Swimsuit

Chapter 8

A man stood at the edge of a lava-rock seawall staring out at the dark water and at the clouds turning pink as dawn stormed Maui 's eastern shore.

His name was Henri Benoit, not his real name, but the name he was using now. He was in his thirties with medium-length blondish hair and light gray eyes, and he stood at about six feet tall in his bare feet. He was shoeless now, his toes half-buried in the sand.

His white linen shirt hung loosely over his gray cotton pants, and he watched the seabirds calling out as they skimmed the waves.

Henri thought those birdcalls could have been the opening notes of another flawless day in paradise. But before the day had even begun, it was down the crapper.

Henri turned away from the ocean and jammed his PDA into a trouser pocket. Then, as the wind at his back blew his shirt into a kind of spinnaker, he strode up the sloping lawn to his private bungalow.

He swung open the screened door, crossed the lanai and the pale hardwood floors to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of Kona java. Then out again to the lanai, where he sank down into the chaise beside the hot tub and settled in to think.

This place, the Hana Beach Hotel, was at the top of his A-list: exclusive, comfortable, no TV or even a telephone. Surrounded by a few thousand acres of rain forest, perched on the coast of the island, the unobtrusive cluster of buildings made a perfect haven for the very rich.

Being here gave a man a chance to relax fully, to be whoever he truly was, to realize his essence as a human.

The cell phone call from Europe had shot his relaxation all to hell. The conversation had been brief and essentially one-way. Horst had delivered both the good and bad news in a tone of voice that attacked Henri's sense of free agency with the finesse of a shiv through a vital organ.

Horst had told Henri that the job he had done had been well received, but there were issues.

Had he chosen the right victim? Why was Kim McDaniels's death the sound of one hand clapping? Where was the press? Had they really gotten all they'd paid for?

“I delivered a brilliant piece of work,” Henri had snapped. “How can you deny it?”

“Watch the attitude, Henri. We're all friends, yes?”

Yes. Friends in a strictly commercial enterprise in which one set of amigos controlled the money. And now Horst was telling him that his buddies weren't quite happy enough. They wanted more. More twists. More action. More clapping at the end of the movie.

“Use your imagination, Henri. Surprise us.”

They would pay more, of course, for additional contracted services, and after a while the prospect of more money softened the edges of Henri's bad mood without touching the core of his contempt for the Peepers.

They wanted more?

So be it.

By the time his second cup of coffee was finished, he had mapped out a new plan. He dug a wireless phone out of his pocket and began making calls.

Chapter 9

That night snow fell lightly on Levon and Barbara McDaniels's house in Cascade Township, a wooded suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Inside their efficient but cozy three-bedroom brick home, the two boys slept deeply under their quilts.

Down the hall, Levon and Barbara lay back-to-back, soles touching across the invisible divide of their Sleep Number bed, their twenty-five-year connection seemingly unbroken even in sleep.

Barbara's night table was stacked with magazines and half-read paperbacks, folders of tests and memos, a crowd of vitamin supplements around her bottle of green tea. Don't worry about it, Levon, and please don't touch anything. I know where everything is.

Levon's nightstand favored his left brain to Barb's right: his neat stack of annual reports, annotated copy of Against All Reason, pen and notepad, and a platoon of electronics – phones, laptop, weather clock – all lined up four inches from the table's edge, plugged into a power strip behind the lamp.

The snowfall had wrapped the house in a white silence – and then a ringing phone jarred Levon awake. His heartbeat boomed, and his mind reeled in instant panic. What was happening?

Again the phone rang, and this time Levon made a grab for the landline.

He glanced at the clock, which read 3:14 a.m., and wondered who the hell would be calling at this hour. And then he knew. It was Kim. She was five hours behind them. He figured she'd gotten that mixed up somehow.

“Kim? Honey?” Levon said into the mouthpiece.

“Kim is gone,” said the male voice in Levon's ear.

Levon's chest tightened, and he couldn't catch his breath. Was he having a heart attack? “Sorry? What did you say?”

Barb sat up in bed, turned on the light.

“Levon?” she said. “What is it?”

Levon held up a hand. Give me a second. “Who is this?” he asked, rubbing his chest to ease the pain.

“I only have a minute, so listen carefully. I'm calling from Hawaii. Kim's disappeared.” ”.”

Levon's fear filled him from scalp to toes with a cold terror. He clung to the phone, hearing the echo of the man's voice: “”.”

It made no sense.

“I don't get you. Is she hurt?”

No answer.

“Hello?”

“Are you listening to what I'm saying, Mr. McDaniels?”

“Yes. Who is this speaking, please?”

“I can only tell you once.”

Levon pulled at the neck of his T-shirt, trying to decide what to think. Was the man a liar, or telling the truth? He knew his name, phone number, that Kim was in Hawaii. How did he know all that?

Barb was asking him, “What's happening? Levon, is this about Kim?”

“Kim didn't show up at the shoot yesterday morning,” said the caller. “The magazine is keeping it quiet. Crossing their fingers. Hoping she'll come back.”

“Have the police been called? Has someone called the police?”

“I'm hanging up now,” said the caller. “But if I were you, I'd get on the next plane to Maui. You and Barbara.”

“Wait! Please, wait. How do you know she's missing?”

“Because I did it, sir. I saw her. I liked her. I took her. Have a nice day.”

Chapter 10

What do you want? Tell me what you want!”

There was a click in Levon's ear followed by a dial tone. He toggled the directory button, read “Unknown” where there should have been a caller ID.

Barb was pulling at his arm. “Levon! Tell me! What's happened?”

Barb liked to say that she was the flamethrower in the family and that he was the fireman – and those roles had become fixed over time. So Levon began to tell Barb what the caller had said, strained the fear out of his voice, kept to the facts.

Barb's face reflected the terror leaping inside his own mind like a bonfire. Her voice came through to him as if from a far distance. “Did you believe him? Did he say where she was? Did he say what happened? My God, what are we talking about?”

“All he said is she's gone?”

“She never goes anywhere without her cell,” Barb said, starting now to gasp for breath, her asthma kicking in.

Levon bolted out of bed, knocked things off Barb's night table, spilling pills and papers all over the carpet. He picked the inhaler out of the jumble, handed it to Barb, watched her take in a long pull.

Tears ran down her face.

He reached out his arms for her, and she went to him, cried into his chest, “Please? just call her.”

Levon snatched the phone off the blanket, punched in Kim's number, counted out the interminable rings, two, then three, looking at the clock, doing the math. It was just after ten at night in Hawaii.

Then Kim's voice was in his ear.

“Kim!” he shouted.

Barb clapped her hands over her face in relief – but Levon realized his mistake.

“It's only a message,” he said to Barb, hearing Kim's recorded voice. “Leave your name and number and I'll call you back. Byeeee.”

“Kim, it's Dad. Are you okay? We'd like to hear from you. Don't worry about the time. Just call. Everybody here is fine. Love you, honey. Dad.”

Barb was crying. “Oh, my God, Oh, my God,” she repeated as she balled up the comforter, pressing it to her face.

“We don't know anything, Barb,” he said. “He could be some moron with a sick sense of humor -”

“Oh, God, Levon. Try her hotel room.”

Sitting at the edge of the bed, staring down at the nubby carpet between his feet, Levon called information. He jotted down the number, disconnected the line, then dialed the Wailea Princess in Maui.

When the operator came on, he asked for Kim McDaniels, got five distant rings in a room four thousand miles away, and then a machine answered. “Please leave a message for the occupant of Room Three-fourteen. Or press zero for the operator.”

Levon's chest pains were back and he was short of breath. He said into the mouthpiece, “Kim, call Mom and Dad. It's important.” He stabbed the 0 button until the lilting voice of the hotel operator came back on the line.

He asked the operator to ring Carol Sweeney's room, the booker from the modeling agency, who'd accompanied Kim to Hawaii and was supposed to be there as her chaperone.

There was no answer in Carol's room, either. Levon left a message: “Carol, this is Levon McDaniels, Kim's dad. Please call when you get this. Don't worry about the time. We're up. Here's my cell phone number?”

Then he got the operator again.

“We need help,” he said. “Please connect me to the manager. This is an emergency.”

Chapter 11

Levon Mcdaniels was square-jawed, just over six feet, a muscular 165 pounds. He had always been known as a straight shooter, decisive, thoughtful, a good leader, but sitting in his red boxers, holding a dinky cordless phone that didn't connect to Kim – he felt nauseated and powerless.

As he waited for hotel security to go to Kim's room and report back to the manager, Levon's imagination fired off images of his daughter, hurt, or the captive of some freaking maniac who was planning God only knew what.

Time passed, probably only a few minutes, but Levon imagined himself rocketing across the Pacific Ocean, bounding up the stairs of the hotel, and kicking open Kim's door. Seeing her peacefully asleep, her phone switched off.

“Mr. McDaniels, Security is on the other line. The bed is still made up. Your daughter's belongings look undisturbed. Would you like us to notify the police?”

“Yes. Right away. Thank you. Could you say and spell your name for me?”

Levon booked a room, then phoned United Airlines, kept pressing zeros until he got a human voice.

Beside him, Barb's breathing was wet, her cheeks shining with tears. Her graying braid was coming undone as she repeatedly pushed her fingers through it. Barb's suffering was right out in the open, and she didn't know any other way. You always knew how she felt and where you stood with Barb.

“The more I think about it,” she said, her voice coming between jerky sobs, “the more I think it's a lie. If he took her? he'd want money, and he didn't ask for that, Levon. So? why would he call us?”

“I just don't know, Barb. It doesn't make sense to me either.”

“What time is it there?”

“Ten thirty p.m.”

“She probably went for a ride with some cute guy. Got a flat tire. Couldn't get a cell phone signal, something like that. She's probably all worked up about missing the shoot. You know how she is. She's probably stuck somewhere and furious with herself.”

Levon had held back the truly terrifying part of the phone call. He hadn't told Barb that the caller had said that Kim had fallen into “bad hands.” How would that help Barb? He couldn't bring himself to say it.

“We have to keep our heads on straight,” he said.

Barb nodded. “Absolutely. Oh, we're going over there, Levon. But Kim is going to be as mad as bees that you told the hotel to call the police. Watch out when Kim's mad.”

Levon smiled.

“I'll shower after you,” Barb said.

Levon came out of the bathroom five minutes later, shaven, his damp brown hair standing up around the bald spot at the back. He tried to picture the Wailea Princess as he dressed, saw frozen postcard images of honeymooners walking the beach at sunset. He thought of never seeing Kim again, and a knifing terror cut through him.

Please, God, oh, please, don't let anything happen to Kim.

Barb showered quickly, dressed in a blue sweater, gray slacks, flat shoes. Her expression was wide-eyed shock, but she was past the hysteria, her excellent mind in gear.

“I packed underwear and toothbrushes and that's all, Levon. We'll get what we need in Maui.”

It was 3:45 in Cascade Township. Less than an hour had passed since the anonymous phone call had cracked open the night and spilled the McDanielses out into a terrifying unknown.

“You call Cissy,” Barb said. “I'll wake the kids.”

Chapter 12

Barbara sighed under her breath, then turned up the dimmer, gradually lighting the boys' room. Greg groaned, pulled the Spider-Man quilt over his head, but Johnny sat straight up, his fourteen-year-old face alert to something different, new, and maybe exciting.

Barb shook Greg's shoulder gently. “Sweetie, wake up now.”

“Mommmmm, nooooo.”

Barb peeled down her younger son's blanket, explained to both boys a version of the story that she halfway believed. That she and Dad were going to Hawaii to visit Kim.

Her sons became attentive immediately, bombarding Barb with questions until Levon walked in, his face taut, and Greg, seeing that, shouted, “Dad! What's goin' on?”

Barb swooped Greg into her arms, said that everything was fine, that Aunt Cissy and Uncle Dave were waiting for them, that they could be asleep again in fifteen minutes. They could stay in their pj's but they had to put on shoes and coats.

Johnny pleaded to come with them to Hawaii, made a case involving jet skis and snorkeling, but Barb, holding back tears, said “not this time” and busied herself with socks and shoes and toothbrushes and Game Boys.

“You're not telling us something, Mom. It's still dark!”

“There's no time to go into it, Johnny. Everything's okay. We've just – gotta catch a plane.”

Ten minutes later, five blocks away, Christine and David waited outside their front door as the arctic air sweeping across Lake Michigan put down a fine white powder over their lawn.

Levon watched Cissy run down the steps to meet their car as it turned in at the driveway. Cissy was two years younger than Barb, with the same heart-shaped face, and Levon saw Kim in her features, too.

Cissy reached out and enfolded the kids as they dashed toward her. She lifted her arms and took in Barb and Levon, as Barb said, “I forwarded our phone to yours, Cis. In case you get a call.” Barb didn't want to spell it out in front of the boys. She wasn't sure Cis got it yet either.

“Call me between planes,” Cis said.

Dave held out an envelope to Levon. “Here's some cash, about a thousand. No, no, take it. You could need it when you get there. Cabs and whatever. Levon, take it.”

Fierce hugs were exchanged and wishes for a safe flight and love-you's rang out loudly in the morning stillness. When Cissy and David's front door closed, Levon told Barb to strap in.

He backed the Suburban out of the drive, then turned onto Burkett Road, heading toward Gerald R. Ford International Airport, ramping the car up to ninety on the straightaway.

“Slow down, Levon.”

“Okay.”

But he kept his foot on the gas, driving fast into the star field of snow that somehow kept his mind balanced on the brink of terror rather than letting it topple into the abyss.

“I'll call the bank when we change planes in L.A.,” Levon said. “Talk to Bill Macchio, get a loan started against the house in case we need cash.”

He saw tears dropping from Barb's face into her lap, heard the click of her fingernails tapping on her BlackBerry, sending text messages to everyone in the family, to her friends, to her job. To Kim.

Barb called Kim's cell phone again as Levon parked the car, held up the phone so Levon could hear the mechanical voice saying, “The mailbox belonging to – Kim McDaniels - is full. No messages can be left at this time.”

Chapter 13

The Mcdanielses hopscotched by air from Grand Rapids to Chicago and from there to their wait-listed flight to Los Angeles, which connected just in time to their flight to Honolulu. Once in Honolulu, they ran through the airport, tickets and IDs in their hands, making Island Air's turbo prop plane. They were the last people on, settling into their bulkhead seats before the doors to the puddle jumper closed with a startling bang.

They were now only forty minutes from Maui.

Only forty minutes from Kim.

Since leaving Grand Rapids, Barbara and Levon had slept in snatches. So much time had elapsed since the phone call that it was starting to feel unreal.

They now spun the idea that after Kim had given them hell for coming there, they'd be laughing about all of this, showing off a snapshot of Kim with that “oh, please” look on her face and standing between her parents, all of them wearing leis, typical happy tourists in Hawaii.

And then they'd swing back to their fear.

Where was Kim? Why couldn't they reach her? Why was there no return call from her on their home phone or Levon's cell?

As the airplane sailed above the clouds, Barb said, “I've been thinking about the bike.”

Levon nodded, took her hand.

