Swimsuit - James Patterson [56]
Zagami went on to say that Keller got late-night threats at home, TV producers calling his cell phone. His company’s stock went down the toilet, and Keller had a heart attack.
My own heart was starting to fibrillate. Leonard thought that either Henri was lying or I was stretching a newspaper article beyond reality.
Either way, he was turning me down.
Hadn’t Leonard heard what I said? Henri had threatened to kill me and Amanda. Len took a breath, so I seized the moment.
“Len, I’m going to say something very important.”
“Go ahead, because unfortunately, I only have five more minutes.”
“I questioned it, too. Wondered if Henri was really a killer, or if he’s a talented con man, seeing in me the grift of a lifetime.”
“Exactly,” Len said.
“Well, Henri is for real. And I can prove it to you.”
I put the media card on the desk.
“What’s that?”
“Everything you need to know and more. I want you to meet Henri for yourself.”
Len inserted the flash drive, and his computer screen went from black to a shot of a dusky yellow room, candles burning, a bed centered on a wall. The camera zoomed in on a slender young woman lying belly-down on the bed. She had long, pale blond hair, wore a red bikini and black shoes with red soles. She was hog-tied with intricately knotted ropes. She seemed drugged or sleeping, but when the man entered the frame she began crying.
The man was naked except for a plastic mask and blue latex gloves.
I didn’t want to see the video again. I walked to the glass wall that looked straight down the well of the atrium, from the forty-third floor to the tiny people who crossed the plaza on the ground floor below.
I heard the voices coming from the computer, heard Leonard gag. I turned to see him make a run for the door. When he returned a few minutes later, Leonard was as pale as a sheet of paper, and he was changed.
Chapter 73
LEONARD DROPPED BACK into the seat behind his desk, yanked out the flash drive, stared at it like it was the snake in the Garden of Eden.
“Take this back,” he said. “Let’s agree that I never saw it. I don’t want to be any kind of accessory after the fact or God knows what. Have you told the police? The FBI?”
“Henri said that if I did, he’d kill me, kill Amanda, too. I can’t take that chance.”
“I understand now. You’re sure that the girl in that video is Kim McDaniels?”
“Yeah. That’s Kim.”
Len picked up the phone, canceled his twelve-thirty meeting, and cleared the rest of his afternoon. He ordered sandwiches from the kitchen, and we moved to the seating area at the far side of his office.
Len said, “Okay, start at the beginning. Don’t leave out a bloody period or comma.”
So I did. I told Len about the last-minute Hawaiian boondoggle that had turned out to be a murder mystery times five. I told him about becoming friends with Barbara and Levon McDaniels and about being deceived by Henri’s alter egos, Marco Benevenuto and Charlie Rollins.
Emotion jammed up my voice box when I talked about the dead bodies, and also when I told Len how Henri had forced me into my apartment at gunpoint, then showed me the pictures he’d taken of Amanda.
“How much does Henri want for his story? Did he give you a number?”
I told Len that Henri was talking about multimillions, and my editor didn’t flinch. In the past half hour, he had gone from skeptic to inside bidder. From the light in his eyes, I thought he’d sized up the market for this book and saw his budget gap being overwhelmed by a mountain of cash.
“What’s the next step?” he asked me.
“Henri said he’d be in touch. I’m certain he will be. That’s all I know so far.”
Len called Eric Zohn, Raven-Wofford’s chief legal counsel, and soon a tall, thin, nervous man in his forties joined our meeting.
Len and I briefed Eric on “the assassin’s legacy,” and Zohn threw up objections.
Zohn cited the “Son of Sam” law that held that a killer can’t profit