Swimsuit (14 page)

“What do you think, Eddie? Do you see the connection? Or am I fanning the flames of my overheated imagination?”

Keola sighed loudly, and said, “Tell you the truth, Ben, I’m in over my head. Don’t look at me like that. I do cheating husbands.
Insurance claims. What do you think? Maui is Los Angeles?”

I said, “Work on your friend, Lieutenant Jackson, why don’t you?”

“I will. I’ll get him to reach out to the PD in Oahu, get a serious search going for Barb and Levon. If he won’t do it, I’ll
go over his head. My dad’s a judge.”

“That must come in handy.”

“Damned right it does.”

Keola said he’d call me, then left me sitting with my phone in my lap. I stared across the open lobby to the dark aqua sea.
I could see the outline of Lanai through the morning mist, the small island where Julia Winkler’s life had been snuffed out.

It was five a.m. in L.A., but I had to talk to Amanda.

“Wassup, buttercup?” she slurred into the phone.

“Bad stuff, honeybee.”

I told her about this latest shocker, how it felt like spiders were using my spine as a speedway, and no, I hadn’t had anything
stronger to drink than guava juice in three days.

“Kim would have shown up by now if she could do it,” I told Amanda. “I don’t know the who, where, why, when, or how, but honest
to God, honey, I think I know the what.”

“ ‘Serial Killer in Paradise.’ The story you’ve been waiting for. Maybe a book.”

I hardly heard her. The elusive fact that had been bothering me since I turned on the TV two hours before lit up in my mind
like it was made of bright red neon.
Charles Rollins.
The name of the man last seen with Julia Winkler.

I knew that name.

I told Amanda to hold on a sec, got my wallet out of my back pocket, and, with a shaking hand, I sorted through the business
cards I’d stashed behind the small plastic window.

“Mandy.”

“I’m here. Are you?”

“A photographer named Charles Rollins came up to me at the Rosa Castro crime scene. He was from a
Talk Weekly
magazine, Loxahatchee, Florida. The cops think he may have been the last person to have seen Julia Winkler alive. He’s nowhere
to be found.”

“You talked to him? You could identify him?”

“Maybe. I need a favor.”

“Boot up my laptop?”

“Please.”

I waited, my cell phone pressed so hard against my ear that I could hear the toilet flush in L.A. Finally, my beloved’s voice
came back on the line.

She cleared her throat, said, “Benjy, there are forty pages of Charles Rollinses on Google, gotta be two thousand guys by
that name, a hundred in Florida. But there’s no listing for a magazine called
Talk Weekly.
Not in Loxahatchee. Not anywhere.”

“For the hell of it, let’s send him an e-mail.”

I read her Rollins’s e-mail address, dictated a message.

Seconds later Amanda said, “It bounced back, Benjy. ‘ Mailer-Daemon. Unknown e-mail address.’ What now?”

“I’ll call you later. I’ve got to go to the police.”

HENRI SAT two rows back from the cockpit in a spanking new charter jet that was almost empty. He watched through the window
as the sleek little aircraft lifted smoothly off the runway and took to the wide blue and white sky above Honolulu.

He sipped champagne, said yes to caviar and toast points from the hostess, and when the pilot made his all-clear announcement
Henri opened his laptop on the tabletop in front of him.

The miniature video camera he’d affixed to the rearview mirror of the car had been sacrificed, but before it was destroyed
by the flooding seawater, it had sent the video wirelessly to his computer.

Henri was dying to see the dailies.

He put in his earbuds and opened the MPV file.

He almost said “wow” out loud. The pictures unfurling on his computer screen were
that
beautiful. The interior of the car glowed from the dome light. Barbara and Levon were softly lit, and the sound quality was
excellent.

Because Henri had been in the front seat, he was not in the shot — and he liked that. No mask. No distortion. Just his disembodied
voice, sometimes as Marco, sometimes as Andrew, at all times reasoning with the victims.

“I told Kim how beautiful she was, Barbara, as I made love to her. I gave her something to drink so she wouldn’t feel pain.
Your daughter was a lovely person, very sweet. You don’t have to think she did anything to deserve being killed.”