What they called “the bike” had started with another terrible phone call, seven years ago, this time from the police. Kim had been fourteen. She'd been riding her bike after school, wearing a muffler around her neck. The end of the scarf, whipping back behind her, got wrapped around the rear wheel, choking Kim, pulling her off the bike and hurling her onto the roadside.

A woman driving along saw the bike in the road, pulled up, and found Kim lying up against a tree, unconscious. That woman, Anne Clohessy, had called 911, and when the ambulance came, the EMTs couldn't get Kim to come back to consciousness.

Her brain had been deprived of oxygen, the doctors said. She was in a coma. The hospital's posturing told Barb that it might be irreversible.

By the time Levon had been reached at the office, Kim had been medevaced to a trauma unit in Chicago. He and Barb had driven three hours, got to the hospital, and found their daughter in intensive care, groggy but awake, a terrible bruise around her neck, as blue as the scarf that nearly killed her.

But she was alive. She wasn't back to a hundred percent yet, but she'd be fine.

“It was weird inside my head,” Kimmy had said then. “It was like dreaming, only much more real. I heard Father Marty talking to me like he was sitting on the end of the bed.”

“What did he say, sweetheart?” Barb had asked.

“He said, 'I'm glad you were baptized, Kim.' ”

Now Levon took off his glasses, dried his eyes with the back of his hand. Barb passed him a tissue, saying, “I know, sweetie, I know.”

This is how they wanted to find Kim now. Fine. Levon gave Barb a crooked smile, both of them thinking how the story in the Chicago Trib had called her “Miracle Girl,” and sometimes they still called her that.

Miracle Girl who got onto the varsity basketball team as a freshman. Miracle Girl who was accepted into Columbia premed. Miracle Girl who'd been picked for the Sporting Life swimsuit shoot, the odds a million to one against her.

Levon thought, What kind of miracle was that?

Chapter 14

Barb twisted a tissue into a knot, and she said to Levon, “I should never have made such a fuss about that modeling agency.”

“She wanted to do it, Barb. It's no one's fault. She's always been her own person.”

Barb took Kimmy's picture from her purse, a five-by-seven headshot of eighteen-year-old Kim, taken for that agency in Chicago. Levon looked at the picture of Kim wearing a low-cut black sweater, her blond hair falling below her shoulders, the kind of radiant beauty that gave men ideas.

“No modeling after this,” Levon said now.

“She's twenty-one, Levon.”

“She's going to be a doctor. Barb, there's no good reason for her to be modeling anymore. This is the end of it. I'll make her understand.”

The flight attendant announced that the plane would be landing momentarily.

Barb raised the shade and Levon looked out at the clouds flowing under the window, the peaks of them looking like they'd been hit with pink spotlights.

As the tiny houses and roads of Maui came into view, Levon turned to his wife, his best pal, his sweetheart.

“How're you doin', hon? Okay?”

“Never better,” Barb chirped, attempting a joke. “And you?”

Levon smiled, brought Barb close, and pressed his cheek to hers, smelled the stuff she put in her hair. What Barb smelled like. He kissed her, squeezed her hand.

“Hang on,” Levon said, as the airplane began its steep, sickening descent. And he sent out a thought to Kim. We're coming for you, honey. Mom and Dad are coming.

Chapter 15

The Mcdanielses stepped from the plane's exit door to a wobbly staircase and from there down to the tarmac, the heat suffocating after the chilled air on the plane.

Levon looked around at the volcanic landscape, an astounding difference from Michigan in the black of night, with the snow falling down the back of his shirt collar as he'd hugged his sons good-bye.

He took off his jacket, patted the inside pocket to make sure that their return plane tickets were safe – including the ticket he'd bought for Kim.

The terminal was full of people, the waiting room in the same open-air section as the baggage claim. He and Barb turned cards over to an official in blue, swearing they were not bringing in any fruit, and then they looked for taxi signs.

Levon was walking fast, feeling a heightened need to get to the hotel and not watching his feet when he sidestepped a luggage trolley and just about stumbled over a young girl with yellow braids. She was clutching a fuzzy toy, standing in the middle of everything, just taking it all in. The child looked so self-assured that she reminded Levon again of Kim, and a wave of panic rose in him, making him feel dizzy and sick to his stomach.

Levon swept blindly forward, asking himself if Kim had used up her quota of miracles. Was her borrowed time up? Had the whole family made a tremendous mistake buying into a headline written by a reporter in Chicago, giving all of them a belief that Kim was so miraculous that nothing could ever hurt her?

Levon silently begged God again to please let Kim be safe at the hotel, make her be glad to see her parents, have her say, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to make you worry.

With his arm around Barb, the two headed out of the terminal, but before they reached the taxi rank, they saw a man approaching – a driver holding up a sign with their name.

The driver was taller than Levon. He had dark hair streaked with gray, a mustache, and he wore a chauffeur's cap and livery jacket and alligator cowboy boots with three-inch heels.

He said, “Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels? I'm Marco. The hotel hired me to be your driver. Do you have claim tickets for your luggage?”

“We didn't bring any bags.”

“Okay. The car's right outside.”

Chapter 16

The Mcdanielses walked behind Marco as Levon noted the driver's odd rolling gait in those cowboy boots and the man's accent, a trace of something – maybe New York or New Jersey.

They crossed the arrival lane to a traffic island where Levon saw a newspaper lying faceup on a bench.

In a heart-stopping double take, he realized that Kim was looking up at him from under the headline.

This was the Maui News, and the large black type spelled out, “Missing Beauty.”

Levon's thoughts scattered, taking him a few stunned moments to understand that during the eleven or so hours he and Barb had been in transit, Kim had officially gone missing.

She wasn't waiting at the hotel.

Like the caller said, she was gone.

Levon grabbed the paper with a trembling hand, his heart bucking as he looked into Kim's smiling eyes, took in the swimsuit she was wearing in this picture, probably taken just a couple of days ago.

Levon folded the newspaper lengthwise, caught up to Marco and Barbara at the car, asked Marco, “Will it take long to get to the hotel?”

“About a half hour, and there's no charge, Mr. McDaniels. The Wailea Princess is paying for as long as you need me.”

“Why are they doing that?”

Marco's voice turned soft. “Well, in light of the situation, sir.”

He opened the car doors, and Levon and Barbara climbed in, Barb's face crumpling when she took the paper, crying while she read the story as the sedan slipped into the traffic stream.

The car sped onto the highway, and Marco spoke to them, his eyes in the rearview mirror, gently asking if they were comfortable, if they wanted more air or music. Levon thought ahead to checking in at the hotel, then going straight to the police, the whole time feeling as though he'd suffered a battlefield amputation, that a part of him had been brutally severed and that he might not survive.

Eventually, the sedan crawled down what looked like a private road, both sides massed in purple flowering vines. They drove by an artificial waterfall, slowed to a stop in front of the grand porte cochere entryway of the Wailea Princess Hotel.

Levon saw tiled fountains on both sides of the car, bronze statues of Polynesian warriors rising out of the water with spears in their hands on one side, outriggers filled with orchids on the other.

Bellhops in white shirts and short red pants hurried toward the car. Marco opened his door, and as Levon walked around the sedan to help Barb he heard his name coming at him from all directions.

People were running toward the hotel entrance – reporters with cameras and microphones.

Racing toward them.

Chapter 17

Ten minutes later, Barb was dazed and jet-lagged as she entered a suite that on another day, and in different circumstances, she would have thought “magnificent.” If she had peeked at the rate card behind the door, she would have seen that the charge for the suite was over three thousand dollars a day.

She walked into the heart of the main room, as good as sleepwalking, seeing but not taking in the hand-knotted silk carpet, a pattern of orchids on a pale peach ground; the tapestry-upholstered furnishings; the huge flat-panel television.

She went to the window, looked out at the beauty without really seeing it, just looking for Kim.

There was a gorgeous swimming pool below, a complicated shape, like a square laid over a rectangle, with circular Jacuzzis at the shallow end. A fountain, like a champagne glass, in the middle spilled water over the children playing.

She scanned the rows of pure white cabanas around the pool, looking for a young woman in a chaise sipping a drink, Kim sitting at the poolside.

Barb saw several girls, some slimmer or heavier or older or shorter, but none of them Kim.

She looked out beyond the pool, saw a covered walk, wooden steps going down to the beach dotted with palm trees, fronted by the sapphire blue ocean, nothing but water between the edge of the beach and the coast of Japan.

Where was Kim?

Barb wanted to say to Levon, “I feel Kim's presence here,” but when she turned, Levon wasn't there.

She noticed an ornate basket of fruit on the table near the window and went to it, heard the toilet flush as she lifted out the note that was in fact a business card with a message written on the back.

Levon, her poor dear husband, his eyes unblinking and pained behind his glasses, came toward her, asking, “What's that, Barb?”

She read out loud, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels, please call me. We're here to help in any way we can.”

The card was signed, “Susan Gruber, SL,” and under her name was a room number.

Levon said, “Susan Gruber. She's the editor in chief. I'll call her now.”

Barb felt hope. Gruber was in charge. She'd know something.

Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later, the McDanielses' hotel room was full. Standing room only.

Chapter 18

Barb sat on one of the sofas, her hands clasped on her lap, waiting for Susan Gruber, this take-charge New York executive, with her bright white teeth and face as sharp as a blade, to tell them that Kim had had a fight with the photographer, or that she hadn't photographed well enough and so she'd been given the time off – or something, anything that would clear it all up, make it so that Kim was simply absent, not missing, not abducted, not in danger.

Gruber was wearing an aquamarine pantsuit and a lot of gold bracelets, and her fingers were cold when she reached out to shake hands with Barbara.

Del Swann, the art director, had dark skin, platinum hair, jewelry in one ear, and he was dressed in fashionably worn-out jeans and a tight black T-shirt. He looked like he was about to have a mental collapse, making Barbara think maybe he knew more than he was saying – or maybe he felt guilty because he was the last one to see Kim.

There were two other men. The senior one was forty-something, in a gray suit, had corporation written all over him. Barb had met men like this at Levon's Merrill Lynch conventions and business cocktail parties. She thought it was a pretty safe bet that he, and the junior clone standing to his right, were both New York lawyers who'd been overnighted to Maui like a FedEx package in order to cover the magazine's ass.

And Barb looked at Carol Sweeney, a big woman wearing an expensive, if shapeless, black dress. As the booker from the modeling agency who'd landed this job for Kim and had gone on the shoot as Kim's chaperone, Carol looked like she'd swallowed a dog, that's how choked up she was.

Barb couldn't stand to be in the same room with Carol.

The senior suit, Barb forgot his name as soon as she heard it, told Levon, “We have a security team working to find out where Kim may have gone.”

He didn't even look at Barb. Directed his attention to Levon. Pretty much, they all did. She knew she looked emotional, fragile. And who could say she didn't have good reason.

“What more can you tell us?” Barb asked the lawyer.

“There's no sign that anything happened to her. The police assume she's sightseeing.”

Barb thought, Levon, tell them, but Levon had said to her before the magazine people arrived, “We'll take information in. We'll listen. But we've got to keep in mind that we don't know these people.” Meaning, anyone attached to the magazine could have had something to do with Kim's disappearance.

Susan Gruber put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, said to Levon, “Kim was inside the hotel bar with Del, and Del went to the men's room, and when he returned, Kim was gone. No one took Kim. She left on her own.”

“So that's the story?” Levon asked. “Kim left the hotel bar on her own, and no one's heard from her, and she's been gone for a day and a half, and that means to you that Kim ditched the shoot and went sightseeing? Am I getting that right?”

“She's an adult, Mr. McDaniels,” Gruber said. “It wouldn't be the first time a girl dumped a job. I remember this girl, Gretchen, took off in Cannes last year, showed up in Monte Carlo six days later.”

Gruber was talking like this was her office, and she was patiently explaining her job to Levon. “We've got eight girls on this shoot.” She went on to say how many people she had to supervise and all the things she had to cover, and how she had to be on the set every minute or looking at the day's shots?

Barbara felt the pressure building inside her head. All that gold on Susan Gruber, but no wedding ring. Did she have a child? Did she even know one? Susan Gruber didn't get it.

“We love Kim,” Carol Sweeney blurted to Barb. “I? I felt that Kim was safe here. I was having dinner with one of the other models. I mean, Kim is such a good girl and so responsible, I never thought we had reason to worry.”

“I only turned my back for a minute,” said Del Swann. And then he started to cry.

It all became clear to Barb, why Gruber had brought her people to see them. Barbara had been raised to be nice, but now that she'd stopped denying the obvious, she had to say it.

“You're not responsible? Is that why you're all here? To tell us that you're not responsible for Kim?”

No one met her gaze.

“We've told the police everything we know,” said Gruber.

Levon stood up, put his hand on Barb's shoulder, and said to the magazine people, “Please call if you learn anything. Right now, we'd like to be alone. Thanks.”

Gruber stood, slung the strap of her handbag across her narrow chest, said, “Kim will be back. Don't worry.”

“You mean, you hope and pray with every miserable breath you take,” said Barbara.

Chapter 19

A man stood in the thick of the media gaggle outside the Wailea Princess main entrance, waiting for the press conference to start.

He blended in well, appeared to be a guy living out of a duffel bag, maybe sleeping on the beach. He had on sports sunglasses wrapped around his face like a windshield, even though the sun was going down. Dodgers cap over his rusty brown hair, vintage Adidas, rumpled cargo pants, and hanging down in front of his cheap Hawaiian shirt was a perfect replica of a press pass identifying him as a photographer, Charles Rollins of Talk Weekly, a publication that didn't exist.

His video camera was expensive, though, a state-of-the-art Panasonic, HD-compatible with a stereo microphone boom and a Leica lens, costing over six thousand bucks.

He pointed the lens at the grand front entrance of the Wailea Princess, where the McDanielses were taking up their positions behind a lectern.

As Levon adjusted the mic, Rollins whistled a few notes through his teeth. He was enjoying himself now, thinking that even Kim wouldn't recognize him if she were alive. He lifted his vid cam over his head and recorded Levon greeting the press, thinking he'd like the McDanielses if he got to know them. Well, fuck it anyway, he already liked them. What was not to like about the McDanielses?

Look at them.

Sweet, feisty Barbara. Levon, with the heart of a five-star general. Both of them, salt of the fucking earth.

They were grief-wracked and terrified, but still comporting themselves with dignity, answering insensitive questions, even the de rigueur “What would you say to Kim if she's listening to you now?”

“I'd say, 'We love you, darling. Please be strong,' ” Barbara said with a quavering voice. “And to everyone hearing us, please, we're offering twenty-five thousand dollars for information leading to the return of our daughter. If we had a million, we'd offer that?”

And then Barbara's air seemed to run out. She turned, and Rollins saw her take a hit off an inhaler. And still, questions were fired at the supermodel's parents: Levon, Levon! Have you gotten a ransom demand? What was the last thing Kim said to you?

Levon leaned toward the microphones, answered the questions very patiently, finally saying, “The hotel management has set up a hotline number,” and he read it to the crowd.

Rollins watched the journalists jumping up like flying fish, calling out more questions even as the McDanielses were stepping down, moving toward the embrace of the hotel lobby.

