back her short hair, kissed her closed eyes, put his arms around the naked girl, and warmed her up with his skin.
“Go to sleep, Julia,” he said. “You’re safe with me.”

“It gets better from here?” she teased.

“Piggy.”

She laughed, snuggled against his chest. Charlie pulled the towel up over her eyes. Julia thought he was talking to her when
he said into the camera lens, “Is everybody happy?”

“Totally, completely happy,” she said with a sigh.

ANOTHER WRENCHING TWENTY-FOUR hours passed for Levon and Barbara, and I felt helpless to ease their despair. The news shows
were running the same old clips when I went to bed that night, and I was somewhere, deep in a troubling dream, when the phone
rang.

Eddie Keola spoke to me, saying, “Ben,
don’t
call the McDanielses on this. Just meet me in front of your hotel in ten minutes.”

Keola’s Jeep was running when I jogged out into the warm night, then quickly climbed up into the passenger seat.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“A beach called Makena Landing. The cops may have found something. Or somebody.”

Ten minutes later, Eddie parked along the curving roadside behind six police cruisers, vans from the Special Response Team
and the coroner’s office. Below us was a semicircle of beach, a cove that was bounded by fingers of lava rock before tapering
out into the ocean.

A helicopter hovered noisily overhead, beaming its spotlight on the scramble of law enforcement people moving like stick figures
along the shoreline.

Keola and I made our way down to the beach, and I saw that a fire department rescue vehicle had backed down to the water’s
edge. There were inflatable boats in the water, and a scuba team was going down.

I was sickened at the thought that Kim’s body was submerged there and that she had disappeared to get away from an old boyfriend.

Keola interrupted my reverie to introduce me to a Detective Palikapu, a heavyset young cop in a Maui PD jacket.

“Those campers over there,” Palikapu said, pointing to a cluster of children and adults on the far side of the lava-rock jetty.
“They saw something floating during the day.”

“A body, you mean,” said Keola.

“They thought it was a log or garbage at first. Then they saw some shark activity and called it in. Since then, the tides
took whatever it is under the bubble rock and left it there. That’s where the divers are now.”

Keola explained to me that the bubble rock was a shelf of lava with a concave undersurface. He said that sometimes people
swam into caves like this one at low tide, didn’t pay attention when the tide came in, and drowned.

Was that what had happened to Kim? Suddenly it seemed very possible.

TV vans were pulling up on the shoulder of the road, photographers and reporters clambering down to the beach, the cops stringing
up yellow tape to keep the scene intact.

One of the photographers came up to me, introduced himself as Charlie Rollins. He said he was freelance and if I needed photos
for the
L.A. Times
he could provide them.

I took his card, then turned in time to see the first divers coming out of the water. One of them had a bundle in his arms.

Keola said,
“You’re with me,”
and we skirted the crime scene tape. We were standing on the lip of the shore when a boat came in.

The bright light from the chopper illuminated the body in the diver’s arms. She was small, maybe a teenager or maybe a child.
Her body was so bloated that I couldn’t tell her age, but she was bound with ropes, hand and foot.

Lieutenant Jackson stepped forward and used a gloved hand to move the girl’s long, dark hair away from her face.

I was relieved that the victim wasn’t Kim McDaniels and that I didn’t have to make a call to Levon and Barbara.

But my relief was swamped with an almost overwhelming sorrow. Clearly another girl, someone else’s daughter, had been savagely
murdered.

A WOMAN’S HIGH-PITCHED scream cut through the chopper’s roar. I turned, saw a dark-skinned woman, five feet two or so, maybe
a hundred pounds, make a run toward the yellow tape, crying out,
“Rosa! Rosa! Madre de Dios, no!”

A man running close behind her shouted,
“Isabel, don’t go there. No, Isabel!”
He caught up and pulled the woman into his arms and she beat at him with her fists, trying to break free, the cords in her
neck stretched out as she cried,
“No, no, no, mi bebé, mi bebé.”

Police surrounded the couple, the woman’s frantic cries trailing behind as she was hustled away from the scene. The press,
a pack of them, ran toward the parents of the dead child. You could almost see light glinting in their eyes. Pathetic.

