Swimsuit - James Patterson [67]
“We’ve got to cover a lot of ground tonight,” he said.
I was thinking that by noon of the next day, I could be in Venice Beach watching the bodybuilders and the thong girls, the skaters and bikers on the winding concrete paths through the beach and along the shore. I thought of the dogs with kerchiefs and sunglasses, the toddlers on their trikes, and that I’d have huevos rancheros with extra salsa at Scotty’s with Mandy.
I’d tell her everything.
Henri put a burger and a bottle of ketchup in front of me, said, “Here ya go, Mr. Meat and Potatoes.” He started making coffee.
The little voice in my head said, You’re not home yet.
Chapter 88
THE KIND OF LISTENING you do when interviewing is very different from the casual kind. I had to focus on what Henri was saying, how it fit into the story, decide if I needed elaboration on that subject or if we had to move along.
Fatigue was coming over me like fog, and I fought it off with coffee, keeping my goal in sight. Get it down and get out of here alive.
Henri backtracked over the story of his service with the military contractor, Brewster-North. He told me how he’d brought several languages to the table and that he’d learned several more while working for them.
He told me how he’d formed a relationship with his forger in Beirut. And then his shoulders sagged as he detailed his imprisonment, the executions of his friends.
I asked questions, placed Gina Prazzi in the time line. I asked Henri if Gina knew his real identity, and he told me no. He’d used the name that matched the papers his forger had given him: Henri Benoit from Montreal.
“Have you stayed in contact with Gina?”
“I haven’t seen her for years. Not since Rome,” he said. “She doesn’t fraternize with the help.”
We worked forward from his three-month-long romance with Gina to the contract killings he did for the Alliance, a string of murders that went back over four years.
“I mostly killed young women,” Henri told me. “I moved around, changed my identity often. You remember how I do that, Ben.”
He started ticking off the bodies, the string of young girls in Jakarta, a Sabra in Tel Aviv.
“What a fighter, that Sabra. My God. She almost killed me.”
I felt the natural arc of the story. I felt excited as I saw how I would organize the draft, almost forgot for a while that this wasn’t some kind of movie pitch.
The murders were real.
Henri’s gun was loaded even now.
I numbered tapes and changed them, made notes that would remind me to ask follow-up questions as Henri listed his kills; the young prostitutes in Korea and Venezuela and Bangkok.
He explained that he’d always loved film and that making movies for the Alliance had made him an even better killer. The murders became more complex and cinematic.
“Don’t you worry that those films are out in the world?”
“I always disguise my face,” he told me. “Either I wear a mask as I did with Kim, or I work on the video with a blur tool. The software that I use makes editing out my face very easy.”
He told me that his years with Brewster-North had taught him to leave the weapons and the bodies on the scene (Rosa was the one exception), and that even though there was no record of his fingerprints, he made sure never to leave anything of himself behind. He always wore a condom, taking no chances that the police might take DNA samples from his semen and begin to link his crimes.
Henri told me about killing Julia Winkler, how much he loved her. I stifled a smart-ass comment about what it meant to be loved by Henri. And he told me about the McDanielses, and how he admired them as well. At that point, I wanted to jump up and try to strangle him.
“Why, Henri, why did you have to kill them?” I finally asked.
“It was part of a film sequence I was making for the Peepers, what we called a documentary. Maui was a big payout, Ben. Just a few days’ work for much more than you make in a year.”
“But the work itself, how did you feel about taking all of those lives? By my count, you’ve killed thirty people.”
“I may have left out a few,” Henri said.
Chapter 89
IT