Rollins looked through his lens, zoomed in on the back of the McDanielses' heads, saw someone coming through the crowd, a semicelebrity he'd seen on C-Span hawking his books.

The subject of Rollins's interest was a good-looking guy of about forty, a journalist and best-selling detective novelist, dressed in Dockers and a pink button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. Kind of reminded him of Brian Williams reporting from Baghdad. Maybe a little more rough-and-ready.

As Rollins watched, the writer reached out and touched Barbara McDaniels's arm, and Barbara stopped to speak with him.

Charlie Rollins saw an interview with the legitimate press in the making. He thought, No kidding. The Peepers will love this. Kim McDaniels is going big-time. This is turning into a very big event, indeed.

Chapter 20

The journalist in the Dockers and pink shirt?

That was me.

I saw an opening as Levon and Barbara McDaniels stepped away from the lectern, the crowd closing in, circling them like a twister.

I lunged forward, touched Barbara McDaniels's arm, catching her attention before she disappeared into the lobby.

I wanted the interview, but no matter how many times you see parents of lost or abducted children begging for their son or daughter's safe return, you cannot fail to be moved.

Barbara and Levon McDaniels had gotten to me as soon as I saw their faces. It killed me to see them in such pain.

Now I had my hand gently on Barbara McDaniels's arm. She turned, and I introduced myself, handed her my card, and lucky for me, she knew my name. “Are you the Ben Hawkins who wrote Red?

“Put It All on Red, yes, that's mine.”

She said she liked the book, her mouth smiling, although her face was rigid with anguish. Right then, hotel security made a cordon with their arms, a path through the crowd, and I walked into the lobby with Barbara, who introduced me to Levon.

“Ben's a best-selling author, Levon. You remember, we read him for our book club last fall.”

“I'm covering Kim's story for the L.A. Times,” I told Mr. McDaniels.

Levon said, “If you want an interview, I'm sorry. We're out of steam, and it's probably best that we don't talk further until we meet with the police.”

“You haven't spoken with them yet?”

Levon sighed, shook his head. “Ever talk to an answering machine?”

“I might be able to help,” I said. “The L.A. Times has clout, even here. And I used to be a cop.”

“Is that right?” Levon McDaniels's eyelids were sagging, his voice ragged and raw. He walked like a man who'd just run his feet off in a marathon, but he was suddenly interested in me. He stopped walking and asked me to tell him more.

“I was with the Portland PD. I was a detective, an investigator. Right now I cover the crime desk for the Times.”

McDaniels winced at the word “crime,” said, “Okay, Ben. You think you can give us a hand with the police? We're going out of our minds.”

I walked with the McDanielses through the cool marble lobby with its high ceilings and ocean views until we found a semisecluded spot overlooking the pool. Palm trees rustled in the island breeze. Wet kids in bathing suits ran past us, laughing, not a care in the world.

Levon said, “I called the police several times and got a menu. 'Parking tickets, press one. Night court, press two.' I had to leave a message. Can you believe that?

“Barb and I went over to the station for this district. Hours were posted on the door. Monday to Friday, eight to five, Saturday, ten to four. I didn't know police stations had closing hours. Did you?”

The look in Levon's eyes was heartbreaking. His daughter was missing. The police station was closed for business. How could this place look the way it did – vacation heaven – when they were slogging through seven kinds of hell?

“The police here mostly do traffic work, DWIs, stuff like that,” I said. “Domestic violence, burglary.”

I thought, but didn't say, that a few years ago a twenty-five-year-old female tourist was attacked on the Big Island by three local hoods who beat her and raped her and killed her.

She'd been tall, blond, sweet-looking, not unlike Kim.

There was another case, more famous, a cheerleader for the University of Illinois who'd fallen off the balcony of her hotel room and died instantly. She'd been partying with a couple of boys who were found not guilty of anything. And there was another girl, a local teenager, who called her friends after a concert on the island, and was never seen again.

“Your press conference was a good thing. The police will have to take Kim seriously,” I said.

“If I don't get a call back, I'm going over there again in the morning,” Levon McDaniels said. “Right now we want to go to the bar, see where Kim was hanging out before she vanished. You're welcome to join us.”

Chapter 21

The Typhoon Bar was on the mezzanine floor, open to the trade winds, wonderfully scented by plumeria. Café tables and chairs were lined up at the balustrade, overlooking the pool and beyond, a queue of palm trees down to the sands. To my left was a grand piano, still covered, and there was a long bar behind us. A bartender was setting up, slicing lemon peel, putting out dishes of nuts.

Barbara spoke. “The night manager told us that Kim was sitting at this table, the one nearest the piano,” Barbara said, tenderly patting the table's marble surface.

Then she pointed to an alcove fifteen yards away. “That would be the famous men's room over there. Where the art director went, to ah, just turn his back for a minute?”

I imagined the bar as it must have been that night. People drinking. A lot of men. I had plenty of questions. Hundreds of them.

I was starting to look at this story as if I were still a cop. If this were my case, I'd start with the security tapes. I'd want to see who was in the bar when Kim was there. I'd want to know if anybody had been watching her when she'd gotten up from this table, and who might have paid the check after she left.

Had Kim departed with someone? Maybe gone to his room?

Or had she walked to the lobby, eyes following her as she made her way down the stairs, her blond hair swinging.

What then? Had she walked outside, past the pool and the cabanas? Had any of those cabanas been occupied late that night? Had someone followed her out to the beach?

Levon carefully polished his glasses, one lens, then the other, and held them out to see if he'd done a good job. When he put them back on, he saw me looking out at the covered walkway beyond the pool area that led to the beach.

“What do you think, Ben?”

“All of the beaches in Hawaii are public property, so there won't be any video surveillance out there.”

I was wondering if the simplest explanation fit. Had Kim gone for a swim? Had she waded out into the water and gotten sucked under by a wave? Had someone found her shoes on the beach and taken them?

“What can we tell you about Kim?” Barbara asked me.

“I want to know everything,” I said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to tape our conversation.”

Barbara nodded, and Levon ordered G and Ts for them both. I was working, so I declined alcohol, asked for club soda instead.

I had already started shaping the Kim McDaniels story in my mind, thinking about this beautiful girl from the heartland, with brains and beauty, on the verge of national fame, and about how she had come to one of the most beautiful spots on earth and disappeared without trace or reason. An exclusive with the McDanielses was more than I'd hoped for, and while I still couldn't know if Kim's story was a book, it was definitely a journalistic whopper.

And more than that, I'd been won over by the McDanielses. They were nice people.

I wanted to help them, and I would.

Right now, they were exhausted, but they weren't leaving the table. The interview was on.

My tape recorder was new, the tape just unwrapped and the batteries fresh. I pushed Record, but, as the machine whirred softly on the table, Barbara McDaniels surprised me.

It was she who started asking questions.

Chapter 22

Barbara rested her chin on her hands, and asked, “What happened with you and the Portland police department – and please don't tell me what it says in your book jacket bio. That's just PR, isn't it?”

Barbara let me know by her focus and determination that if I didn't answer her questions, she had no reason to answer mine. I wanted to cooperate because I thought she was right to check me out, and I wanted the McDanielses to trust me.

I smiled at Barbara's direct interrogatory style, but there was nothing amusing about the story she was asking me to tell. Once I sent my mind back to that place and time, the memories rolled in, unstoppable, none of them glorifying, none of them very pleasant, either.

As the still-vivid images flashed on the wide screen inside my head, I told the McDanielses about a fatal car wreck that had happened many years ago; that my partner, Dennis Carbone, and I had been nearby and had responded to the call.

“When we got to the scene, there was about a half hour left of daylight. It was gloomy with a drizzling rain, but there was enough light to see that a vehicle had skidded off the road. It had caromed off some trees like a two-ton eight ball, crashing out of control through the woods.

“I radioed for help,” I said now. “Then I was the one who stayed behind to interview the witness who'd been driving the other car – while my partner went to the crashed vehicle to see if there were survivors.”

I told the McDanielses that the witness had been driving the car coming from the opposite direction, that the other vehicle, a black Toyota pickup, had been in his lane, coming at him fast. He said that he'd swerved, and so had the Toyota. The witness was shaken as he described how the pickup had left the road at high speed, said that he'd braked – and I could see and smell the hundred yards of rubber he'd left on the asphalt.

“Response and rescue vehicles showed up,” I said. “The paramedics pulled the body out of the pickup, told me that the driver had been killed on impact with a spruce tree and that he'd had no passengers.

“As the dead man was taken away, I looked for my partner. He was a few yards off the roadside, and I caught him sneaking a look in my direction. A little odd, like he was trying not to be seen doing something.”

There was a sudden flurry of girlish laughter as a bride, surrounded by her maids of honor, passed through the bar to the lounge. The bride was a pretty blonde in her twenties. Happiest day of her life, right?

Barbara turned to see the bridal party, then turned back to look at me. Anyone with eyes could see what she was feeling. And what she was hoping.

“Go on, Ben,” she said. “You were talking about your partner with the guilty look.”

I nodded, told her that I turned away from my partner because someone called my name and that when I looked back again, he was closing the trunk of our car.

“I didn't ask Dennis what he was doing, because I was already thinking ahead. We had reports to write up, work to do. We had to start with identifying the deceased.

“I was doing all the right stuff, Barbara,” I told her now. “I think it's pretty common to block out things we don't want to see. I should have confronted my partner right then and right there. But I didn't do it. Turns out that that sneaky, half-seen moment changed my life.”

Chapter 23

A waitress came over and asked if we wanted to refresh our drinks, and I was glad to see her. My throat was closing up and I needed to take a break. I'd told this story before, but it's never easy to get past disgrace.

Especially when you didn't earn it.

Levon said, “I know this is hard, Ben. But we appreciate your telling us about yourself. It's important to hear.”

“This is where it gets hard,” I told Levon.

He nodded, and even though Levon probably had only ten years on me, I felt his fatherly concern.

My second club soda arrived and I stirred at it with a straw. Then I went on.

“A few days passed. The accident victim turned out to be a small-time drug dealer, Robby Snow, and his blood came back positive for heroin. And now his girlfriend called on us. Carrie Willis was her name. Carrie was crushed by Robby's death, but something else was bothering her. She asked me, 'What happened to Robby's backpack? It was red with silver reflecting tape on the back. There was a lot of money in there.'

“Well, we hadn't found any red backpack, and there were a lot of jokes about Carrie Willis having the nerve to report stolen drug money to the police.

“But Robby's girlfriend was convincing. Carrie didn't know that Robby was a dealer. She just knew that he was buying a piece of acreage by a creek and he was going to build a house there for the two of them. The bank papers and the full payment for the property – a hundred thousand dollars – were in that backpack because he was on his way to the closing. She put all that money in the backpack herself. Her story checked out.”

“So you asked your partner about the backpack?” Barbara prompted.

“Sure. I asked him. And he said, 'Well, I sure as hell didn't see a backpack, red or green or sky blue pink.'

“So, at my insistence, we went to the impound, took the car apart, found nothing. Then we drove in broad daylight out to the woods where the accident happened and we searched the area. At least I did. I thought Denny was just rustling branches and kicking piles of leaves. That's when I remembered his face getting foxy the night of the accident.

“I had a long, hard talk with myself that night. The next day I went to my lieutenant for an off-the-record chat. I told him what I suspected, that a hundred thousand dollars in cash might have left the scene and was never reported.”

Levon said, “Well, you had no choice.”

“Denny Carbone was an old pit bull of a cop, and I knew if he learned about my conversation with the lieutenant he'd come at me. So I took a chance with my boss, and the next day Internal Affairs was in the locker room. Guess what they found in my locker?”

“A red backpack,” said Levon.

I gave him a thumbs-up. “Red backpack, silver reflecting tape, bank papers, heroin, and ten thousand dollars in cash.”

“Oh, my God,” said Barbara.

“I was given a choice. Resign. Or there would be a trial. My trial. I knew that I wasn't going to win in court. It would be 'he said/he said,' and the evidence, some of it, anyway, had been found in my locker. Worse, I suspected that I was getting hung with this because my lieutenant was in on it with Denny Carbone.

“A very bad day, blew up a lot of illusions for me. I turned in my badge, my gun, and some of my self-respect. I could've fought, but I couldn't take a chance I'd go to jail for something I hadn't done.”

“That's a sad story, Ben,” said Levon.

“Yep. And you know how the story turns out. I moved to L.A. Got a job at the Times. And I wrote some books.” “You're being modest,” Barbara said, and patted my arm. “Writing is what I do, but it's not who I am.”

“And who would you say you are?” she asked.

“Right now, I'm working at being the best reporter I can be. I came to Maui to tell your daughter's story, and, at the same time, I want you to have that happy ending. I want to see it, report it, be here for all the good feelings when Kim comes back safe. That's who I am.”

Barbara said, “We believe you, Ben.” And Levon nodded at her side.

Like I said, Nice people.

Chapter 24

Amsterdam. Five twenty in the afternoon. Jan Van der Heuvel was in his office on the fifth floor of the classic, neck-gabled house, gazing out over the treetops at the sightseeing boat on the canal, waiting for time to pass.

The door to his office opened, and Mieke, a pretty girl of twenty with short, dark hair, entered. She wore a small skirt and a fitted jacket, her long legs bare to her little lace-up boots. The girl lowered her eyes, said that if he didn't need her for anything she would leave for the day.

“Have a good evening,” Van der Heuvel said.

He walked her to the office door and locked it behind her, returned to his seat at the long drawing table, and looked down at the street running along the Keizersgracht Canal until he saw Mieke get into her fiancé's Renault and speed away.

Only then did Van der Heuvel attend to his computer. The teleconference wasn't for another forty minutes, but he wanted to establish contact early so that he could record the proceedings. He tapped keys until he made the connection and his friend's face came on the screen.

“Horst,” he said. “I am here.”

At that same time, a brunette woman of forty was on the bridge of her 118-foot yacht anchored in the Mediterranean off the coast of Portofino. The yacht was custom-made, constructed of high-tensile aluminum with six cabins, a master suite, and a video conference center in the saloon, which easily converted to a cinema.

The woman left her young captain and took the stairs down to her suite, where she removed a Versace jacket from the closet and slipped it on over her halter top. Then she crossed the galleyway to the media room and booted up her computer. When the connection was made to the encrypted line, she smiled into the webcam.

“Gina Prazzi checking in, Horst. How are we today?”

Four time zones away, in Dubai, a tall bearded man wearing traditional Middle Eastern clothing passed a mosque and hurried to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the street. He greeted the proprietor and continued on through the kitchen, aromatic with garlic and rosemary.

Pushing aside a heavy curtain, he took the stairs down to the basement level and unlocked a heavy wooden door leading to a private room.

In Hong Kong's Victoria Peak section, a young chemist flicked on his computer. He was in his twenties with an IQ in the high 170s. As the software loaded, he looked through his curtains, down the long slope, past the tops of the cylindrical high-rises, and farther below to the brightly lit towers of Hong Kong. It was unusually clear for this time of year, and his gaze had drifted to Victoria Harbour and beyond, to the lights of Kowloon, when the computer signaled and he turned his attention to the emergency meeting of the Alliance.

