“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.”
Chapter 90
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.
Even if I had to put Henri down myself.
Part Four. BIG GAME HUNTING
Chapter 91
On my first day back from my desert retreat with Henri, Leonard Zagami called to say he wanted to publish fast so we'd get gonzo press coverage for breaking Henri's first-person story before the Maui murders were solved.
I'd called Aronstein, taken a leave from the L.A. Times, turned my living room into a bunker and not just because of the pressure from Zagami. I felt Henri's presence all the time, like he was a boa constrictor with a choke hold on my rib cage, peering over my shoulder as I typed. I wanted nothing more than to get his dirty story written and done, and get him out of my life.
Since my return, I'd been working from six in the morning until late at night, and I found transcribing the interview tapes educational.
Listening to Henri's voice behind a locked door, I heard inflections and pauses, comments made under his breath, that I'd missed while sitting next to his coiled presence and wondering if I was going to make it out of Joshua Tree alive.
I'd never worked so hard or so steadily, but by the end of the second full week at my laptop, I'd finished the transcription and also the outline for the book.
One important item was missing: the hook for the introduction, the question that would power the narrative to the end, the question Henri hadn't answered. Why did he want to write this book?
The reader would want to know, and I couldn't understand it myself. Henri was twisted in his particular way, and that included being an actual survivor. He dodged death like it was Sunday traffic. He was smart, probably a genius, so why would he write a tell-all confession when his own words could lead to his capture and indictment? Was it for money? Recognition? Was his narcissism so overpowering that he'd set a trap for himself?
It was almost six on a Friday evening. I was filing the transcribed audiotapes in a shoe box when I put my hand on the exit tape, the one with Henri's instructions telling me how to get out of Joshua Tree Park.
I hadn't replayed the tape because Henri's message hadn't seemed relevant to the work, but before I boxed it up, I dropped tape number 31 into the recorder and rewound it to the beginning.
I realized instantly that Henri hadn't used a fresh tape for his message. He'd recorded on the tape that was already in the machine.
I heard my drugged and weary voice coming through the speaker, saying, “This is important, Henri.”
There was silence. I'd forgotten what I wanted to ask him. Then Henri's voice was saying, “Finish your sentence, Ben. What is important?”
“Why? do you want to write this book?”
My head had dropped to the table, and I remembered hearing Henri's voice as through a fog.
Now he was coming in loud and clear.
“Good question, Ben. If you're half the writer I think you are, if you're half the cop you used to be, you'll figure out why I want to do this book. I think you'll be surprised.”
I was going to be surprised? What the hell was that supposed to mean?