James Patterson - Swimsuit

“I haven't seen her for years. Not since Rome,” he said. “She doesn't fraternize with the help.”

We worked forward from his three-month-long romance with Gina to the contract killings he did for the Alliance, a string of murders that went back over four years.

“I mostly killed young women,” Henri told me. “I moved around, changed my identity often. You remember how I do that, Ben.”

He started ticking off the bodies, the string of young girls in Jakarta, a Sabra in Tel Aviv.

“What a fighter, that Sabra. My God. She almost killed me.”

I felt the natural arc of the story. I felt excited as I saw how I would organize the draft, almost forgot for a while that this wasn't some kind of movie pitch.

The murders were real.

Henri's gun was loaded even now.

I numbered tapes and changed them, made notes that would remind me to ask follow-up questions as Henri listed his kills; the young prostitutes in Korea and Venezuela and Bangkok.

He explained that he'd always loved film and that making movies for the Alliance had made him an even better killer. The murders became more complex and cinematic.

“Don't you worry that those films are out in the world?”

“I always disguise my face,” he told me. “Either I wear a mask as I did with Kim, or I work on the video with a blur tool. The software that I use makes editing out my face very easy.”

He told me that his years with Brewster-North had taught him to leave the weapons and the bodies on the scene (Rosa was the one exception), and that even though there was no record of his fingerprints, he made sure never to leave anything of himself behind. He always wore a condom, taking no chances that the police might take DNA samples from his semen and begin to link his crimes.

Henri told me about killing Julia Winkler, how much he loved her. I stifled a smart-ass comment about what it meant to be loved by Henri. And he told me about the McDanielses, and how he admired them as well. At that point, I wanted to jump up and try to strangle him.

“Why, Henri, why did you have to kill them?” I finally asked.

“It was part of a film sequence I was making for the Peepers, what we called a documentary. Maui was a big payout, Ben. Just a few days' work for much more than you make in a year.”

“But the work itself, how did you feel about taking all of those lives? By my count, you've killed thirty people.”

“I may have left out a few,” Henri said.

It was after three in the morning when Henri told me what fascinated him most about his work.

“I've become interested in the fleeting moment between life and death,” he said. I thought about the headless chickens from his childhood, the asphyxiation games he played after killing Molly.

Henri told me more, more than I wanted to know.

“There was a tribe in the Amazon,” he continued. “They would tie a noose high under the jaws of their victims, right under their ears. The other end of the rope was secured around the tops of bent saplings.

“When they cut off a victim's head, it was carried upward by the young tree snapping back into place. These Indians believed this was a good death. That their victim's last sensation would be of flying.

“Do you know about a killer who lived in Germany in the early nineteen hundreds?” Henri asked me. “Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf.”

I had never heard of the man.

“He was a plain-looking guy whose first kill was a small girl he found sleeping while he robbed her parents' house. He strangled her, opened her throat with a knife, and got off on the blood spouting from her arteries. This was the start of a career that makes Jack the Ripper look like an amateur.”

Henri described how Kurten killed too many people to count, both sexes, men, women, and children, used all kinds of instruments, and at the heart of it all, he was turned on by blood.

“Before Peter Kurten was executed by guillotine,” Henri said to me, “he asked the prison psychiatrist – wait. Let me get this right. Okay. Kurten asked if, after his head was chopped off” – Henri put up fingers as quotation marks – 'If I could hear the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck. That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.' ”

“Henri, are you saying the moment between life and death is what makes you want to kill?”

“I think so. About three years ago, I killed a couple in Big Sur. I knotted ropes high up under their jaws,” he said, demonstrating with the V between thumb and index finger of his hand. “I tied the other end of the ropes to the blades of a ceiling fan. I cut their heads off with a machete, and the fan spun with their heads attached.

“I think the Peepers knew that I was very special when they saw that film,” Henri said. “I raised my fee, and they paid. But I still wonder about those two lovers. I wonder if they felt that they were flying as they died.”

Exhaustion dragged me down as the sun came up. We'd worked straight through the night, and although I heavily sugared my coffee and drank it down to the dregs, my eyelids drooped and the small world of the trailer on the rumpled acres of sand blurred.

I said, “This is important, Henri.”

I completely lost what I was going to say – and Henri prompted me by shaking my shoulder. “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”

It was the question that would be asked by the reader at the beginning of the book, and it had to be answered at the end. I asked, “Why do you want to write this book?”

Then I put my head down on the small table, just for a minute.

I heard Henri moving around the trailer, thought I saw him wiping down surfaces. I heard him talking, but I wasn't sure he was talking to me.

When I woke up, the clock on the microwave read ten after eleven.

I called out to Henri, and when he didn't answer I struggled out of my cramped spot behind the table and opened the trailer door.

The truck was gone.

I left the trailer and looked in all directions. The sludge began to clear from the gears in my brain, and I went back inside. My laptop and briefcase were on the kitchen counter. The piles of tapes that I'd carefully labeled in sequence were in neat stacks. My tape recorder was plugged into the outlet – and then I saw the note next to the machine.

Ben: Play this.

I pushed the Play button and heard Henri's voice.

“Good morning, partner. I hope you had a good rest. You needed it, and so I gave you a sedative to help you sleep. You understand. I wanted some time alone.

“Now. You should take the trail to the west, fourteen miles to Twenty-nine Palms Highway. I've left plenty of water and food, and if you wait until sundown, you will make it out of the park by morning.

“Very possibly, Lieutenant Brooks or one of her colleagues may drop by and give you a lift. Be careful what you say, Ben. Let's keep our secrets for now. You're a novelist, remember. So be sure to tell a plausible lie.

“Your car is behind the Luxury Inn where you left it, and I've put your keys in your jacket pocket with your plane ticket.

“Oh, I almost forgot the most important thing. I called Amanda. I told her you were safe and that you'd be home soon.

“ Ciao, Ben. Work hard. Work well. I'll be in touch.”

And then the tape hissed and the message was over.

The bastard had called Amanda. It was another threat.

Outside the trailer, the desert was cooking in the July inferno, forcing me to wait until sundown before beginning my trek. While I waited, Henri would be erasing his trail, assuming another identity, boarding a plane unhindered.

I no longer had any sense of security, and I wouldn't feel safe again until “Henri Benoit” was in jail or dead. I wanted my life back, and I was determined to get it, whatever it took.