In Sao Paulo, Raphael dos Santos, a man of fifty, drove to his home at just past three in his new Wiesmann GT MF5 sports coupe. The car cost 250,000 U.S. dollars and went from zero to sixty in under four seconds with a top speed of 193 miles per hour. Rafi, as he was called, loved this car.

He braked at the entrance to the underground garage, tossed the keys to Tomás, and took the elevator that opened inside his apartment.

There he crossed several thousand square feet of Jatoba hardwood floors, passed ultramodern furnishings, and entered his home office with its view of the gleaming facade of the Renaissance Hotel on Alameda Santos.

Rafi pressed a button on his desk, and a thin screen rose vertically up through the center. He wondered again at the purpose of this meeting. Something had gone wrong. But what? He touched the keyboard and pressed his thumb to the ID pad.

Rafi greeted the leader of the Alliance in Portuguese. “Horst, you old bastard. Make this good. You have our undivided attention!”

Chapter 25

In the swiss alps, Horst Werner sat in the upholstered chair in his library. Flames leapt in the fireplace and pin lights illuminated the eight-foot-long scale model of the Bismarck he had made himself. There were bookshelves on every wall but no windows, and behind the cherrywood paneling was a three-inch-thick wall of lead-lined steel.

Horst's safe room was linked to the world by sophisticated Internet circuitry, giving him the feeling that this chamber was the very center of the universe.

The dozen members of the Alliance had all signed on to the encrypted network. They all spoke English to greater and lesser degrees, their live pictures on his screen. After greeting them, Horst moved quickly to the point of the meeting.

“An American friend has sent Jan a film as an amusement. I am very interested in your reaction.”

A white light filled twelve linked computer screens and then clarified as the camera focused on a Jacuzzi-style tub. Inside the tub was a dark-skinned young girl, nude with long black hair, lying on her stomach in about four inches of water. She was tied up in the way that Americans quaintly call “hog-tied,” her hands and feet behind her with a rope that also passed around her throat.

There was a man in the video, his back to the camera, and when he half turned, one of the Alliance members said, “Henri.”

Henri was naked, sitting on the edge of the tub, the clear plastic mask obscuring his features. He spoke to the camera. “You see there is very little water, but enough. I don't know which is more lethal for Rosa. Whether she will choke or if she will drown. Let's watch and see.”

Henri turned and spoke in Spanish to the sobbing child, then translated for the camera. “I told Rosa to keep her legs pulled back toward her head. I said if she could do that for another hour, I would let her live. Maybe.”

Horst smiled at Henri's audacity, the way he stroked the back of the child's head, soothing her, but she cried out, clearly a great effort when she was so tired of trying to live.

“Por favor. Déjame marchar. Eres malvado.”

Henri spoke to the camera. “She says to let her go. That I am evil. Well. I love her anyway. Sweet child.”

The girl continued to sob, gasping for air every time her legs relaxed and the rope tightened around her throat. She wailed, “Mama.” Then her head dropped, her final exhalation causing bubbles to break the surface of the water.

Henri touched the side of her neck and shrugged. “It was the ropes,” he said. “Anyway, she committed suicide. A beautiful tragedy. Just what I promised.”

He was smiling when the video faded to black.

Gina spoke now, indignant. “Horst, this is in violation of his contract, yes?”

“Actually, Henri's contract only says he cannot take work that would prevent him from fulfilling his obligations to us.”

“So. He is not technically in violation. He is just freelancing.”

Jan's voice came over the speakers. “Yes. You see how Henri looks for ways to give us the finger? This is unacceptable.”

Raphael broke in. “Okay, he is difficult, but let's admit, Henri has his genius. We should work with him. Give him a new contract.”

“That says what, for example?”

“Henri has been making short films for us like the one we just saw. I suggest we have him make? a documentary.”

Jan jumped in, excited. “Very good, Rafi. Wall-to-wall with Henri. A year in the life, ja? Salary and bonuses commensurate with the quality of the action.”

“Exactly. And he's exclusive to us,” said Raphael. “He starts now, on location with the parents of the swimsuit girl.”

The Alliance discussed terms, and they put some teeth into the contract, penalties for failure to perform. That phrase provided a light moment, and then, after they had voted, Horst made the call to Hawaii.

Chapter 26

The Mcdanielses and I were still in the Typhoon Bar as dusk dropped over the island. For the past hour, Barbara had sweated me like a pro. When she was satisfied that I was an okay guy, she brought me into her family's lives with her passion and a natural gift for storytelling that I wouldn't have expected from a high school math and science teacher.

Levon could barely string two sentences together. He wasn't inarticulate. He just wasn't with us. I read him as choked up with fear and too anxious about his daughter to concentrate. But he expressed himself vividly with his body language, tightening his fists, turning away when tears welled up, frequently taking off his glasses and pressing his palms over his eyes.

I'd asked Barbara, “How did you learn that Kim was missing?”

At that, Levon's cell phone rang. He looked at the faceplate and walked away toward the elevator.

I heard him say, “Lieutenant Jackson? Not tonight? Why not?” After a pause, he said, “Okay. Eight a.m.”

“Sounds like we have a date with the police in the morning. Come with us,” Barbara said. She took my phone number, patted my hand. And then, she kissed my cheek.

I said good night to Barbara, then ordered another club soda, no lime, no ice. I sat in a comfortable chair overlooking the hundred-million-dollar view, and in the next fifteen minutes the atmosphere at the Typhoon Bar picked up considerably.

Handsome people in fresh suntans and translucent clothing in snow-cone colors dropped into chairs at the railing while singles took the high-backed stools at the long bar. Laughter rose and fell like the warm breeze that gusted through the wide-open space, riffling hairlines and skirt hems as it passed.

The piano player uncovered the Steinway, then turned sideways on the piano seat and broke into an old Peter Allen standard, delighting the crowd as he sang “I Go to Rio.”

I noted the security cameras over the bar, dropped several bills on the table, and walked down the stairs and past the pool, lit now so that it looked like aqua-colored glass.

I continued past the cabanas, taking a walk that Kim might have taken two nights ago.

The beach was nearly empty of people, the sky still light enough to see the shoreline that ringed the whole of Maui like a halo around an eclipse of the moon.

I pictured walking behind Kim on Friday night. Her head might have been down, hair whipping around her face, the strong surf obliterating all other sound.

A man could have come up behind her with a rock, or a gun, or a simple choke hold.

I walked on the hard-packed sand, passing hotels on my right, empty chaises and cockeyed umbrellas as far as I could see.

After a quarter mile, I turned off the beach, walked up a path that skirted the Four Seasons, another five-star hotel where eight hundred bucks a night might buy a room with a view of the parking lot.

I continued on through the hotel's dazzling marble lobby and out to the street. Fifteen minutes later I was back sitting in my rented Chevy, parked in the leafy shadows surrounding the Wailea Princess, listening to the rush of waterfalls.

If I'd been a killer, I could've dumped my victim into the surf or slung her over my shoulder and carried her out to my car. I could've left the scene without anyone noticing.

Easy breezy.

Chapter 27

I started my engine and followed the moon to Stella Blues, a cheerful café in Kihei. It has high, peaked ceilings and a wraparound bar, now buzzing with a weekend crowd of locals and cruise ship tourists enjoying their first night in port. I ordered a Jack Daniel's and mahimahi from the bar, took my drink outside to a table for two on the patio.

As the votive candle guttered in its glass, I called Amanda.

Amanda Diaz and I had been together for almost two years. She's five years younger than me, a pastry chef and a self-described biker chick, which means she takes her antique Harley for a run on the Pacific Coast Highway some weekends to blow off the steam she can't vent in the kitchen. Mandy is not only smart and gorgeous, but when I look at her, all those rock-and-roll songs about booming hearts and loving her till the day I die make total sense.

Right then I was aching to hear my sweetie's voice, and she didn't disappoint, answering the phone on the third ring. After some verbal high fives, and at my request, she told me about her day at Intermezzo.

“It was Groundhog Day, Benjy. Rémy fired Rocco, again,” Amanda said, going into a French accent now. 'What I have to say to you to make you think like chef? This confit. It looks like pigeon poop.' He put about twelve ooohs in poop.”

She laughed, said, “Hired him back ten minutes later. As usual. And then I scorched the crcme brulée. 'Merde, Ahmandah, mon Dieu. You are making me craaaaa-zy.' ” She laughed again. “And you, Benjy? Are you getting your story?”

“I met with the missing girl's folks. They're talking to me.”

“Oh, boy. How grim was that?”

I caught Mandy up on the interview with Barbara, told her how much I liked the McDanielses and that they had two other kids, both boys adopted from Russian orphanages.

“Their oldest son was almost catatonic from neglect when the police in Saint Petersburg found him. The younger boy has fetal alcohol syndrome. Kim decided to become a pediatrician because of her brothers.”

“Ben, honey?”

“ Uh-huh. Am I breaking up?”

“No, I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

“Totally.”

“Then listen. Be careful, will you?”

I felt a slight burr of irritation. Amanda was uncommonly intuitive, but I was in no danger.

“Careful of what?”

“Remember when you left your briefcase with all of your notes on the Donato story in a diner?”

“You're going to bring up the bus again, aren't you?”

“Since you mention it.”

“I was under your spell, goofball. I was looking at you when I stepped off the curb. If you were here now, it could happen again -”

“What I'm saying is, you sound the same way now as you did then.”

“I do, huh?”

“Yeah, you kinda do. So watch out, okay? Pay attention. Look both ways.”

Ten feet away, a couple clinked glasses, held hands across a small table. Honeymooners, I thought.

“I miss you,” I said.

“I miss you, too. I'm keeping the bed warm for you, so come home soon.”

I sent a wireless kiss to my girl in L.A. and said good night.

Chapter 28

At seven fifteen Monday morning, Levon watched the driver pull the black sedan up to the entrance of the Wailea Princess. Levon got into the front passenger seat as Hawkins and Barb got into the back, and when all the doors had slammed shut, Levon told Marco to please take them to the police station in Kihei.

During the ride, Levon half listened as Hawkins talked, telling him how to handle the police, saying to be helpful, to make the cops your friends and not to be belligerent because that would work against them.

Levon had nodded, grunted “uh-huh” a few times, but he was inside his head, wouldn't have been able to describe the route between the hotel and the police station, his mind fully focused on the upcoming meeting with Lieutenant James Jackson.

Levon came back to the present as Marco was parking at the mini-strip mall, and he jumped out before the car had fully stopped. He walked straight up to the shoebox-sized substation, a storefront wedged between a tattoo parlor and a pizzeria.

The glass door was locked, and so Levon jabbed the intercom button and spoke his name, saying to the female voice that he had an appointment at eight with Lieutenant Jackson. There was a buzz and the door opened and they were in.

The station looked to Levon like a small-town DMV. The walls were bureaucrat green; the floor, a buffed linoleum; the long hallway-width room lined with facing rows of plastic chairs.

At the end of the narrow room was a reception window, its metal shutter rolled down, and beside it was a closed door. Levon sat down next to Barbara, and Hawkins sat across from them with his notebook sticking out of his breast pocket, and they waited.

At a few minutes past eight, the shuttered window opened and people trickled in to pay parking tickets, register their cars, God knows what else. Guys with Rasta hair; girls with complicated tattoos; young moms with small, bawling kids.

Levon felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes, and he thought about Kim, wanting to know where she could be right now and if she was in any pain and why this had happened.

After a while, he stood up and paced along the gallery of Wanted posters, looked into the staring eyes of murderers and armed robbers, and then there were the missing-children posters, some of them digitally altered to age the kids to how they might look now, having disappeared so many years ago.

Behind him, Barbara said to Hawkins, “Can you believe it? We've been here two hours. Don't you just want to scream?”

And Levon did want to scream. Where was his daughter? He leaned down and spoke to the female officer behind the window. “Does Lieutenant Jackson know we're here?”

“Yes, sir, he sure does.”

Levon sat down next to Barb, pinched the place between his eyes, wondered why Jackson was taking so long. And he thought about Hawkins, how he'd gotten in very tight with Barb. Levon trusted Barb's judgment, but, like a lot of women, she made friends fast. Sometimes too fast.

Levon watched Hawkins writing in his notebook and then some teenage girls joined the line at the front desk, talking in high-pitched chatter that just about took off the top of his head.

By ten fifteen, Levon's agitation was like the rumbling of the volcanoes that had raised this island out of the prehistoric sea. He felt ready to explode.

Chapter 29

I was sitting in a hard plastic chair next to Barbara McDaniels when I heard the door open at the end of the long, narrow room. Levon leapt up from his seat and was practically in the cop's face before the door swung closed.

The cop was big, midthirties, with thick black hair and mocha-toned skin. He looked part Jimmy Smits, part Ben Affleck, and part island surfer god. Wore a jacket and tie, had a shield hooked into the waistband of his chinos, a gold one, which meant he was a detective.

Barbara and I joined Levon, who introduced us to Lieutenant Jackson. Jackson asked me, “What's your relationship to the McDanielses?”

“Friend of the family,” Barbara said at the same time that I said, “I'm with the L.A. Times.”

Jackson snorted a laugh, scrutinized me, then asked, “Do you know Kim?”

No.

“Have any information as to her whereabouts?”

No.

“Do you know these people? Or did you meet them, say, yesterday?”

“We just met.”

“Interesting,” Jackson said, smirking now. He said to the McDanielses. “You understand this man's job is to sell newspapers?”

“We know that,” Levon said.

“Good. Just so you're clear, anything you say to Mr. Hawkins is going directly from your mouths to the front page of the L.A. Times. Speaking for myself,” Jackson went on, “I don't want him here. Mr. Hawkins, have a seat, and if I need you, I'll call you.”

Barbara spoke up. “Lieutenant, my husband and I talked it over last night, and it comes down to this. We trust Ben, and he has the power of the L.A. Times behind him. He might be able to do more for us than we can do alone.”

Jackson exhaled his exasperation but seemed to concede the point. He said to me, “Anything out of my mouth has to be okayed by me before you run with it, understand?”

I said I did.

Jackson 's office took up a corner at the back of the building, had one window and a noisy air conditioner; numbers were written on the blue plasterboard walls near the phone.

Jackson indicated chairs for the McDanielses, and I leaned against the doorframe as he flapped open a notepad, took down basic information.

Then he got down to business, working, I thought, off a notion that Kim was a party girl, questioning her late-night habits and asking about men in her life and drug use.

Barbara told Jackson that Kim was a straight-A student. That she had sponsored a Christian Children's Fund baby in Ecuador. That she was responsible to a fault and the fact that she hadn't returned their call was way out of character.

Jackson listened with a mostly bored look on his face before saying, “Yeah, I'm sure she's an angel. I'm waiting for the day someone comes in, says their kid is a meth head or a slut.”

Levon sprang to his feet, and Jackson stood up a beat after that, but by then Levon had the advantage. He shoved his palms into Jackson 's beefy shoulders, sending him backward into the wall, which shook with a loud crack. Plaques and photos crashed to the floor, which is what you'd expect when 180 pounds or so was used as a wrecking ball.