Under other circumstances, I could’ve been part of that pack, but right then I was behind Eddie Keola, scrambling up the rocky
slope to where media setups dotted the upper ledge. Local TV correspondents fed the breaking news to the cameras as the small,
twisted body was transferred by stretcher into the coroner’s van. Doors slammed and the van sped away.

“Her name was Rosa Castro,” Keola told me as we got into the Jeep. “She was twelve. Did you see those ligatures? Arms and
legs tied back like that.”

I said, “Yeah. I saw.”

I’d seen and written about violence for nearly half my life, but this little girl’s murder put such ugly pictures into my
mind that I felt physically sick. I swallowed my bile and yanked the car door closed.

Keola started up the engine, headed north, saying, “See, this is why I didn’t want to call the McDanielses. And if it
had
been Kim —”

His sentence was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He patted his jacket pocket, put his phone to his ear, said,
“Keola,” then “Levon,
Levon.
It’s not Kim. Yes. I saw the body. I’m
sure.
It’s not your daughter.” Eddie mouthed to me, “They’re watching the news on TV.”

He told the McDanielses we would stop by their hotel, and minutes later we pulled up to the main entrance to the Wailea Princess.

Barb and Levon were under the breezeway, zephyrs riffling their hair and their new Hawaiian garb. They were holding each other’s
white-knuckled hands, their faces pale with fatigue.

We walked with them into the lobby. Keola explained, without going into the unspeakable details.

Barbara asked if there could be a connection between Rosa’s death and Kim’s disappearance, her way of seeking assurances that
no one could give her. But I tried to do it anyway. I said that pattern killers had preferences, and it would be rare for
one of them to target both a child and a woman.
Rare, but not unheard of
, I neglected to add.

I wasn’t just telling Barbara what she wanted to hear, I was also comforting myself. At that time, I didn’t know that Rosa
Castro’s killer had a wide-ranging and boundless appetite for torture and murder.

And it never entered my mind that I’d already met and talked with him.

HORST TASTED the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, bought at Sotheby’s for $24,000 per bottle in 2001. He told Jan to hold out
his glass. It was a joke. Jan was hundreds of miles away, but their webcam connection almost made it seem as if they were
in the same room.

The occasion of this meeting: Henri Benoit had written to Horst saying to expect a download at nine p.m., and Horst had invited
Jan, his friend of many years, to preview the newest video before sending it out to the rest of the Alliance.

A ping sounded from Horst’s computer, and he walked to his desk, told his friend he was downloading now, and then forwarded
the e-mail to Jan in his office in Amsterdam.

The images appeared simultaneously on their screens.

The background was a moonlit beach. A pretty girl was lying faceup on a large towel. She was nude, slim-hipped, small-breasted,
and her short hair was finger-combed in a boyish fashion. The black-and-white images of form and shadow gave the film a moody
quality, as though it had been shot in the 1940s.

“Beautiful composition,” said Jan. “The man has an eye.”

When Henri entered the frame, his face was digitally pixilated to a blur, and his voice had been electronically altered. Henri
talked to the girl, his voice playful, calling her a monkey and sometimes saying her name.

Horst commented to Jan, “Interesting, yes? The girl isn’t the least bit afraid. She doesn’t even appear to be drugged.”

Julia was smiling up at Henri, reaching out her arms, opening her legs to him. He stepped out of his shorts, his cock large
and erect, and the girl covered her mouth as she stared up at him, saying,
Oh my God, Charlie.

Henri told her she was greedy, but they could hear the teasing and the laughter in his voice. They watched him kneel between
her thighs, lift her buttocks, and lower his face until the girl squirmed, grinding her hips, digging her toes into the sand,
crying out,
“Please, I can’t stand it, Charlie.”

Jan said to Horst, “I think Henri is making her fall in love. Maybe he is falling in love, too? Wouldn’t that be something
to watch.”

“Oh, you think Henri can feel love?”

