Swimsuit - James Patterson [35]
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?”
Chapter 44
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?
If so, had he abducted and possibly murdered Kim McDaniels?
Chapter 45