Her screams were washed away by the ocean's roar, just as he had imagined they would be, and when they were done, he reached into the duffel bag and took out a knife with a serrated blade. Put the knife down on the towel beside them.
“What's that for?” Julia asked.
“Can't be too careful,” Charlie said, shrugging off the question. “In case some bad guy is creeping around.”
He raked back her short hair, kissed her closed eyes, put his arms around the naked girl, and warmed her up with his skin. “Go to sleep, Julia,” he said. “You're safe with me.”
“It gets better from here?” she teased.
“Piggy.”
She laughed, snuggled against his chest. Charlie pulled the towel up over her eyes. Julia thought he was talking to her when he said into the camera lens, “Is everybody happy?”
“Totally, completely happy,” she said with a sigh.
Chapter 41
Another wrenching twenty-four hours passed for Levon and Barbara, and I felt helpless to ease their despair. The news shows were running the same old clips when I went to bed that night, and I was somewhere, deep in a troubling dream, when the phone rang.
Eddie Keola spoke to me, saying, “Ben, don't call the McDanielses on this. Just meet me in front of your hotel in ten minutes.”
Keola's Jeep was running when I jogged out into the warm night, then quickly climbed up into the passenger seat.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“A beach called Makena Landing. The cops may have found something. Or somebody.”
Ten minutes later, Eddie parked along the curving roadside behind six police cruisers, vans from the Special Response Team and the coroner's office. Below us was a semicircle of beach, a cove that was bounded by fingers of lava rock before tapering out into the ocean.
A helicopter hovered noisily overhead, beaming its spotlight on the scramble of law enforcement people moving like stick figures along the shoreline.
Keola and I made our way down to the beach, and I saw that a fire department rescue vehicle had backed down to the water's edge. There were inflatable boats in the water, and a scuba team was going down.
I was sickened at the thought that Kim's body was submerged there and that she had disappeared to get away from an old boyfriend.
Keola interrupted my reverie to introduce me to a Detective Palikapu, a heavyset young cop in a Maui PD jacket.
“Those campers over there,” Palikapu said, pointing to a cluster of children and adults on the far side of the lava-rock jetty. “They saw something floating during the day.”
“A body, you mean,” said Keola.
“They thought it was a log or garbage at first. Then they saw some shark activity and called it in. Since then, the tides took whatever it is under the bubble rock and left it there. That's where the divers are now.”
Keola explained to me that the bubble rock was a shelf of lava with a concave undersurface. He said that sometimes people swam into caves like this one at low tide, didn't pay attention when the tide came in, and drowned.
Was that what had happened to Kim? Suddenly it seemed very possible.
TV vans were pulling up on the shoulder of the road, photographers and reporters clambering down to the beach, the cops stringing up yellow tape to keep the scene intact.
One of the photographers came up to me, introduced himself as Charlie Rollins. He said he was freelance and if I needed photos for the L.A. Times he could provide them.
I took his card, then turned in time to see the first divers coming out of the water. One of them had a bundle in his arms.
Keola said, “You're with me,” and we skirted the crime scene tape. We were standing on the lip of the shore when a boat came in.
The bright light from the chopper illuminated the body in the diver's arms. She was small, maybe a teenager or maybe a child. Her body was so bloated that I couldn't tell her age, but she was bound with ropes, hand and foot.
Lieutenant Jackson stepped forward and used a gloved hand to move the girl's long, dark hair away from her face.
I was relieved that the victim wasn't Kim McDaniels and that I didn't have to make a call to Levon and Barbara.
But my relief was swamped with an almost overwhelming sorrow. Clearly another girl, someone else's daughter, had been savagely murdered.
Chapter 42
A woman's high-pitched scream cut through the chopper's roar. I turned, saw a dark-skinned woman, five feet two or so, maybe a hundred pounds, make a run toward the yellow tape, crying out, “Rosa! Rosa! Madre de Dios, no!”
A man running close behind her shouted, “Isabel, don't go there. No, Isabel!” He caught up and pulled the woman into his arms and she beat at him with her fists, trying to break free, the cords in her neck stretched out as she cried, “No, no, no, mi bebé, mi bebé.”
Police surrounded the couple, the woman's frantic cries trailing behind as she was hustled away from the scene. The press, a pack of them, ran toward the parents of the dead child. You could almost see light glinting in their eyes. Pathetic.
Under other circumstances, I could've been part of that pack, but right then I was behind Eddie Keola, scrambling up the rocky slope to where media setups dotted the upper ledge. Local TV correspondents fed the breaking news to the cameras as the small, twisted body was transferred by stretcher into the coroner's van. Doors slammed and the van sped away.
“Her name was Rosa Castro,” Keola told me as we got into the Jeep. “She was twelve. Did you see those ligatures? Arms and legs tied back like that.”
I said, “Yeah. I saw.”
I'd seen and written about violence for nearly half my life, but this little girl's murder put such ugly pictures into my mind that I felt physically sick. I swallowed my bile and yanked the car door closed.
Keola started up the engine, headed north, saying, “See, this is why I didn't want to call the McDanielses. And if it had been Kim -”
His sentence was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. He patted his jacket pocket, put his phone to his ear, said, “Keola,” then “Levon, Levon. It's not Kim. Yes. I saw the body. I'm sure. It's not your daughter.” Eddie mouthed to me, “They're watching the news on TV.”
He told the McDanielses we would stop by their hotel, and minutes later we pulled up to the main entrance to the Wailea Princess.
Barb and Levon were under the breezeway, zephyrs riffling their hair and their new Hawaiian garb. They were holding each other's white-knuckled hands, their faces pale with fatigue.
We walked with them into the lobby. Keola explained, without going into the unspeakable details.
Barbara asked if there could be a connection between Rosa 's death and Kim's disappearance, her way of seeking assurances that no one could give her. But I tried to do it anyway. I said that pattern killers had preferences, and it would be rare for one of them to target both a child and a woman. Rare, but not unheard of, I neglected to add.
I wasn't just telling Barbara what she wanted to hear, I was also comforting myself. At that time, I didn't know that Rosa Castro's killer had a wide-ranging and boundless appetite for torture and murder.
And it never entered my mind that I'd already met and talked with him.
Chapter 43
Horst tasted the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, bought at Sotheby's for $24,000 per bottle in 2001. He told Jan to hold out his glass. It was a joke. Jan was hundreds of miles away, but their webcam connection almost made it seem as if they were in the same room.
The occasion of this meeting: Henri Benoit had written to Horst saying to expect a download at nine p.m., and Horst had invited Jan, his friend of many years, to preview the newest video before sending it out to the rest of the Alliance.