Swimsuit - James Patterson [63]
I sat up on the foldaway bed, and Henri lit the stove, beat the eggs in a bowl, made the frying pan sizzle. After I’d eaten, we began work under the awning. I kept turning it over in my mind: Henri had confessed to a murder. Somewhere, a fourteen-year-old girl had been strangled at a county fair. A record of her death would still exist.
Would Henri really let me live knowing about that girl?
Henri went back to the story of Molly, picked up where he’d left off the night before.
He was animated, using his hands to show me how he’d dragged Molly’s body into the woods, buried it under piles of leaves, said that he was imagining the fear that would spread from the fairgrounds to the surrounding towns when Molly was reported missing.
Henri said that he’d joined the search for Molly, put up posters, went to the candlelight vigil, all the while cherishing his secret, that he’d killed Molly and had gotten away with it.
He described the girl’s funeral, the white coffin under the blanket of flowers, how he’d watched the people crying, but especially Molly’s family, her mother and father, the siblings.
“I wondered what it must be like to have those feelings,” he told me.
“You know about the most famous of the serial killers, don’t you, Ben? Gacy, BTK, Dahmer, Bundy. They were all run by their sexual compulsions. I was thinking last night that it’s important for the book to make a distinction between those killers and me.”
“Wait a minute, Henri. You told me how you felt raping and killing Molly. That video of you and Kim McDaniels? Are you telling me now you that you’re not like those other guys? How does that follow?”
“You’re missing the point. Pay attention, Ben. This is critical. I’ve killed dozens of people and had sex with most of them. But except for Molly, when I’ve killed I’ve done it for money.”
It was good that my recorder was taking it all down because my mind was split into three parts: The writer, figuring out how to join Henri’s anecdotes into a compelling narrative. The cop, looking for clues to Henri’s identity from what he told me, what he left out, and from the psychological blind spots he didn’t know that he had. And the part of my brain that was working the hardest, the survivor.
Henri said that he killed for money, but he’d killed Molly out of anger. He’d warned me that he would kill me if I didn’t do what he said. He could break his own rules at any time.
I listened. I tried to learn Henri Benoit in all of his dimensions. But mostly, I was figuring out what I had to do to survive.
Chapter 83
HENRI CAME BACK to the trailer with sandwiches and a bottle of wine. After he uncorked the bottle, I asked him, “How does your arrangement with the Peepers work?”
“They call themselves the Alliance,” Henri said. He poured out two glasses, handed one to me.
“I called them ‘the Peepers’ once and was given a lesson: no work, no pay.” He put on a mock German accent. “You are a bad boy, Henri. Don’t trifle with us.”
“So the Alliance is German.”
“One of the members is German. Horst Werner. That name is probably an alias. I never checked. Another of the Peepers, Jan Van der Heuvel, is Dutch.
“Listen, that could be an alias, too. It goes without saying, you’ll change all the names for the book, right, Ben? But these people are not so stupid as to leave their own breadcrumbs.”
“Of course. I understand.”
He nodded, then went on. His agitation was gone, but his voice was harder now. I couldn’t find a crack in it.
“There are several others in the Alliance. I don’t know who they are. They live in cyberspace. Well, one I know very well. Gina Prazzi. She recruited me.”
“That sounds interesting. You were recruited? Tell me about Gina.”
Henri sipped at his wine, then began to tell me about meeting a beautiful woman after his four years in the Iraqi prison.
“I was having lunch in a sidewalk bistro in Paris when I noticed this tall, slender, extraordinary woman at a nearby table.
“She had very white skin, and her sunglasses were pushed up into her thick brown hair. She had high breasts and long