Swimsuit - James Patterson [68]
“I’ve become interested in the fleeting moment between life and death,” he said. I thought about the headless chickens from his childhood, the asphyxiation games he played after killing Molly.
Henri told me more, more than I wanted to know.
“There was a tribe in the Amazon,” he continued. “They would tie a noose high under the jaws of their victims, right under their ears. The other end of the rope was secured around the tops of bent saplings.
“When they cut off a victim’s head, it was carried upward by the young tree snapping back into place. These Indians believed this was a good death. That their victim’s last sensation would be of flying.
“Do you know about a killer who lived in Germany in the early nineteen hundreds?” Henri asked me. “Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf.”
I had never heard of the man.
“He was a plain-looking guy whose first kill was a small girl he found sleeping while he robbed her parents’ house. He strangled her, opened her throat with a knife, and got off on the blood spouting from her arteries. This was the start of a career that makes Jack the Ripper look like an amateur.”
Henri described how Kurten killed too many people to count, both sexes, men, women, and children, used all kinds of instruments, and at the heart of it all, he was turned on by blood.
“Before Peter Kurten was executed by guillotine,” Henri said to me, “he asked the prison psychiatrist — wait. Let me get this right. Okay. Kurten asked if, after his head was chopped off” — Henri put up fingers as quotation marks — ‘If I could hear the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck. That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.’ ”
“Henri, are you saying the moment between life and death is what makes you want to kill?”
“I think so. About three years ago, I killed a couple in Big Sur. I knotted ropes high up under their jaws,” he said, demonstrating with the V between thumb and index finger of his hand. “I tied the other end of the ropes to the blades of a ceiling fan. I cut their heads off with a machete, and the fan spun with their heads attached.
“I think the Peepers knew that I was very special when they saw that film,” Henri said. “I raised my fee, and they paid. But I still wonder about those two lovers. I wonder if they felt that they were flying as they died.”
Chapter 90
EXHAUSTION DRAGGED ME down as the sun came up. We’d worked straight through the night, and although I heavily sugared my coffee and drank it down to the dregs, my eyelids drooped and the small world of the trailer on the rumpled acres of sand blurred.
I said, “This is important, Henri.”
I completely lost what I was going to say — and Henri prompted me by shaking my shoulder. “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”
It was the question that would be asked by the reader at the beginning of the book, and it had to be answered at the end. I asked, “Why do you want to write this book?”
Then I put my head down on the small table, just for a minute.
I heard Henri moving around the trailer, thought I saw him wiping down surfaces. I heard him talking, but I wasn’t sure he was talking to me.
When I woke up, the clock on the microwave read ten after eleven.
I called out to Henri, and when he didn’t answer I struggled out of my cramped spot behind the table and opened the trailer door.
The truck was gone.
I left the trailer and looked in all directions. The sludge began to clear from the gears in my brain, and I went back inside. My laptop and briefcase were on the kitchen counter. The piles of tapes that I’d carefully labeled in sequence were in neat stacks. My tape recorder was plugged into the outlet — and then I saw the note next to the machine.
Ben: Play this.
I pushed the Play button and heard Henri’s voice.
“Good morning, partner. I hope you had a good rest. You needed it, and so I gave you a sedative to help you sleep. You understand. I wanted some time alone.
“Now. You should take the trail to the west, fourteen