Jackson was the bigger and younger man, but Levon was mainlining adrenaline. Without pause, he reached down and grabbed Jackson up by his lapels and threw him against the wall again. There was another terrible crashing sound as Jackson 's head bounced off the plasterboard. I watched him grab for the arm of his chair, which toppled, and sent him down a third time.

It was an ugly scene even before Levon crowned the moment.

He stared down at Jackson, and said, “Damn, that felt good. You son of a bitch.”

Chapter 30

A heavyset female officer barreled toward the doorway as I stood there like a stump, trying to absorb that Levon had assaulted a cop, shoved him, thrown him down, cursed at him, and said it felt good.

Now Jackson was on his feet, and Levon was still panting. The woman cop yelled, “Hey, what's going on?”

Jackson said, “We're fine here, Millie. Lost my balance. Gonna need a new chair.” And he waved her off. Then he turned back to Levon, who was shouting at him, “Don't you get it? I told you last night. We got a fricking phone call in Michigan. The man said he took my daughter, and you're trying to say Kim's a tramp?”

Jackson straightened his jacket, his tie, righted his chair. His face was red and he was scowling. He jerked the chair around, then shouted back at Levon, “You're crazy, McDaniels.

You realize what you just did, you stupid fuck? You want to be locked up? Do you? You think you're a tough guy? You want to find out just how tough I am? I could arrest your ass and have you put away for this, don't you know that?”

“Yeah, throw me in jail, damn you. Do that, because I want to tell the world how you treated us. What a yahoo you are.”

“Levon, Levon,” Barbara was up, begging her husband, pulling at his arm. “Stop, Levon. Control yourself. Apologize to the lieutenant, please.”

Jackson sat down, rolled his chair up to his desk, said, “McDaniels, don't ever put a hand on me again. Due to the fact that you're out of your fucking mind, I'll minimize what just happened in my report. Now sit down before I change my mind and arrest you.”

Levon was still blowing hard, but Jackson gestured to the chairs, and Levon and Barbara sat down.

Jackson touched the back of his head, rubbed his elbow, then said, “Half the time, a kid goes missing, one of the parents knows what happened. Sometimes both of them. I had to see where you were coming from.”

Levon and Barbara stared. And we all got it. Jackson had provoked them to see how they'd react.

It had been a test. They'd passed. In a manner of speaking.

“We've been investigating this case since yesterday morning. Like I told you when I called,” Jackson said, glaring at Levon. “We've met with the Sporting Life people, also the desk and bar staff at the Princess. So far, we got nothing from that.”

Jackson opened his desk drawer, took out a cell phone, one of those thin, half-human devices that takes pictures, sends mail, and tells you when you're low on oil.

“This is Kim's phone,” Jackson said. “We found it on the beach behind the Princess. We've dumped the data and found a number of phone calls to Kim from a man named Doug Cahill.”

“Cahill?” Levon said. “Doug Cahill used to date Kim. He lives in Chicago.”

Jackson shook his head. “He was calling Kim from Maui . Called her every hour until her mailbox filled up and stopped taking incoming calls.”

“You're saying Doug is here?” Barbara asked. “He's in Maui now?”

“We located Cahill in Makena, worked on him for two hours last night before he lawyered up. He said he hadn't seen Kim. That she wouldn't talk to him. And we couldn't hold him, because we have nothing on him,” Jackson said, putting Kim's cell phone back in the drawer.

“McDaniels, here's what we've got. You got a phone call saying Kim was in bad hands. And we have Kim's cell phone. We don't even know if a crime has been committed. If Cahill gets on a plane, there's nothing we can do to stop him from leaving.”

I saw Barbara start, shock coming over her face again.

“Doug's not your guy,” Levon said.

Jackson 's eyebrows shot up. “Why do you say that?”

“I know Doug's voice. The man who called us wasn't Doug.”

Chapter 31

We were back in the black sedan. This time I was in front, beside the driver. Marco adjusted his rearview mirror, and we exchanged nods, but there was nothing to say. It was all going on in the backseat between Barbara and Levon.

Levon was explaining to his wife, “Barb. I didn't tell you what that bastard said verbatim because there was nothing to be gained from it. I'm sorry.”

“I'm your wife. You had no right to hold back what he said.”

“ 'She's fallen into bad hands,' okay? That's the only thing I didn't tell you, and I still wouldn't tell you, but I had to tell Jackson. I tried to spare you, sweetheart, I wanted to spare you.”

Barb cried, “Spare me? You lied to me, Levon. You lied.” And then Levon was crying too, and I realized that this was what had been binding Levon up, why he'd been so glassy-eyed and removed. A man had said that he was going to hurt his daughter and Levon hadn't told his wife. And now he couldn't pretend anymore that it wasn't true.

I wanted to give them some privacy, so I lowered the window, stared out at the beachfront whizzing by, at the families picnicking by the ocean, as Kim's parents suffered terribly. The contrast between the campers and the weeping couple behind me was excruciating.

I made a note, then swiveled in my seat and, trying for something comforting, I said to Levon, “ Jackson isn't subtle, but he's on the case. He might be a pretty good cop.”

Kim's father leveled hard eyes on me.

“I think you're right about Jackson. He nailed you in five seconds. Look at you. You parasite. Writing your story. Selling newspapers on our pain.”

I felt the accusation like a gut punch – but there was some truth in it, I guess. I swallowed the hurt and found my compassion for Levon.

I said, “You've got a point, Levon. But even if I'm exactly what you say, Kim's story could get out of control and eat you alive.

“Think of JonBenet Ramsey. Natalee Holloway. Chandra Levy. I hope Kim is safe and that she's found fast. But whatever happens, you're going to want me with you. Because I'm not going to fan the flames and I'm not going to make anything up. I'm going to tell the story right.”

Chapter 32

Marco watched until Hawkins and the McDanielses passed between the koi ponds and entered the hotel before he put the car in gear, eased out onto Wailea Alanui Drive, and headed south.

As he drove, he felt under the seat, pulled out a nylon duffel bag, and put it beside him. Then he reached behind the rearview mirror where he'd parked the cutting-edge, wireless, high-resolution, micro-video camera. He ejected the media card and dropped it into his shirt pocket.

He had a thought that maybe the camera had slipped during the drive back from the police station and the angle might have been off, but even if he just got the crying, he had his sound track for another scene. Levon talking about bad hands? Priceless.

Sneaky Marco.

Imagine their surprise when they figure it all out. If they ever do.

He felt a rush as he added up the cash potential of his new contract, the thick stack of euros with the possibility of doubling his take, depending on the vote of the Alliance on the project as a whole.

He would thrill them to the roots of their short hairs, that's how good this film would be, and all he had to do was what he did best. How could a job possibly be better than this?

Marco saw his turn coming up, signaled, got into the right lane, then entered the parking lot of the Shops at Wailea. He parked the Caddy in the southernmost section of the lot, far from the mall's surveillance cameras and next to his nondescript rented Taurus.

Hidden behind the Caddy's tinted glass, the killer stripped himself of all things Marco: the chauffeur's cap and wig, fake mustache, livery jacket, cowboy boots. Then he took “Charlie Rollins” out of the bag. The baseball cap, beat-up Adidas, wraparound shades, press pass, and both cameras.

He changed quickly, bagged the Marco artifacts, then made the return trip to the Wailea Princess in the Taurus. He tipped the bellman three bucks, then checked in at the front desk, lucking out, getting a king-size bed, ocean view.

Leaving the desk, heading for the stairway at the far end of the marble acreage of the lobby, Henri as “Charlie Rollins” saw the McDanielses and Ben Hawkins sitting together around a low glass table, coffee cups in front of them.

Rollins felt his heart kick into overdrive as Hawkins turned, looked at him, pausing for a nanosecond – maybe his reptilian brain was making a match? – before his “rational” brain, fooled by the Rollins getup, steered his gaze past him.

The game could have been over in that one look, but Hawkins hadn't recognized him – and he'd been sitting right beside him in the car for hours. This was the real thrill, skating along the razor's edge and getting away with it.

So Charlie Rollins, photographer from the nonexistent Talk Weekly, jacked it up a notch. He raised his Sony – say cheese, mousies – and snapped off three shots of the McDanielses.

Gotcha, Mom and Dad.

His heart was still pounding as Levon scowled and leaned forward, blocking his camera's-eye view of Barbara.

Ecstatic, the killer took the stairs to his room, thinking now about Ben Hawkins, a man who interested him even more than the McDanielses did. Hawkins was a great crime writer, every one of his books as good as The Silence of the Lambs. But Hawkins hadn't quite made it to the big time. Why not?

Rollins slipped the card key into the slot and got the green light. His door opened onto a scene of casual magnificence that he barely noticed. He was busy turning ideas over in his mind, thinking about how to make Ben Hawkins an integral part of his project.

It was just a question of how best to use him.

Chapter 33

Levon put down his coffee cup, the porcelain chattering against the saucer, knowing that Barb and Hawkins and probably the entire gang of Japanese tourists trooping by could see that his hands were shaking. But he couldn't do a thing about it.

That damned bloodsucking paparazzo pointing the camera at him and Barb! Plus he was reeling from the aftershocks of his out-of-control fight with Lieutenant Jackson. He still felt the shove in the balls of his hands, still felt a flush of mortification at the idea that he could be in a jail cell right now, but hell, he'd done it, and that was that.

The bright side: maybe he'd motivated Jackson to bust his ass on Kim's behalf. If not, too bad. They weren't going to be relying entirely on Jackson anymore.

Levon felt someone coming up behind him, and Hawkins was getting out of his chair, saying, “There he is now.”

Levon looked up, saw a thirtyish man coming across the lobby in slacks and a blue sports jacket over a bold Hawaiian-print shirt, his bleached-blond hair parted in the middle. Hawkins was saying, “Levon, Barbara, meet Eddie Keola, the best private detective in Maui.”

“The only private detective in Maui,” Keola said, his smile showing braces on his teeth. God, Levon thought, he's not much older than Kim. This was the detective who found the Reese girl?

Keola shook hands with the McDanielses, sat down in one of the richly upholstered rattan-backed chairs, and said, “Good to meet you. And forgive me for jumping right in, but I've already got some feelers out.”

“Already?” Barb asked.

“As soon as Ben called me, I reached out. I was born about fifteen minutes from here and I was on the force for a few years when I got out of school, University of Hawaii. I've got a good working relationship with the police,” he said. He wasn't show-offy in Levon's opinion, was just stating his credentials.

“They've got a suspect,” Keola added.

“We know him,” Levon said, and he told Keola about Doug Cahill being Kim's ex-boyfriend, then went over the phone call back home in Michigan that had cracked open his universe like it was a raw egg.

Barb asked Keola to tell them about Carol Reese, the twenty-year-old track star from Ohio State who'd gone missing a couple of years before.

“I found her in San Francisco,” Keola said. “She had a bad-news, violent boyfriend and so she kidnapped herself, changed her name and everything. She was powerfully mad at me for finding her,” he said, nodding his head as he remembered.

Levon said, “Tell me how this would work.”

Keola said he'd want to talk to the Sporting Life photographer, see if he might have filmed some bystanders at the shoot, and that he'd talk to hotel security, see the security tapes from the Typhoon Bar the night Kim disappeared.

“Let's hope Kim shows up on her own,” Keola went on, “but if not, this is going to be basic, shoe-leather detective work. You'll be my only client. I'll pull in additional help as needed, and we'll work around the clock. It's over when you say it's over and not before. That's the right way to go.”

Levon discussed rates with Keola, but it really didn't matter. He thought about the hours posted on the door at the police station in Kihei. Monday through Friday, eight to five. Saturday, ten to four. Kim, in a dungeon or a ditch, helpless.

Levon said, “You're hired. You've got the job.”

Chapter 34

My phone rang as soon as I opened the door to my room.

I said hello to a woman who said, “ Ben-ah Haw-keens?” Strong accent.

I said, “Yes, this is Hawkins,” and I waited for her to tell me who she was, but she didn't identify herself. “There's a man, staying in the Princess hotel.”

“Go on.”

“His name is Nils Bjorn, and you should talk to him.”

“And why's that?”

My caller said that Bjorn was a European businessman who should be investigated. “He was in the hotel when Kim McDaniels went missing. He could be? you should talk to him.”

I pulled at the desk drawer, looking for stationery and a pen.

“What makes this Nils Bjorn suspicious?” I asked, finding the paper and pen, writing down the name.

“You talk to him. I have to hang up now,” the woman said – and did.

I took a bottle of Perrier from the fridge and went out to my balcony. I was staying at the Marriott, a quarter mile up the beach from the much pricier Wailea Princess but with the same dazzling ocean view. I sipped my Perrier and thought about my tipster. For starters, how had she found me? Only the McDanielses and Amanda knew where I was staying.

I went back through the sliding doors, booted up my laptop, and when I got an Internet connection I Googled “Nils Bjorn.”

The first hit was an article that had run in the London Times a year before, about a Nils Bjorn who had been arrested in London, held on suspicion of selling arms to Iran, released for lack of evidence.

I kept clicking and opening articles, all of which were similar if not identical to the first.

I opened another Perrier and kept poking, found another story on Bjorn going back to 2005, a charge of “aggravated assault on a woman,” the legal term for rape. The woman's name wasn't mentioned, only that she was a model, age nineteen, and again, Bjorn wasn't indicted.

My last stop on Bjorn's Internet trail was Skoal, a glossy European society magazine. There was a photo that had been taken at a reception dinner for a Swedish industrialist who'd opened a munitions factory outside of Gothenburg.

I enlarged the photo, studied the man identified as Bjorn, stared at his flashbulb-lit eyes. He had regular features, light brown hair, straight nose, looked to be in his thirties, and had not one remarkable or memorable feature.

I saved the photo to my hard drive and then I called the Wailea Princess and asked for Nils Bjorn. I was told he'd checked out the day before.

I asked to be put through to the McDanielses.

I told Levon about my phone call from the woman and what I knew about Nils Bjorn: He'd been charged with selling arms to a terrorist nation, and he'd been charged with raping a model. Neither charge had stuck. Two days ago he'd been staying at the Wailea Princess hotel.

I was trying to keep my excitement in check, but I could hear it in my voice.

“This could be a break,” I said.

Chapter 35

Levon was holding for Jackson. After five minutes of Muzak, he was told the police lieutenant would call him back. He hung up the phone, turned on the television, a big plasma thing, took up half the wall, as the news was coming on.

First came the flashy graphic intro to All-Island News at Noon with Tracy Baker and Candy Ko'alani, and then Baker was talking about the “still-missing model, Kim McDaniels” and cutting to a picture of her in a bikini. Then Jackson 's face was on the screen above the word “Live.”

He was talking to the press in front of the police station.

Levon shouted, “Barb, come in here, quick,” as he cranked up the volume. Barb sat next to him on the sofa just as Jackson was saying, “We're talking to a person of interest, and this investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about Kim McDaniels is asked to call us. Confidentiality will be respected. And that's all I can say at this time.”

“They arrested someone or not?” Barb said, clutching his hand.

“A 'person of interest' is a suspect. But they don't have enough on him, or they'd be saying he was in custody.” Levon cranked up the volume a little more.

A reporter asked, “Lieutenant, we understand you're talking to Doug Cahill.”

