“What the hell is this?” I asked him. “Barbara and Levon left town, and you didn’t know where they were going?”
It sounded like an accusation. I didn’t mean it that way, but my panic had risen to the high-water mark and it was still climbing. Hawaii had a low crime rate. And now, in the space of a week, two girls were dead. Kim was still missing, and her parents and driver were missing, too.
“I told Barbara it should be me following that lead on Oahu,” Keola said. “Those backpacker joints are remote and kind of rough. But Levon talked me out of it. He said that he wanted me to spend my time here looking for Kim.”
Keola was snapping his wristband, chewing his lip. The two of us, ex-cops without portfolio, were trying desperately to make sense out of thin air.
Chapter 54
IT WAS BECOMING a three-ring circus in the lobby of the Wailea Princess. A queue of German tourists had lined up at the desk, a flock of little kids were begging the gardener to let them feed the koi, even a presentation on tourist attractions was going on thirty feet away, slides and film and native music.
Eddie Keola and I might as well have been invisible. No one even looked at us.
I started ticking off the facts, linking Rosa to Kim, Kim to Julia, and to the driver, Marco Benevenuto, who had lied to me and the McDanielses — who were missing.
“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.”
Chapter 55
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 c
hanged 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.
Chapter 56
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.”
Chapter 57
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.
Part Three
BODY COUNT
Chapter 58
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.
“Your suite is ready for you, Mr. Meile. Welcome back to the Pradha Han.”
“Delighted to be here,” Henri said. He pushed his horn-rimmed glasses to the top of his head as he signed the credit card slip. “Did you keep the gulf warm for me, Rahpee?”
“Oh, yes sir. We would not disappoint our precious guest.”
Henri opened the door to the luxury suite, undressed in the lavish bedroom, tossing his clothes onto the king-size bed under the mosquito netting. He wrapped himself in a silk robe and sampled chocolates and dried mango as he watched BBC World News, thrilling to the update on “the killing spree in Hawaii that continues to confound police.”
> He was thinking, That should make the Peepers happy, when the door chimes announced the arrival of his special friends.
Aroon and Sakda, slight boys in their early teens with short hair and golden skin, bowed to greet the man they knew as Mr. Paul Meile. Then they laughed and threw their arms around him as he called them by name.
The massage table was set up on the private balcony facing the beach, and as the boys smoothed the sheets and got oils and lotions out of their bags, Henri set up his video camera and framed the scene.
Aroon helped Henri out of his robe, and Sakda folded the sheets over his lower body, and then the boys began the specialty of the Pradha Han spa, the four-hand massage.
Henri sighed as the boys worked in tandem, stroking across the grain of his muscles, working in the Hmong cream, rubbing away his tensions of the past week. Hornbills screeched in the jungle, and the air was scented with jasmine. This was one of the most delicious of sensory experiences, and it was why he came to Hua Hin at least once a year.
The boys turned Henri over and pulled at his arms down to the pads of his fingers in unison, did the same with his legs and feet, stroked his brow, until Henri opened his eyes, and said in Thai, “Aroon, will you bring me my wallet from the dresser?”
When Aroon returned, Henri took a stack of bills out of the wallet, quite a lot more than the few hundred baht he owed for the massage. He waggled the money in front of the boys’ faces, asked, “Would you like to stay and play some games?”
The boys giggled and helped the rich gentleman sit up on the massage table.
“What games would you like to play, Daddy?” Sakda asked.
Henri explained what he was thinking, and they nodded and clapped their hands, seeming very excited to be part of his enjoyment. He kissed their palms, each in turn.
He just loved these sweet boys.
It was a true joy to be with them.