The hotel's day manager was a young guy wearing a smart hundred-dollar tie and a blue gabardine jacket with a name-tag reading “Joseph Casey.”
When he got off the phone, Keola and I told Casey our problem – that we couldn't locate two of the hotel guests and we couldn't locate their hotel-comped driver, either. I said that we were concerned for the McDanielses' safety.
The manager shook his head, and said, “We don't have any drivers on staff and we never hired anyone to drive Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels. Not somebody named Marco Benevenuto. Not anyone. We don't do that and never have.”
I was stunned into an openmouthed silence. Keola asked, “Why would this driver tell the McDanielses he'd been hired and paid for by your hotel?”
“I don't know the man,” said the manager. “I have no idea. You'll have to ask him.”
Keola flashed his ID, saying he was employed by the McDanielses, and asked to be let into their room.
After clearing Keola with the head of security, Casey agreed. I took a phone book to a plush chair in the lobby.
There were five limousine services on Maui, and I'd worked my way through all of them by the time Eddie Keola sat down heavily in the chair beside me.
“No one's ever heard of Marco Benevenuto,” I told him. “I can't find a listing for him in all of Hawaii.”
“The McDanielses' room is empty, too,” Keola said. “Like they were never there.”
“What the hell is this?” I asked him. “Barbara and Levon left town, and you didn't know where they were going?”
It sounded like an accusation. I didn't mean it that way, but my panic had risen to the high-water mark and it was still climbing. Hawaii had a low crime rate. And now, in the space of a week, two girls were dead. Kim was still missing, and her parents and driver were missing, too.
“I told Barbara it should be me following that lead on Oahu,” Keola said. “Those backpacker joints are remote and kind of rough. But Levon talked me out of it. He said that he wanted me to spend my time here looking for Kim.”
Keola was snapping his wristband, chewing his lip. The two of us, ex-cops without portfolio, were trying desperately to make sense out of thin air.
Chapter 54
It was becoming a three-ring circus in the lobby of the Wailea Princess. A queue of German tourists had lined up at the desk, a flock of little kids were begging the gardener to let them feed the koi, even a presentation on tourist attractions was going on thirty feet away, slides and film and native music.
Eddie Keola and I might as well have been invisible. No one even looked at us.
I started ticking off the facts, linking Rosa to Kim, Kim to Julia, and to the driver, Marco Benevenuto, who had lied to me and the McDanielses – who were missing.
“What do you think, Eddie? Do you see the connection? Or am I fanning the flames of my overheated imagination?”
Keola sighed loudly, and said, “Tell you the truth, Ben, I'm in over my head. Don't look at me like that. I do cheating husbands. Insurance claims. What do you think? Maui is Los Angeles?”
I said, “Work on your friend, Lieutenant Jackson, why don't you?”
“I will. I'll get him to reach out to the PD in Oahu, get a serious search going for Barb and Levon. If he won't do it, I'll go over his head. My dad's a judge.”
“That must come in handy.”
“Damned right it does.”
Keola said he'd call me, then left me sitting with my phone in my lap. I stared across the open lobby to the dark aqua sea. I could see the outline of Lanai through the morning mist, the small island where Julia Winkler's life had been snuffed out.
It was five a.m. in L.A., but I had to talk to Amanda.
“Wassup, buttercup?” she slurred into the phone.
“Bad stuff, honeybee.”
I told her about this latest shocker, how it felt like spiders were using my spine as a speedway, and no, I hadn't had anything stronger to drink than guava juice in three days.
“Kim would have shown up by now if she could do it,” I told Amanda. “I don't know the who, where, why, when, or how, but honest to God, honey, I think I know the what.”
“ 'Serial Killer in Paradise.' The story you've been waiting for. Maybe a book.”
I hardly heard her. The elusive fact that had been bothering me since I turned on the TV two hours before lit up in my mind like it was made of bright red neon. Charles Rollins. The name of the man last seen with Julia Winkler.
I knew that name.
I told Amanda to hold on a sec, got my wallet out of my back pocket, and, with a shaking hand, I sorted through the business cards I'd stashed behind the small plastic window.
“Mandy.”
“I'm here. Are you?”
