Swimsuit - James Patterson [90]
And then I saw him.
Horst Werner, the terror who Van der Heuvel had described as a man with long arms and steel fists, “the last man you’d ever want to meet,” came out of his house of stone. He was barrel-chested, with a goatee and gold wire-framed glasses, and he wore a blue overcoat. Even with his hands folded on top of his head, he had a confident “military” bearing.
This was the twisted man behind it all, the master voyeur, the murderer’s murderer, the Wizard of some hellacious, perverted Oz.
He was alive, and he was under arrest.
Chapter 121
HORST WERNER WAS BUNDLED into an armored car, and Swiss cops piled in behind him. I went with two Interpol investigators in another. An hour after the takedown, we arrived at the police station in Bern, and the questioning of Horst Werner began.
I watched anxiously from a small observation chamber with a window onto the interrogation room.
As Werner waited for his lawyer to arrive, his face streamed with sweat. I knew that the heat had been turned up, that the front legs of Werner’s chair were shorter than the back, and that Captain Voelker, who was questioning him, was not getting much information.
A young officer stood behind my chair and interpreted for me. “Herr Werner says, ‘I do not know Henri Benoit. I haven’t killed anyone! I watch, but I do nothing.’ ”
Captain Voelker left the interrogation room briefly and returned holding what looked like a CD. Voelker spoke to Werner, and my interpreter told me that this disc had been found inside a DVD player, along with a cache of other discs in Werner’s library. Werner’s face stiffened as Voelker inserted the disc into a player.
What video was this? The Gina Prazzi murder? Maybe some other killing by Henri?
I angled my chair so that I could see the monitor, and I took a deep breath.
A man’s bowed head came on the screen. I could see him from the crown of his skull to the middle of his T-shirt. When he lifted his swollen and bloodied face, he turned away from the camera, away from me.
From the one brief glimpse, the man looked to be in his thirties and had no distinguishing features.
An interrogation was clearly in progress. I felt the most extreme tension as I watched. Off camera, a voice said, “ Onnn-reee, say the words.”
My heart jumped. Was it him? Had Henri been caught?
The bloodied prisoner said to his questioner, “I’m not Henri. My name is Antoine Pascal. You’ve got the wrong man.”
“It’s not hard to say, is it, Henri?” asked the voice from the wings. “Just say the words, and maybe we will let you go.”
“I tell you, I’m not Henri. My identification is in my pocket. Get my wallet.”
The interrogator finally came into view. He looked to be in his twenties, dark-haired, had a spiderweb tattooed on his neck and the inked netting continued to his left cheek. He adjusted the camera lens so that there was a wide shot of the bare, windowless room, a cellar lit by a single bulb. The subject was hog-tied to a chair.
The tattooed man said, “Okay, ‘Antoine.’ We’ve seen your ID, and we admire how you can become someone else. But I am getting tired of the game. Say it or don’t say it. I give you to the count of three.”
The tattooed man held a long, serrated knife in his hand, and he slapped it against his thigh as he counted. Then he said, “Time is up. I think this is what you’ve always wanted, Henri. To know that moment between life and death. Correct?”
The voice I’d heard from the hostage was familiar. So was the look in his pale gray eyes. It was Henri. I knew it now.
Suddenly I was filled with horror as I realized what was going to happen. I wanted to shout out to Henri, express some emotion that I didn’t understand myself.
I had been prepared to kill him, but I was not capable of this. I couldn’t just watch.
Henri spit at the lens, and the tattooed man grabbed a hank of his brown hair. He pulled his neck taut. “Say the words!” he yelled.
Then he made four powerful sawing strokes at the back of Henri’s neck with the knife, separating the screaming man’s head from