Swimsuit - James Patterson [43]
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,