“A photographer named Charles Rollins came up to me at the Rosa Castro crime scene. He was from a Talk Weekly magazine, Loxahatchee, Florida. The cops think he may have been the last person to have seen Julia Winkler alive. He's nowhere to be found.”
“You talked to him? You could identify him?”
“Maybe. I need a favor.”
“Boot up my laptop?”
“Please.”
I waited, my cell phone pressed so hard against my ear that I could hear the toilet flush in L.A. Finally, my beloved's voice came back on the line.
She cleared her throat, said, “Benjy, there are forty pages of Charles Rollinses on Google, gotta be two thousand guys by that name, a hundred in Florida. But there's no listing for a magazine called Talk Weekly. Not in Loxahatchee. Not anywhere.”
“For the hell of it, let's send him an e-mail.”
I read her Rollins's e-mail address, dictated a message.
Seconds later Amanda said, “It bounced back, Benjy. ' Mailer-Daemon. Unknown e-mail address.' What now?”
“I'll call you later. I've got to go to the police.”
Chapter 55
Henri sat two rows back from the cockpit in a spanking new charter jet that was almost empty. He watched through the window as the sleek little aircraft lifted smoothly off the runway and took to the wide blue and white sky above Honolulu.
He sipped champagne, said yes to caviar and toast points from the hostess, and when the pilot made his all-clear announcement Henri opened his laptop on the tabletop in front of him.
The miniature video camera he'd affixed to the rearview mirror of the car had been sacrificed, but before it was destroyed by the flooding seawater, it had sent the video wirelessly to his computer.
Henri was dying to see the dailies.
He put in his earbuds and opened the MPV file.
He almost said “wow” out loud. The pictures unfurling on his computer screen were that beautiful. The interior of the car glowed from the dome light. Barbara and Levon were softly lit, and the sound quality was excellent.
Because Henri had been in the front seat, he was not in the shot – and he liked that. No mask. No distortion. Just his disembodied voice, sometimes as Marco, sometimes as Andrew, at all times reasoning with the victims.
“I told Kim how beautiful she was, Barbara, as I made love to her. I gave her something to drink so she wouldn't feel pain. Your daughter was a lovely person, very sweet. You don't have to think she did anything to deserve being killed.”
“I don't believe you killed her,” Levon said. “You're a freak. A pathological liar!”
“I gave you her watch, Levon.? Okay, then, look at this.”
Henri had opened his cell phone, and showed them the photo of his hand holding Kim's head by the roots of her wild blond hair.
“Try to understand,” he said, talking over Barb and Levon's insufferable wailing and snuffling. “This is business. The people I work for pay a lot of money to see people die.”
Barbara was gagging and sobbing, telling him to stop, but Levon was in a different kind of hell, clearly trying to balance his grief and horror with a desire to keep the two of them alive.
He'd said, “Let us go, Henri. We don't know who you really are. We can't hurt you.”
Henri had said, “It's not that I want to kill you, Levon. It's about the money. Yes. I make money by killing you.”
“I can get you money,” Levon said. “I'll beat their offer. I will!”
And now there on his laptop, Barbara was pleading for her boys. Henri stopped her, saying it was time for him to go.
He'd stepped on the gas, the soft tires rolling easily over the sand, the car plowing into the surf. When it had good momentum, Henri had gotten out of the car, walked alongside it, until the water rose up to the windshield.
Inside, the camera on the rearview had recorded the McDanielses begging, the water sloshing over the window frames, rising up the seats where the McDanielses' arms were locked behind them, their bodies lashed in place with the seat belts.
Still he'd given them hope.
“I'm leaving the light on so you can record your goodbyes,” he heard himself saying on the small screen. “And someone on the road could see you. You could be rescued. Don't count it out. But if I were you, I'd pray for that.”
He had wished them luck, then waded back up to the beach. He'd stood under the trees and watched the car sink completely in only about three minutes. Faster than he would have guessed. Merciful. So maybe there was a God after all.
When the dome light winked out, he'd changed his clothes, then walked up the highway until he caught a ride.
Now he closed his laptop, finished the champagne as the hostess handed him the lunch menu. He decided on the duck r l'orange, put on his Bose speakers, and listened to some Brahms. Soothing. Beautiful. Perfect.
The last few days had been exceptional, a fantastic drama every minute, a highlight of his life.
He was quite sure everybody would be happy.