As the two men watched, Henri stroked, teased, plunged himself into the girl’s body, telling her how beautiful she was and
to give herself to him until her cries became sobs.

She reached her hands around his neck, and Henri took her in his arms and kissed her closed eyes, her cheeks and mouth. Then
his hand became large in front of the camera, almost blocking the image of the girl, and reappeared again, holding a hunting
knife. He placed the blade beside the girl on the towel.

Horst was leaning forward, watching the screen intently, thinking,
Yes, first the ceremony, now the ultimate sacrifice,
when Henri turned his digitally obscured face to the camera and said, “Is everybody happy?”

The girl answered, yes, she was completely happy, and then the picture went black.

“What is
this?
” Jan asked, jerked out of what was almost a trance state. Horst reversed the video, reviewed the last moments, and he realized
it was over. At least for them.

“Jan,” he said, “our boy is teasing us, too. Making us wait for the finished product. Smart. Very smart.”

Jan sighed. “What a life he is having at our expense.”

“Shall we make a wager? Just between you and me?”

“On what?”

“How long before Henri gets caught?”

IT WAS ALMOST FOUR IN THE MORNING, and I hadn’t slept, my mind still burning with the images of Rosa Castro’s tortured body,
thinking of what had been done to her before her life ended under a rock in the sea.

I thought about her parents and the McDanielses and that these good people were suffering a kind of hell that Hieronymus Bosch
couldn’t have imagined, not on his most inspired day or night. I wanted to call Amanda but didn’t. I was afraid I might slip
and tell her what I was thinking:
Thank God we don’t have kids.

I swung my legs over the bed, turned on the lights. I got a can of POG out of the fridge, a passion fruit, orange, and guava
drink, and then I booted up my laptop.

My mailbox had filled with spam since I’d checked it last, and CNN had sent me a news alert on Rosa Castro. I scanned the
story quickly, finding that Kim was mentioned in the last paragraph.

I quickly typed Kim’s name into the search box to see if CNN had dragged any new tidbits into their net. They had not.

I opened a can of Pringles, ate just one, made coffee with the complimentary drip coffeemaker, then pecked away at the Internet
some more.

I found Doug Cahill videos on YouTube: frat house clips and locker-room antics, and a video of Kim sitting in the stands at
a football game, clapping and stomping. The camera went back and forth between her and shots of Cahill playing against the
New York Giants, nearly decapitating Eli Manning.

I tried to imagine Cahill killing Kim, and I couldn’t rule out that a guy who could slam into three hundred pounders was a
guy who could get physical with a resistant girl and accidentally, or on purpose, break her neck.

But, in my heart, I believed that Cahill’s tears were real, that he loved Kim, and, logically, if he
had
killed her he had the means to get lost anywhere in the world by now.

So I sent my browser out to search for the name the female tipster had whispered in my ear, the suspected arms trader, Nils
— middle name, Ostertag — Bjorn. The search returned the same leads I’d gotten the day before, but this time I opened the
articles that were written in Swedish.

Using an online dictionary, I translated the Swedish words for “munitions” and “body armor,” and then I found another photo
of Bjorn dated three years earlier.

It was a candid shot of the man with the regular, almost forgettable, features getting out of a Ferrari in Geneva. He was
wearing a handsome chalk-striped suit under a well-cut topcoat, carrying a Gucci briefcase. Bjorn looked different in this
photo from the way he looked at the industrialist’s black-tie dinner, because Bjorn’s hair was now blond. White blond.

I clicked on the last of the articles about Nils Ostertag Bjorn, and another photo filled my screen, this one of a man in
a military uniform. He looked about twenty or so, had wide-spaced eyes and a boxy chin. But he looked nothing like the other
photos of Nils Bjorn I’d seen.

I read the text beneath the photo and made out the Swedish words for “Persian Gulf” and “enemy fire,” and then it hit me.

I was reading an obituary.

Nils Ostertag Bjorn had been dead for fifteen years.

I went to the shower, let the hot water beat down on my head as I tried to fit the pieces together. Was this simply a case
of two men with the same unusual name? Or had someone using a dead man’s identity checked into the Wailea Princess?