“No comment. That's all I have for you. Thank you.”

Jackson turned away and the reporters went nuts, and then Tracy Baker was back on the screen, saying “Doug Cahill, linebacker for the Chicago Bears, has been seen on Maui, and informed sources say he was Kim McDaniels's lover.” A picture came on the screen of Doug in his uniform, helmet under his arm, huge grin, cropped blond hair, mid-western good looks.

“I could see him pestering her,” Barb said, chewing on her lower lip, snatching the remote out of Levon's hand, dialing the volume down. “But hurt her? I do not believe that.”

And then the phone rang. Levon grabbed it off the hook.

“Mr. McDaniels, this is Lieutenant Jackson.”

“Are you arresting Doug Cahill? If you are, it's a mistake.”

“A witness came forward an hour ago, a local who said he'd seen Cahill harassing Kim after the photo shoot.”

“Didn't Doug tell you he hadn't seen Kim?” Levon asked. “Right. So maybe he lied to us and so we're talking to him now. He's still denying any involvement.”

“There's someone else you should know about,” Levon said, and he told Jackson about Hawkins's recent phone call concerning a tip about an international businessman named Nils Bjorn.

“We know who Bjorn is,” Jackson said. “There's no link between Bjorn and Kim. No witnesses. Nothing on the surveillance tapes.”

“You talked with him?”

“Bjorn had checked out before anyone knew Kim was missing. McDaniels, I know you don't buy it, but Cahill is our guy. We just need time enough to break him.”

Chapter 36

Henri, in his Charlie Rollins gear, was having lunch at the Sand Bar, the hotel's exquisite beachside restaurant. Yellow market umbrellas glowed overhead, and teenagers ran up the steps from the beach, their tanned bodies glistening with water. Henri didn't know who was more beautiful, the boys or the girls.

Henri's waitress brought him liquid sugar for his iced tea and a basket of cheesy breadsticks and said his salad would be coming shortly. He nodded pleasantly, said he was enjoying the view and had no place he'd rather be than here.

A waiter pulled out a chair at the next table, and a pretty, young woman sat down. She wore her black hair in a short, boyish style, was dressed in a white bikini top and yellow shorts.

Henri knew who she was behind her Maui Jim shades.

When she put down her menu, he said, “Julia. Julia Winkler.”

She looked up, said, “Sorry. Do I know you?”

“I know you,” he said, held up his camera to say, I'm in the business. “Are you on a job?”

“I was,” she said. “The shoot wrapped yesterday. I'm going back to L.A. tomorrow.”

“Oh. The Sporting Life job?”

She nodded, her face getting sad. “I've been waiting around, hoping? I was rooming with Kim McDaniels.”

“She'll be back,” Henri said kindly.

“You think? Why?”

“I have a feeling she's taking a holiday. It happens.”

“If you're so psychic, where is she?”

“She's out of my vibrational reach, but I can read you loud and clear.”

“Sure. So what am I thinking?”

“That you're feeling sad and a little lonely and you wish you were having lunch with someone who would make you smile.”

Julia laughed, and Henri signaled to the waiter, asked him to set Ms. Winkler up at his table, and the beautiful girl sat down next to him so that they were both looking out at the view.

“Charlie,” he said, putting out his hand. “Rollins.”

“Hi, Charlie Rollins. What am I having for lunch?”

“Grilled chicken salad and a Diet Coke. And here's what else. You're thinking you'd like to stay over another day because a neighbor is taking care of your cat and it's so nice here, so what's the rush to go home?”

Julia laughed again. “Bruno. He's a Rottweiler.”

“I knew that,” Henri said, sitting back as the waitress brought his salad and asked Julia for her order, grilled chicken and a mai tai.

“Even if I were to stay over another night, I never date photographers,” she said, eyeing the camera resting on the table facing her.

“Have I asked you out?”

“You will.”

Their grins turned into laughter, and then Rollins said, “All right, I'll ask you out. And I'm taking your picture so the guys in Loxahatchee won't think I made this up.”

“Okay, but take off your sunglasses, Charlie. I want to see your eyes.”

“Show me yours, I'll show you mine.”

Chapter 37

WHOOOOOOO,” Julia screamed as the chopper yawed into the coral-gold sky. The little island of Lanai grew huge, and then they were dropping softly to the tiny private heliport at the edge of the vast Island Breezes Hotel's greener-than-green golf course.

Charlie got out first and helped Julia to the ground as she held the collar of her windbreaker closed, her curly hair parting, her cheeks flushed. They ducked under the rotor blades and ran to a waiting car.

“You've got a great expense account, buddy,” she said breathlessly.

“Our dream date's on me, Julia.”

“Really?”

“What kind of person would expense a date with you?”

“Awww.”

The driver opened the doors, and then the car rolled slowly over the carriage road to the hotel, Julia gasping as she entered the lobby, all velvety teal and gold and burgundy, dense Chinese carpets and ancient statuary. The sunset streamed through the open-air space, almost stealing the show.

Julia and Charlie had their twin massages in a bamboo hut open to the ocean's rhythmic pounding on the shore. The masseurs quartered the plumeria-scented sheets that covered them as their strong hands massaged in cocoa butter before proceeding to the long strokes of the traditional lomi lomi massage.

Julia, lying on her stomach, smiled lazily at the man she'd just met, saying, “This is too good. I don't want it to ever stop.”

“It only gets better from here.”

Dinner came hours later at the restaurant on the main floor. Pillars and soft lighting were the backdrop for their feast of shrimp and Kurubuta pork chops with mango chutney and an excellent French wine. And Julia was happy to let Charlie lead her in conversation about herself. She opened up to him, talking about her upbringing on an army base in Beirut, her move to Los Angeles, her lucky break.

Charlie ordered a dessert wine and the entire dessert menu: zuccotto, pralines and milk, chocolate mousse, Lanai bananas caramelized by the waiter at the table. The delicious fragrance of burnt sugar made him hungry all over again. He looked at the girl, and she was a girl now, sweet and vulnerable and available to him.

Four thousand dollars had been well spent, even if he stopped right now.

But he didn't.

They changed into their swimsuits in a cabana by the pool and took a long walk on the beach. Moonlight bathed the sand, turning the ocean into a magical meeting of rushing sound and frothing foam.

And then Julia laughed, and said, “Last one in the water is an old poop, and that will be you, Charlie.”

She ran, screamed as the water lapped her thighs, and Charlie snapped off some quick shots before putting his camera back inside his duffel bag and setting it down.

“Let's see who's an old poop.”

He sprinted toward her, dove into the waves, and surfaced with his arms around her.

Chapter 38

After a quick dinner out with Keola, I returned to my hotel room, checked for messages, had no new calls from the woman with the accent, or anyone else. I cranked up my computer, and after a while I sent a pretty fine seven-hundred-word story to Aronstein's in-box at the L.A. Times.

Work done for today, I turned on the TV and saw that Kim's story was headlining the ten o'clock news.

There was a banner, “Breaking News,” and then the talking heads announced that Doug Cahill was a presumed suspect in the presumed abduction of Kim McDaniels. Cahill's picture came on the screen, fully uniformed for a Chicago Bears game, smiling at the camera like a movie star, all 6 feet, 3 inches, and 250 pounds of him.

Anyone would have been able to do the math. Cahill could've easily picked up 110-pound Kim McDaniels and carried her under his arm like a football.

And then my eyes nearly jumped out of my head.

Cahill was shown in a video clip that had been shot two hours earlier. While I was having pizza with Eddie Keola, the action had taken place right outside the police station in Kihei.

Cahill was flanked by two lawyers, one of whom I recognized. Amos Brock was dapper in his pearl gray suit, a New York criminal defense attorney with a history of representing celebrities and sports stars who'd gone too far over to the dark side. Brock had turned into a star himself, and now he was defending Doug Cahill.

Station KITV had cameras trained on Cahill and Brock. Brock stepped to the microphone, said, “My client, Doug Cahill, hasn't been charged with anything. The accusations against him are preposterous. There's not a speck of evidence to support any of the allegations that have been going around, which is why my client hasn't been charged. Doug wants to speak publicly, this one and only time.”

I grabbed the phone, woke Levon out of what sounded like a deep sleep. “Levon. It's Ben. Turn on the TV. Channel four. Hurry.”

I stayed on with Levon as Cahill stood front and center. He was unshaven, wearing a blue cotton button-down shirt under a well-cut sports jacket. Without the pads and the uniform, he looked relatively tame, like a kid in a Wall Street management training program.

“I came to Maui to see Kim,” Doug said, his voice shaking, thick with the tears that were also wetting his cheeks. “I saw her for about ten minutes three days ago and never saw her after that. I didn't hurt her. I love Kim, and I'm staying here until we find her.”

Cahill handed the mic back to Brock: “To repeat, Doug had nothing to do with Kim's disappearance, and I will absolutely, unequivocally bring action against anyone who defames him. That's all we have to say for the moment. Thank you.”

Levon said to me, “What do you make of that? The lawyer? Doug?”

“Doug was pretty convincing,” I said. “Either he loves her. Or he's a very good liar.”

I had another thought, one I didn't share with Levon. Those seven hundred words I'd just sent to Aronstein at the Times?

They were old news.

Chapter 39

I e-mailed my editor, told him that Doug Cahill was going to be chum for the media feeding frenzy and why: that a mystery witness had seen him coming on strong with Kim, and that Cahill was being represented by Amos Brock, the current champion bully of defense attorneys.

“Here's an updated version of my article,” I wrote Aronstein. “If nothing else, I'm fast.”

And then I called our sports chief, Sam Paulson. He keeps odd hours, and I knew he'd be up.

Paulson likes me, but he doesn't trust anyone. I said, “Look, Sam, I need to know what kind of person Doug Cahill is. My story isn't going to mess with yours.”

It was a wrestling match that went on for fifteen minutes, Sam Paulson protecting his position as the sports world's premiere “in” guy, while I tried to get something out of Paulson that would tell me if Cahill was dangerous off the playing field.

At last Sam gave me a tantalizing lead.

“There's a PR girl. I got her a job working for the Bears. Hawkins, I'm not kidding. This is off the record. This girl's a friend of mine.”

“I understand.”

“Cahill got this girl pregnant a couple months back. She's told her mother about the baby. She also told Cahill and me. She's giving Cahill a chance to do the right thing. Whatever the hell that might be.”

“He was dating Kim when this happened with the other woman? You're certain?”

“Yep.”

“Does he have any history of violence?”

“They all do. Sure. Bar fights. One zesty one when he played at Notre Dame. Crap like that.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

“Don't mention it,” he said back. “I mean really. Don't mention it.”

I sat on this bombshell for a few minutes, thinking through what this meant. If Kim knew Cahill had cheated on her, that was reason enough for her to dump him. If he wanted her back, if he was desperate, a confrontation could have led to something physical that might have gotten out of hand.

I called Levon. And I was startled by his reaction.

“Doug is a testosterone machine,” he told me. “Kim said he was strong-willed, and we all know he was a killer on the field. How do we know what he's capable of doing? Barb still believes in him, but as for me, I'm starting to think maybe Jackson is right. Maybe they've got the right guy after all.”

Chapter 40

Julia felt weightless in Charlie's arms, like an angel. Her long legs locked around his waist, and all he had to do was raise his knees, and she was sitting on his lap.

He did just that as they bobbed in the waves. She lifted her face to him, saying, “Charlie, this has been the most. The best.”

“It gets better from here,” he said again, his theme song for their date, and she grinned at him, kissed him softly, then deeply, a long salty kiss followed by another, electricity arcing like heat lightning around them.

He undid the string tie at her neck, jerked loose the tie behind her back, said, “You do a lot for a simple white bikini.”

“What bikini?”

“Never mind,” he said, and the swimsuit top drifted away, a ribbon of white on the black waves, until it was gone, and she didn't seem to care.

Julia was too busy licking his ear, her nipples as hard as diamonds against his chest. She groaned as he shifted her so she was pressed even tighter to him, rubbing like an eager beaver against his dick.

He reached around and ran his fingers under the elastic of her bikini bottoms, touched the tender places, making her squeal and squirm like a kid.

She pushed down at the waistband of his swim shorts with the backs of her feet.

“Wait,” he said. “Be good.”

“I plan to be great,” she said breathily, kissing him, pulling at his shorts again. “I'm dying for you.” She sighed.

He unhooked her legs and pulled off the bottom half of her swimsuit. Carrying the naked girl in his arms, he walked out of the waves as water streamed off their bodies, silver in the moonlight.

Charlie said, “Hang on to me, monkey.”

He brought her over to where he'd left his duffel bag next to a mound of black lava rock. He stooped and unzipped the bag, pulled out two enormous beach towels.

Still balancing the girl in his arms, he spread out one towel and laid Julia softly down, covered her with the second towel.

He turned away briefly, set the Panasonic camera on top of the duffel, and switched it on, angling it just so.

Then he faced Julia again, shucked his swim trunks, smiled when she said, “Oh my God, oh my God, Charlie.”

He knelt between her legs, tonguing her until she cried out, “Please, I can't stand it, Charlie. I'm begging you, please,” and he entered her.

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.

A ping sounded from Horst's computer, and he walked to his desk, told his friend he was downloading now, and then forwarded the e-mail to Jan in his office in Amsterdam.

The images appeared simultaneously on their screens.

The background was a moonlit beach. A pretty girl was lying faceup on a large towel. She was nude, slim-hipped, small-breasted, and her short hair was finger-combed in a boyish fashion. The black-and-white images of form and shadow gave the film a moody quality, as though it had been shot in the 1940s.

“Beautiful composition,” said Jan. “The man has an eye.”

When Henri entered the frame, his face was digitally pixilated to a blur, and his voice had been electronically altered. Henri talked to the girl, his voice playful, calling her a monkey and sometimes saying her name.

Horst commented to Jan, “Interesting, yes? The girl isn't the least bit afraid. She doesn't even appear to be drugged.”

Julia was smiling up at Henri, reaching out her arms, opening her legs to him. He stepped out of his shorts, his cock large and erect, and the girl covered her mouth as she stared up at him, saying, Oh my God, Charlie.

Henri told her she was greedy, but they could hear the teasing and the laughter in his voice. They watched him kneel between her thighs, lift her buttocks, and lower his face until the girl squirmed, grinding her hips, digging her toes into the sand, crying out, “Please, I can't stand it, Charlie.”

Jan said to Horst, “I think Henri is making her fall in love. Maybe he is falling in love, too? Wouldn't that be something to watch.”

“Oh, you think Henri can feel love?”

As the two men watched, Henri stroked, teased, plunged himself into the girl's body, telling her how beautiful she was and to give herself to him until her cries became sobs.

She reached her hands around his neck, and Henri took her in his arms and kissed her closed eyes, her cheeks and mouth. Then his hand became large in front of the camera, almost blocking the image of the girl, and reappeared again, holding a hunting knife. He placed the blade beside the girl on the towel.

Horst was leaning forward, watching the screen intently, thinking, Yes, first the ceremony, now the ultimate sacrifice, when Henri turned his digitally obscured face to the camera and said, “Is everybody happy?”

The girl answered, yes, she was completely happy, and then the picture went black.