“I don’t believe you killed her,” Levon said. “You’re a freak. A pathological liar!”

“I gave you her watch, Levon.… Okay, then,
look at this.
”

Henri had opened his cell phone, and showed them the photo of his hand holding Kim’s head by the roots of her wild blond hair.

“Try to understand,” he said, talking over Barb and Levon’s insufferable wailing and snuffling. “This is business. The people
I work for pay a lot of money to see people die.”

Barbara was gagging and sobbing, telling him to stop, but Levon was in a different kind of hell, clearly trying to balance
his grief and horror with a desire to keep the two of them alive.

He’d said, “Let us go, Henri. We don’t know who you really are. We can’t hurt you.”

Henri had said, “It’s not that I
want
to kill you, Levon. It’s about the money. Yes. I make money by killing
you.
”

“I can get you money,” Levon said. “I’ll beat their offer. I will!”

And now there on his laptop, Barbara was pleading for her boys. Henri stopped her, saying it was time for him to go.

He’d stepped on the gas, the soft tires rolling easily over the sand, the car plowing into the surf. When it had good momentum,
Henri had gotten out of the car, walked alongside it, until the water rose up to the windshield.

Inside, the camera on the rearview had recorded the McDanielses begging, the water sloshing over the window frames, rising
up the seats where the McDanielses’ arms were locked behind them, their bodies lashed in place with the seat belts.

Still he’d given them hope.

“I’m leaving the light on so you can record your goodbyes,” he heard himself saying on the small screen. “And someone on the
road
could
see you. You could be rescued. Don’t count it out. But if I were you, I’d pray for that.”

He had wished them luck, then waded back up to the beach. He’d stood under the trees and watched the car sink completely in
only about three minutes. Faster than he would have guessed. Merciful. So maybe there was a God after all.

When the dome light winked out, he’d changed his clothes, then walked up the highway until he caught a ride.

Now he closed his laptop, finished the champagne as the hostess handed him the lunch menu. He decided on the duck
à l’orange,
put on his Bose speakers, and listened to some Brahms. Soothing. Beautiful. Perfect.

The last few days had been exceptional, a fantastic drama every minute, a highlight of his life.

He was quite sure everybody would be happy.

HOURS LATER, Henri Benoit was in the washroom of the first-class flight lounge at Honolulu International. The first leg of
his flight had been a pleasure, and he was looking forward to the same for his flight to Bangkok.

He washed his hands, checked out his new persona in the mirror. He was a Swiss businessman based in Geneva. His white-blond
hair was short, his eyeglass frames were large and horn-rimmed, giving him an erudite look, and he wore a five-thousand-dollar
suit with some fine handmade English shoes.

He had just sent a few frames of the McDanielses’ last moments to the Peepers, knowing that by this time tomorrow, there would
be a good many more euros in his bank account in Zurich.

Henri left the washroom, went to the main waiting area in the lounge, set his briefcase beside him, and relaxed in a soft
gray chair. Breaking news was coming over the television, a cable news special. The anchorwoman Gloria Roja was reporting
on a crime that she said “evoked horror and outrage.”

She went on, “A young woman’s decapitated body has been founded in a rental cabin on a beach in Maui. Sources close to the
police department say the victim has been dead for several days.”

Roja turned to the large screen behind her and introduced a local reporter, Kai McBride, on the ground in Maui.

McBride said into the camera, “This morning, Ms. Maura Aluna, the owner of this beach camp, found the decapitated head and
body of a young woman inside. Ms. Aluna told police that she had rented her house to a man over the telephone and that his
credit card cleared. Any minute now, we expect Lieutenant Jackson of the Kihei PD to make a statement.”

McBride turned away briefly from the camera, then said, “Gloria, Lieutenant James Jackson is coming out of the house
now.
”

McBride ran, and her cameraman ran right alongside her, the picture jiggling. McBride shouted, “Lieutenant, Lieutenant Jackson,
can you give us a minute?”

The camera closed in on the lieutenant.

“I have nothing to say to the press at this time.”

“I have just
one
question, sir.”

Henri leaned forward in his seat in the flight lounge, transfixed by the dramatic scene that was unfolding on the large screen.

