Swimsuit - James Patterson [42]
When he got off the phone, Keola and I told Casey our problem — that we couldn’t locate two of the hotel guests and we couldn’t locate their hotel-comped driver, either. I said that we were concerned for the McDanielses’ safety.
The manager shook his head, and said, “We don’t have any drivers on staff and we never hired anyone to drive Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels. Not somebody named Marco Benevenuto. Not anyone. We don’t do that and never have.”
I was stunned into an openmouthed silence. Keola asked, “Why would this driver tell the McDanielses he’d been hired and paid for by your hotel?”
“I don’t know the man,” said the manager. “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him.”
Keola flashed his ID, saying he was employed by the McDanielses, and asked to be let into their room.
After clearing Keola with the head of security, Casey agreed. I took a phone book to a plush chair in the lobby.
There were five limousine services on Maui, and I’d worked my way through all of them by the time Eddie Keola sat down heavily in the chair beside me.
“No one’s ever heard of Marco Benevenuto,” I told him. “I can’t find a listing for him in all of Hawaii.”
“The McDanielses’ room is empty, too,” Keola said. “Like they were never there.”
“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