“What is this?” Jan asked, jerked out of what was almost a trance state. Horst reversed the video, reviewed the last moments, and he realized it was over. At least for them.

“Jan,” he said, “our boy is teasing us, too. Making us wait for the finished product. Smart. Very smart.”

Jan sighed. “What a life he is having at our expense.”

“Shall we make a wager? Just between you and me?”

“On what?”

“How long before Henri gets caught?”

Chapter 44

It was almost four in the morning, and I hadn't slept, my mind still burning with the images of Rosa Castro's tortured body, thinking of what had been done to her before her life ended under a rock in the sea.

I thought about her parents and the McDanielses and that these good people were suffering a kind of hell that Hieronymus Bosch couldn't have imagined, not on his most inspired day or night. I wanted to call Amanda but didn't. I was afraid I might slip and tell her what I was thinking: Thank God we don't have kids.

I swung my legs over the bed, turned on the lights. I got a can of POG out of the fridge, a passion fruit, orange, and guava drink, and then I booted up my laptop.

My mailbox had filled with spam since I'd checked it last, and CNN had sent me a news alert on Rosa Castro. I scanned the story quickly, finding that Kim was mentioned in the last paragraph.

I quickly typed Kim's name into the search box to see if CNN had dragged any new tidbits into their net. They had not.

I opened a can of Pringles, ate just one, made coffee with the complimentary drip coffeemaker, then pecked away at the Internet some more.

I found Doug Cahill videos on YouTube: frat house clips and locker-room antics, and a video of Kim sitting in the stands at a football game, clapping and stomping. The camera went back and forth between her and shots of Cahill playing against the New York Giants, nearly decapitating Eli Manning.

I tried to imagine Cahill killing Kim, and I couldn't rule out that a guy who could slam into three hundred pounders was a guy who could get physical with a resistant girl and accidentally, or on purpose, break her neck.

But, in my heart, I believed that Cahill's tears were real, that he loved Kim, and, logically, if he had killed her he had the means to get lost anywhere in the world by now.

So I sent my browser out to search for the name the female tipster had whispered in my ear, the suspected arms trader, Nils – middle name, Ostertag – Bjorn. The search returned the same leads I'd gotten the day before, but this time I opened the articles that were written in Swedish.

Using an online dictionary, I translated the Swedish words for “munitions” and “body armor,” and then I found another photo of Bjorn dated three years earlier.

It was a candid shot of the man with the regular, almost forgettable, features getting out of a Ferrari in Geneva. He was wearing a handsome chalk-striped suit under a well-cut topcoat, carrying a Gucci briefcase. Bjorn looked different in this photo from the way he looked at the industrialist's black-tie dinner, because Bjorn's hair was now blond. White blond.

I clicked on the last of the articles about Nils Ostertag Bjorn, and another photo filled my screen, this one of a man in a military uniform. He looked about twenty or so, had wide-spaced eyes and a boxy chin. But he looked nothing like the other photos of Nils Bjorn I'd seen.

I read the text beneath the photo and made out the Swedish words for “ Persian Gulf ” and “enemy fire,” and then it hit me.

I was reading an obituary.

Nils Ostertag Bjorn had been dead for fifteen years.

I went to the shower, let the hot water beat down on my head as I tried to fit the pieces together. Was this simply a case of two men with the same unusual name? Or had someone using a dead man's identity checked into the Wailea Princess?

If so, had he abducted and possibly murdered Kim McDaniels?

Chapter 45

Henri Benoit woke up between soft, white layers of bedding in an elegant four-poster bed in his room at the Island Breezes Hotel on Lanai.

Julia was snoring gently under his arm, her face warm against his chest. Late morning sunlight filtered through the filmy curtains, the whole wide Pacific only fifty yards away.

This girl. This setting. This inimitable light. It was a cinematographer's dream.

He brushed Julia's hair away from her eyes with his fingers. The sweet girl was under the spell of the kava kava, plus the generous lacing of Valium he'd put in her cup. She'd slept deeply, but now it was time to wake her for her close-up.

Henri shook Julia's arm gently, said, “Wakey, wakey, monkey face.”

Julia cracked open her eyes, said, “Charlie? What? Is it time for my flight?”

“Not yet. Want another ten minutes?”

She nodded, then dropped off against his shoulder.

Henri eased out of bed and got busy, turning on lamps, replacing the media card in his video camera with a new one, setting the camera on the dresser, blocking out the scene. Satisfied, he removed the silk tassel tiebacks from the curtains, letting the heavy drapery fall closed.

Julia mumbled a complaint as he turned her onto her stomach. He said, “It's okay. It's just Charlie,” as he tied her legs to the posts at the foot of the bed, making a clove hitch knot with the cords, and then he tied her arms to the headboard using an exotic Japanese chain knot that photographed beautifully.

Julia threw a sigh as she slipped into another dream.

Henri went to his duffel bag, sorted through the contents, put on the clear plastic mask and blue latex gloves, unsheathed the hunting knife.

Masked and gloved but otherwise naked, Henri placed the knife on the nightstand, then knelt behind Julia and stroked her back before lifting her hips and entering her from behind. She moaned in her sleep, never waking, as he pumped into her, his pleasure overtaking reason, and told her that he loved her.

Afterward, he collapsed beside her, his arm across the small of her back until his breathing slowed. Then he straddled the sleeping girl, twirled her short hair around the fingers of his left hand, and lifted her head a few inches off the pillow.

“Ow,” Julia said, opening her eyes. “You hurt me, Charlie.”

“I'm sorry. I'll be more careful.”

He waited a moment before drawing the blade lightly across the back of Julia's neck, leaving a thin red line.

Julia only flinched, but with Henri's second cut, her eyelids flew open wide. She twisted her head, her eyes growing huge as she took in the mask, the knife, the blood. She sucked in her breath, shouted, “Charlie! What are you doing?”

Henri's mood shattered. He'd been filled with love for this girl, and now she was defying him, wrecking his shot, ruining everything.

“For God's sake, Julia. Show a little class.”

Julia screamed, bucked violently against the restraints, her body having more range of motion than Henri expected. Her elbow collided with his hand, and as the knife danced away from him, Julia filled her lungs and let loose a long, undulating, horror-movie screech.

She'd left Henri no choice. It wasn't graceful, but it was ultimately the best means to the end. He closed his hands around Julia's throat and shook her. Julia gagged and thrashed against the ropes as he squeezed off her air, controlled every last second of her life. He released, then squeezed her neck again – and again – and then finally she was still. Because she was dead.

Henri was panting as he got off the bed and crossed the floor to the camera.

He leaned toward the lens, put his hands on his knees, said with a grin, “Better than I planned. Julia went off script and ended our time together with a real flourish. I just love her. Is everybody happy?”

Chapter 46

Henri was stepping out of the shower when he heard a knock at the door. Had someone heard Julia screaming? A voice called out, “Housekeeping.”

“Go away!” he shouted. “Do not disturb. Read the sign, huh?”

Henri tightened the sash of his robe, walked to the glass doors at the far end of the room, opened them, and stepped out onto the balcony.

The beauty of the grounds spread out before him like the Garden of Eden. Birds chirped their little hearts out in the trees, pineapples grew in the flower beds, children ran along the walks to the pool as hotel staff set up lounge chairs. Beyond the pool, the ocean was bright blue, the sun beat down on another perfect Hawaiian day.

There were no sirens. No men in black. No trouble on the horizon for him.

All was well.

Henri palmed his cell phone, called for the helicopter, then went to the bed and pulled the comforter over Julia's body. He wiped down the room, every knob and surface, and turned on the TV as he dressed in his Charlie Rollins gear. Rosa Castro's face grinned at him from the TV screen, a sweet little girl, and then there was the continuing story of Kim McDaniels. No news, but the search went on.

Where was Kim? Where, oh, where could she be?

Henri packed his gear, checked the room for anything he might have overlooked, and when he was satisfied he put on Charlie's wraparound sunglasses and ball cap, swung his large duffel onto his shoulder, and left the room.

He passed the housekeeper's cart on his way to the elevator, said to the stout brown woman vacuuming, “I'm in Four-twelve.”

“I can clean now?” she asked.

“No, no. A few more hours, please.”

He apologized for the inconvenience, said, “I've left something for you in the room.”

“Thank you,” she said. Henri winked at her, took the stairs down to the marvelous velvet jewel box of a lobby with birds flying through one side and out the other.

He settled his bill at the desk, then asked a groundskeeper for a lift out to the helipad. He was already thinking ahead as the hotel's oversize golf cart ran smoothly alongside the green, the wind picking up now, blowing clouds out to the sea.

He tipped the driver and, holding down his cap, ran toward the chopper.

After buckling in, he raised his hand to say hello to the pilot. He pulled on headphones and, as the chopper lifted, he snapped off shots of the island with his Sony, what any tourist would do. But it was all for show. Henri was well beyond the magnificence of Lanai.

When the helicopter touched down in Maui, he made an important call.

“Mr. McDaniels? You don't know me. My name is Peter Fisher,” he said, brushing his speech with a bit of Aussie. “I have something to tell you about Kim. I also have her watch – a Rolex.”

Chapter 47

The Kamehameha Hostel on Oahu had been built in the early 1900s, and it looked to Levon like it had been a boardinghouse, with small bungalows surrounding the main building. The beach was right across the highway. Out on the horizon, surfers crouched above their boards, skimming the waves, waiting for the Big One.

Levon and Barbara stepped over backpackers in the dark lobby, which smelled musty, like mildew with a touch of marijuana.

The man behind the desk looked like he'd washed up on the beach a hundred years ago. He had bloodshot eyes, hair in a white braid even longer than Barb's, and a stained “Bullish on America ” T-shirt with a name patch: “Gus.”

Levon told Gus that he and Barb had a reservation for one night, and Gus told Levon that he'd need to be paid in full before he handed over the keys, those were the rules.

Levon gave the man ninety bucks in cash.

“No refunds, checkout at noon, no exceptions.”

“We're looking for a guest named Peter Fisher,” Levon said. “He has an accent. Australian or South African maybe. ' Pee-ta Fish-a.' You have his room number?”

The clerk flipped pages of the guest book, saying, “Not everyone signs in. If they come in a gang, I only need the one signature of whoever's paying. I don't see any Peter Fleisher.”

“Fisher.”

“Either way, I don't see him. Most people eat in our dining room at dinner. Six dollars, three courses. Ask around later, and you might find your man.”

Gus looked hard at Levon, said, “I know you. You're the parents of that model got killed over on Maui.”

Levon felt his blood pressure rocket, wondered if today was the day he would be cut down by a fatal myocardial infarction. “Where'd you hear that?” he snapped.

“Whad'ya mean? It's on TV. In the newspapers.”

“She's not dead,” Levon said.

He took the keys. With Barb behind him, they climbed to the third floor, opened the door to an appalling room: two small beds, mattress springs poking at grimy sheets. The shower stall was black with mold, there were years of crud in the blinds, and the scatter rug looked damp to the touch.

The sign tacked over the sink read, “Please clean up after yourselfs. There's no maid service here.”

Barbara looked helplessly at her husband.

“We'll go downstairs for dinner in a while and talk to people. We don't have to stay here. We could go back.”

“After we find this Fisher person.”

“Of course,” Levon said. But what he was thinking was, If Fisher hadn't checked out of this hellhole. If the whole thing wasn't a hoax like Lieutenant Jackson warned him from the day they met.

Chapter 48

Henri didn't rely on the costume, the cowboy boots or the cameras or the wraparound shades. The trappings were important, but the art of disguise was in the gestures and the voice, and then there was the X Factor. The element that truly distinguished Henri Benoit as a first-class chameleon was his talent for becoming the man he was pretending to be.

At half past six that evening, Henri strolled into the rustic dining room of the Kamehameha Hostel. He was wearing jeans, a summer-weight blue cashmere sweater, sleeves pushed up, Italian loafers, no socks, gold watch, wedding band. His hair, streaked gray, was combed straight back, and his rimless glasses framed the look of a man of sophistication and means.

He gazed around the rough-hewn room, at the rows of tables and folding chairs and at the steam table. He joined the line and took the slop that was offered before heading toward the corner where Barbara and Levon sat behind their untouched food.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

“We're about to leave,” Levon said, “but if you're brave enough to eat that, you're welcome to sit down.”

“What the heck do you think this is?” Henri asked, pulling out a chair next to Levon. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

Levon laughed, “I was told it's beef stew, but don't take my word for it.”

Henri put out his hand, said, “Andrew Hogan. From San Francisco.”

Levon shook his hand, introduced Barb and himself, said, “We're the only ones here in the over-forty crowd. Did you know what this pit was like when you booked your room?”

“Actually, I'm not staying here. I'm looking for my daughter. Laurie just graduated from Berkeley,” he said modestly. “I told my wife that Laur's having the time of her life camping out with a bunch of other kids, but she hasn't called home in a few days. A week, actually. So Mom is having fits because of that poor model who went missing, you know, on Maui.”

Henri turned his stew over with his fork, looked up when Barbara said, “That's our daughter. Kim. The model who is missing.”

“Oh, Jesus, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. How're you holding up?”

“It's been awful,” said Barb, shaking her head, eyes down. “You pray. You try to sleep. Try to keep your wits together.”

Levon said, “You're willing to chase any scrap of hope. What we're doing here, we got a call from some guy named Peter Fisher. He said he had Kim's watch and if we met him here he'd give it to us and tell us about Kim. He knew that Kim wore a Rolex. You said your name is Andrew?”

Henri nodded his head.

“Cops told us the call was probably bull, that there are nut jobs who love to screw with people's heads. Anyway, we've talked to everyone here. No one's heard of Peter Fisher. He's not registered at the fabulous Kamehameha Hilton.”

“You shouldn't stay here, either,” said the man in blue. “Listen, I rented a place about ten minutes from here, three bedrooms, two baths, and it's clean. Why don't you two stay with me tonight? Keep me company.”

Barbara said, “Nice of you to offer, Mr. Hogan, but we don't want to impose.”

“It's Andrew. And you'd be doing me a favor. You like Thai food? I found a place not far from here. What do you say? Get out of this hole, and we'll go looking for our girls in the morning.”

“Thanks, Andrew,” said Barbara. “That's a nice offer. If you let us take you out to dinner, we'll talk about it.”

Chapter 49

Barbara woke up in the dark, feeling sheer, naked terror.

Her arms were tied behind her back and they ached. Her legs were roped together at her knees and ankles. She was crammed into a fetal position against the corner of a shallow compartment that was moving!

Was she blind? Or was it just too dark to see? Dear God, what was happening? She screamed, “Levon!”

Behind her back, something stirred.

“Barb? Baby? Are you okay?”

“Oh, honey, thank God, thank God you're here. Are you all right?”

“I'm tied up. Shit. What is this?”

“I think we're in the trunk of a car.”

“Christ! A trunk! It's Hogan. Hogan did this.”

Muffled music came through the backseat to where the couple lay trussed like hens in a crate.

Barbara said, “I'm going crazy. I don't understand any of this. What does he want?”

Levon kicked at the trunk's lid. “Hey! Let us out. Hey!” His kick didn't budge the lid, didn't make a dent. But now Barbara's eyes were growing accustomed to the dark.