He was witnessing the endgame in real time. This was just too good to be true. What he’d do later is lift the broadcast from
the network’s Web site, cut it into his video. He’d have the whole Hawaiian saga, the beginning, middle, phenomenal ending,
and now — this epilogue.

Henri quashed a giddy desire to say to the guy sitting two seats away, “Look at that cop, would you? That Lieutenant Jackson.
His skin is
green.
I think he’s going to throw up.”

On screen, the reporter persisted.

“Lieutenant Jackson, is it Kim? Is the body you found that of the supermodel Kim McDaniels?”

Jackson spoke, tripping over his words. “No comment at this,
on
this. We’re right in the middle of something,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of moves we have to make. Will you turn that thing
off? We never comment on an ongoing investigation, McBride. You
know
that.”

Kai McBride turned back to the camera.

“I’m going to take a wild flying leap and say that Lieutenant Jackson’s no-comment dodgeball was a confirmation, Gloria. We’re
all waiting now for a positive ID that the victim
was
Kim McDaniels. This is Kai McBride, reporting from Maui.”

THAT MORNING at low tide the roof of a car had looked at first to the passing jogger like the shell of a giant sea turtle.
When he realized what it was, he’d called the police and they’d responded in force.

Now the crane had lowered the waterlogged car to the beach. The fire department crew, search and rescue, and cops from two
islands were standing in groups on the sand, watching the Pacific flow out of the chassis.

A cop opened one of the back doors and called out, “Two DBs wearing their seat belts. I recognize them. Jesus God. It’s the
McDanielses. The parents.”

My stomach dropped, and I spewed a string of curse words that didn’t make any literal sense, just me venting all the bile
I could without getting physically violent or sick.

Eddie Keola was standing beside me outside the yellow tape that ran from a branch of driftwood to a chunk of lava rock thirty
yards away. Keola was not only my ticket to police intel and crime scenes, but I was starting to think of him as the younger
brother I never had.

Actually, we looked nothing alike, except that we both looked like shit right now.

More vehicles pulled up, some with sirens, some without, all braking on the potholed asphalt running above and parallel to
the beach, a road that had been closed for repairs.

These new additions to the law enforcement fleet were black SUVs, and the men who got out of them wore jackets stenciled “FBI.”

A cop friend of Eddie’s came over to us, said, “Only thing I can tell you is that the McDanielses were seen having dinner
at the Kamehameha Hostel. They were with a white man, six foot or so, grayish hair and glasses. They left with him, and that’s
all we’ve got. Based on that description, the guy they had dinner with could’ve been anyone.”

“Thanks,” said Eddie.

“It’s okay, but now you guys really have to leave.”

Eddie and I walked up a sandy ramp to Eddie’s Jeep.

I was glad to go.

I didn’t want to see the corpses of those two good people I’d come to care about so very much. Eddie drove me back to the
Marriott, and we sat in the lot for a while just chewing it over.

The deaths of everyone attached to this crime spree had been premeditated, calculated, almost artistic, the work of a very
smart and practiced killer who’d left no clues behind. I felt sorry for the people who had to solve this crime. And now Aronstein
was terminating my all-expenses-paid Hawaiian holiday.

“When’s your flight?” Keola asked.

“Around two.”

“Want me to drive you? I’d be happy to do it.”

“Thanks, anyway. I’ve got to return my car.”

“I’m sorry how this turned out,” said Keola.

“This is going to be one of those cases, if it gets solved at all, it’ll be like… seventeen years from now. A deathbed confession,”
I said. “Or a deal with a jailhouse snitch.”

A little while later, I said good-bye to Eddie, threw my things together, and checked out of the hotel. I was going back to
L.A. unresolved and disconsolate, feeling like I’d left a big piece of myself behind. I would’ve bet anything I owned that
for me, at least, the story was over.

I was wrong again.

BODY COUNT

THE VERY GOOD-LOOKING gentleman with the white-blond hair walked down a red, silk-lined corridor ending in a breeze-swept
lobby. A stone desk rose out of the floor at the far end of the room, and a young clerk received the guest with a smile and
lowered eyes.