“Levon, look! See that? The trunk release.”

The two turned painfully by inches, scraping cheeks and elbows against the carpeting, Barb working off her shoes, pulling at the release lever with her toes. The lever moved, but there was no resistance, no release of the lock.

“Oh, God, please,” Barbara wailed, her asthma kicking in, her voice trailing into a wheeze, then a burst of coughs.

“The cables are cut,” said Levon. “The backseat. We can kick through the backseat.”

“And then what? We're tied up!” Barb gasped.

Still they tried, the two of them kicking without full use of their legs, getting nowhere.

“It's latched, goddammit,” said Levon.

Barb was fighting to take one breath and then another, trying to stop herself from going into a full-blown gag attack. Why had Hogan taken them? Why? What was he going to do with them? What was to be gained from kidnapping them?

Levon said, “I read somewhere, you kick out the taillights and you can stick a hand out, wave until someone notices. Even if we just bust the lights, maybe a cop will pull the car over. Do it, Barb. Try.”

Barb kicked, and plastic shattered. “Now you!” she shouted.

As Levon broke through the taillight on his side of the trunk, Barbara turned so that her face was near the shards and wires.

She actually could see blacktop streaming below the tires. If the car stopped, she'd scream. They weren't helpless, not anymore. They were still alive and dammit, they would fight!

“What's that sound? A cell phone?” Levon asked. “In the trunk with us?”

Barb saw the glowing faceplate of a phone by her feet. “We're getting out of here, honey. Hogan made a big mistake.”

She struggled to position her hands as the first ring became the second, thumbing the buttons blindly behind her back, hitting the Send key, turning on the phone.

Levon yelled, “Hello! Hello! Who's there?”

“Mr. McDaniels, it's me. Marco. From the Wailea Princess.”

“Marco! Thank God. You've got to find us. We've been kidnapped.”

“I'm sorry. I know you're uncomfortable back there. I'll explain everything momentarily.”

The phone went dead.

The car slowed to a stop.

Chapter 50

Henri felt blood charging through his veins. He was tense in the best possible way, adrenalized, mentally rehearsed, ready for the next scene to play itself out.

He checked the area again, glancing up to the road, then taking in the 180 degrees of shoreline. Satisfied that the area was deserted, he hauled his duffel bag out of the backseat, tossed it under a tangle of brush before returning to the car.

Walking around the all-wheel-drive sedan, he stooped beside each tire, reducing the air pressure from eighty to twenty pounds, slapping the trunk when he passed it, then opening the front door on the passenger side. He reached into the glove box, tossed the rental agreement to the floor, and removed his ten-inch buck knife. It felt like it was part of his hand.

He grabbed the keys and opened the trunk. Pale moonlight shone on Barbara and Levon. Henri, as Andrew, said, “Is everyone all right back here in coach?”

Barbara launched a full-throated, wordless scream until Henri leaned in and held the knife up to her throat. “Barb, Barb. Stop yelling. No one can hear you but me and Levon, so call off the histrionics, okay? I don't like it.”

Barb's scream became a wheeze and a cry.

“What the hell are you doing, Hogan?” Levon demanded, wrenching his body so he could see his captor's face. “I'm a reasonable man. Explain yourself.”

Henri put two fingers under his nose to resemble a mustache. He lowered his voice and thickened it, said, “Sure, I will, Mr. McDaniels. You're my number one priority.”

“My dear Christ. You're Marco? You're him! I don't believe it. How could you scare us like this? What do you want?”

“I want you to behave, Levon. You, too, Barb. Act up, and I'll have to take strong measures. Be good and I'll move you up to first class. Deal?”

Henri sawed through the nylon ropes around Barbara's legs and helped her out of the car and into the backseat. Then he went back for Levon, cutting the restraints, walking the man to the back of the car, strapping them both in with the seat belts.

Then Henri got into the driver's seat. He locked the doors, turned on the dome light, reached up to the camera behind the rearview mirror, and switched it on.

“If you like, you can call me Henri,” he said to the McDanielses, who were staring at him with unblinking eyes. He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, pulled out a dainty, bracelet-style wristwatch, and held it up in front of them.

“See? As I promised. Kim's watch. The Rolex. Recognize it?”

He stuffed it into Levon's jacket pocket.

“Now,” Henri said, “I'd like to tell you what's going on and why I have to kill you. Unless you have questions so far.”

Chapter 51

When I woke up that morning and snapped on the local news, Julia Winkler was all over it. There, filling the TV screen, was her achingly beautiful face and a headline in bold italics running under her picture: Supermodel Found Murdered.

How could Julia Winkler be dead?

I bolted upright in bed, goosed up the sound, stared at the next shot, this one of Kim and Julia posing together for the Sporting Life photo-story, their lovely faces pressed together, laughing, both absolutely radiant with life.

The TV anchors were going back over the breaking news “for those who've just tuned in.”

I stared at the tube, gathering in the stunning details: Julia Winkler's body had been found in a room at the Island Breezes Hotel, a five-star resort on Lanai. A housekeeper had run through the hotel shouting that a woman had been strangled, that there were bruises around her neck, blood all over the linens.

Next up, a waitress was interviewed. Emma Laurent. She'd waited on tables in the Club Room last night and recognized Julia Winkler. She'd been having dinner with a good-looking man in his thirties, Laurent said. He was white, brown-haired with a good build. “He definitely works out.”

Winkler's date signed the check with a room number, 412, registered to Charles Rollins. Rollins left a good tip, and Julia had given the waitress her autograph. Personalized it. To Emma from Julia. Emma held up the signed napkin for the camera.

I got a POG out of the fridge, guzzled it, watched the camera cut now to live shots outside the Island Breezes Hotel. Cruisers were everywhere, the loud garble of police radios squawked in the background. The camera held on a reporter with the local NBC affiliate.

The reporter, Kevin de Martine, was well respected, had been embedded with a military unit in Iraq in '04. He was now standing with his back to a sawhorse barrier, rain falling softly on his bearded face, palm fronds waving dramatically behind him.

De Martine said, “This is what we know. Nineteen-year-old supermodel Julia Winkler, former roommate of the still-missing top model Kimberly McDaniels, was found dead this morning in a room registered to a Charles Rollins of Loxahatchee, Florida.”

De Martine went on to say that Charles Rollins was not in his room, that he was sought for questioning, that any information about Rollins should be phoned in to the number at the bottom of the screen.

I tried to absorb this horrendous story. Julia Winkler was dead. There was a suspect – but he was missing. Or how the police like to describe it – he was in the wind.

Chapter 52

The phone rang next to my ear, jarring the hell out of me. I grabbed the receiver. “Levon?”

“It's Dan Aronstein. Your paycheck. Hawkins, are you on this Winkler story?”

“Yep. I'm on the case, chief. If you hang up and let me work, okay?”

I glanced back at the TV. The local anchors, Tracy Baker and Candy Ko'alani, were on screen, and a new face had been patched in from Washington. Baker asked the former FBI profiler John Manzi, “Could the killings of Rosa Castro and Julia Winkler be connected? Is this the work of a serial killer?”

Those two potent and terrifying words. “Serial killer.” Kim's story was now going global. The whole wide world was going to be focused on Hawaii and the mystery of two beautiful girls' deaths.

Former agent Manzi tugged at his earlobe, said serial killers generally had a signature, a preferred method for killing.

“Rosa Castro was strangled, but with ropes,” he said. “Her actual manner of death was drowning. Without speaking to the medical examiner, I can only go by the witness reports that Julia Winkler was manually strangled. That is, she was killed by someone choking her with his hands.

“It's too soon to say if these killings were done by the same person,” Manzi continued, “but what I can say about manual strangulation is that it's personal. The killer gets more of a thrill because unlike a shooting, it takes a long time for the victim to die.”

Kim. Rosa. Julia. Was this coincidence or a wildfire? I wanted desperately to talk to Levon and Barbara, to get to them before they saw Julia's story on the news, prepare them somehow – but I didn't know where they were.

Barbara had called me yesterday morning to say that she and Levon were going to Oahu to check out what was probably a bum lead, and I hadn't heard from them since.

I turned down the TV volume, called Barb's cell phone number, and, when she didn't answer, I hung up and called Levon. He didn't answer, either. After leaving a message, I called their driver, and when I got forwarded to Marco's voice mail, I left my number and told him that my call was urgent.

I showered and dressed quickly, collecting my thoughts, feeling an elusive and important something I should pay attention to, but I couldn't nail it down.

It was like a horsefly you can't swat. Or the faint smell of gas, and you don't know where it's coming from. What was it?

I tried Levon again, and when I got his voice mail I called Eddie Keola. He had to know how to reach Barbara and Levon.

That was his job.

Chapter 53

Keola barked his name into the phone.

“Eddie, it's Ben Hawkins. Have you seen the news?”

“Worse than that. I've seen the real thing.”

Keola told me he'd been to the Island Breezes since the news of Julia Winkler's death had gone over the police band. He'd been there when the body was taken out and he had spoken with the cops on the scene.

He said, “Kim's roommate was murdered. Do you believe it?”

I told him I'd had no luck reaching the McDanielses or their driver and asked if he knew where Barb and Levon were staying.

“Some dive on the eastern shore of Oahu. Barb told me she didn't know the name.”

“Maybe I'm paranoid,” I told Keola, “but I'm worried. It isn't like them to be incommunicado.”

“I'll meet you at their hotel in an hour,” Keola said.

I arrived at the Wailea Princess just before eight a.m. I was heading to the front desk when I heard Eddie Keola calling my name. He came across the marble floor at a trot. His bleached hair was damp and wind-combed, and fatigue dragged at his face.

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.

Chapter 56

Hours later, Henri Benoit was in the washroom of the first-class flight lounge at Honolulu International. The first leg of his flight had been a pleasure, and he was looking forward to the same for his flight to Bangkok.

He washed his hands, checked out his new persona in the mirror. He was a Swiss businessman based in Geneva. His white-blond hair was short, his eyeglass frames were large and horn-rimmed, giving him an erudite look, and he wore a five-thousand-dollar suit with some fine handmade English shoes.

He had just sent a few frames of the McDanielses' last moments to the Peepers, knowing that by this time tomorrow, there would be a good many more euros in his bank account in Zurich.

Henri left the washroom, went to the main waiting area in the lounge, set his briefcase beside him, and relaxed in a soft gray chair. Breaking news was coming over the television, a cable news special. The anchorwoman Gloria Roja was reporting on a crime that she said “evoked horror and outrage.”

She went on, “A young woman's decapitated body has been founded in a rental cabin on a beach in Maui. Sources close to the police department say the victim has been dead for several days.”

Roja turned to the large screen behind her and introduced a local reporter, Kai McBride, on the ground in Maui.

McBride said into the camera, “This morning, Ms. Maura Aluna, the owner of this beach camp, found the decapitated head and body of a young woman inside. Ms. Aluna told police that she had rented her house to a man over the telephone and that his credit card cleared. Any minute now, we expect Lieutenant Jackson of the Kihei PD to make a statement.”

McBride turned away briefly from the camera, then said, “Gloria, Lieutenant James Jackson is coming out of the house now.”

McBride ran, and her cameraman ran right alongside her, the picture jiggling. McBride shouted, “Lieutenant, Lieutenant Jackson, can you give us a minute?”

The camera closed in on the lieutenant.

“I have nothing to say to the press at this time.”

“I have just one question, sir.”

Henri leaned forward in his seat in the flight lounge, transfixed by the dramatic scene that was unfolding on the large screen.

He was witnessing the endgame in real time. This was just too good to be true. What he'd do later is lift the broadcast from the network's Web site, cut it into his video. He'd have the whole Hawaiian saga, the beginning, middle, phenomenal ending, and now – this epilogue.

Henri quashed a giddy desire to say to the guy sitting two seats away, “Look at that cop, would you? That Lieutenant Jackson. His skin is green. I think he's going to throw up.”

On screen, the reporter persisted.

“Lieutenant Jackson, is it Kim? Is the body you found that of the supermodel Kim McDaniels?”

Jackson spoke, tripping over his words. “No comment at this, on this. We're right in the middle of something,” he said. “We've got a lot of moves we have to make. Will you turn that thing off? We never comment on an ongoing investigation, McBride. You know that.”

Kai McBride turned back to the camera.

“I'm going to take a wild flying leap and say that Lieutenant Jackson's no-comment dodgeball was a confirmation, Gloria. We're all waiting now for a positive ID that the victim was Kim McDaniels. This is Kai McBride, reporting from Maui.”

Chapter 57

That morning at low tide the roof of a car had looked at first to the passing jogger like the shell of a giant sea turtle. When he realized what it was, he'd called the police and they'd responded in force.

Now the crane had lowered the waterlogged car to the beach. The fire department crew, search and rescue, and cops from two islands were standing in groups on the sand, watching the Pacific flow out of the chassis.

A cop opened one of the back doors and called out, “Two DBs wearing their seat belts. I recognize them. Jesus God. It's the McDanielses. The parents.”

My stomach dropped, and I spewed a string of curse words that didn't make any literal sense, just me venting all the bile I could without getting physically violent or sick.

Eddie Keola was standing beside me outside the yellow tape that ran from a branch of driftwood to a chunk of lava rock thirty yards away. Keola was not only my ticket to police intel and crime scenes, but I was starting to think of him as the younger brother I never had.

Actually, we looked nothing alike, except that we both looked like shit right now.

More vehicles pulled up, some with sirens, some without, all braking on the potholed asphalt running above and parallel to the beach, a road that had been closed for repairs.

These new additions to the law enforcement fleet were black SUVs, and the men who got out of them wore jackets stenciled “FBI.”

A cop friend of Eddie's came over to us, said, “Only thing I can tell you is that the McDanielses were seen having dinner at the Kamehameha Hostel. They were with a white man, six foot or so, grayish hair and glasses. They left with him, and that's all we've got. Based on that description, the guy they had dinner with could've been anyone.”

“Thanks,” said Eddie.

“It's okay, but now you guys really have to leave.”

Eddie and I walked up a sandy ramp to Eddie's Jeep.

I was glad to go.

I didn't want to see the corpses of those two good people I'd come to care about so very much. Eddie drove me back to the Marriott, and we sat in the lot for a while just chewing it over.

The deaths of everyone attached to this crime spree had been premeditated, calculated, almost artistic, the work of a very smart and practiced killer who'd left no clues behind. I felt sorry for the people who had to solve this crime. And now Aronstein was terminating my all-expenses-paid Hawaiian holiday.

“When's your flight?” Keola asked.

“Around two.”

“Want me to drive you? I'd be happy to do it.”

“Thanks, anyway. I've got to return my car.”

“I'm sorry how this turned out,” said Keola.

“This is going to be one of those cases, if it gets solved at all, it'll be like? seventeen years from now. A deathbed confession,” I said. “Or a deal with a jailhouse snitch.”

A little while later, I said good-bye to Eddie, threw my things together, and checked out of the hotel. I was going back to L.A. unresolved and disconsolate, feeling like I'd left a big piece of myself behind. I would've bet anything I owned that for me, at least, the story was over.

I was wrong again.