I hit the Pause button, stopping the video.
Henri's ninety-second cut of Kim McDaniels's execution flashed into my mind in sharp detail. I would never forget Kim's postmortem expression, as if she was in pain even though her head had been detached from her body.
I didn't want to add another Henri Benoit production to my mental playlist.
I didn't want to see this.
Downstairs, an ordinary Sunday night was unfolding on Traction Avenue. I heard a street guitarist playing “Domino” and tourists applauding, the whoosh of tires on pavement as cars passed under my windows. A few weeks ago, a night like this, I might have gone down, had a couple of beers at Moe's.
I wished I could do it now. But I couldn't walk away.
I pressed the Play button and watched the moving pictures on my computer screen: Henri telling the woman that she cared only about her own pleasure, laughing, saying, “Always a price.” He picked up the remote control and turned on the TV.
The hotel welcome screen flashed by, and then an announcer on BBC World News gave a sports update, mostly football. Another announcer followed with a summary of various international financial markets, then came the breaking news of the two girls who'd been killed in Barbados.
Now, on my computer screen, Henri shut off the TV. He straddled the naked woman's body, put his hands around her neck, and I was sure that he was going to choke her – and then he changed his mind.
He untied her wrists, and I exhaled, wiped my eyes with my palms. He was letting her go – but why?
On screen, the woman said to Henri, “I knew you couldn't do it.” Her English was accented. She was Italian.
Was this Gina?
She got out of the bed and strolled toward the camera, and she winked. She was a pretty brunette in her late thirties, maybe forty. She headed to an adjoining room, probably the bathroom.
Henri got out of the bed, reached down, and pulled a gun from a bag that looked to be a 9-millimeter Ruger with a suppressor extending the muzzle.
He walked behind the woman and out of camera range.
I heard muffled conversation, then the phfffft sound of the gun firing through the suppressor. A shadow passed over the threshold. There was a soft, heavy thud, two more muffled shots, then the rush of running water.
Except for the empty bed, that's all I saw or heard until the screen went black.
My hands shook as I played the video again. This time I was looking for any detail that could tell me where Henri had been when he had surely killed this woman.
On my third viewing, I saw something I'd missed before.
I stopped the action when Henri turned on the TV. I enlarged the picture and read the welcome screen with the name of the hotel at the top of the menu.
It had been shot on an angle, and it was damned hard to make out the letters, but I wrote them down and then went out to the Web to see if such a place existed.
It did.
I read that the Château de Mirambeau was in France, in the wine country near Bordeaux. It had been built on the foundations of a medieval fortress founded in the eleventh century, reconstructed in the early 1800s, and turned into an expensive resort. Pictures on the hotel's Web site showed fields of sunflowers, vineyards, and the château itself, an elaborate fairy-tale construction of vaulted stone, capped with turrets surrounding a courtyard and formal gardens.
I searched the Web again, found the football scores and the market closings that I'd seen on the TV in Henri's room.
I realized that this video had been shot on Friday, the same night Amanda had brought home Cornish game hens and I had learned about the deaths of Sara and Wendy.
I put my hand over the bandage against my ribs and felt the banging of my heart. It was all clear to me now.
Two days ago, Henri was in France, about a five-hour drive from Paris. This coming week marked the beginning of September. Henri had told me that he always went to Paris in September.
I had a pretty good idea where he might be.
Chapter 101
I slammed down the lid of my laptop, as if I could actually shut out the images Henri had left to my imagination.
Then I called Amanda, talking rapidly as I threw clothes into a suitcase.
“Henri sent me a video,” I told her. “Looks like he killed Gina Prazzi. Maybe he's doing cleanup. Getting rid of people who know him and what he's done. So we have to ask ourselves, Mandy, when the book is finished, what's he going to do to us?”
I told her my plan, and she argued with me, but I got the last word. “I can't just sit here. I have to do something.”
I called a cab, and once we were rolling I ripped the adhesive tape from my rib cage and stuck the tracking device underneath the cab's backseat.
Chapter 102
I caught a direct flight to Paris – midcabin coach, next to the window. As soon as I put the seatback down, my eyes slammed shut. I missed the movie, the precooked meals, and the cheap champagne, but I got about nine hours of sleep, waking only as the plane started its descent.
My bag shot down the luggage chute like it had missed me, and within twenty minutes of landing I was sitting in the backseat of a taxi.
I spoke to the driver in my broken French, told him where to take me: the Hôtel Singe-Vert, French for “Green Monkey.” I'd stayed there before and knew it to be a clean two-and-a-half-star lodging popular with journalists on location in the City of Lights.
I walked through the unmanned lobby door, passed the entrance to the bar called Jacques' Américain on my left, then crossed into the dark inner lobby with its worn green couches, racks of folded newspapers in all languages, and a large, faded watercolor of African green monkeys behind the front desk.
The concierge's nametag read “Georges.” He was flabby, fiftyish, and pissed that he had to break off his phone conversation to deal with me. After Georges ran my credit card and locked my passport in the safe, I took the stairs, found my room on the third floor at the end of a frayed runner at the back of the hotel.
The room was papered with cabbage roses and crowded with century-old furniture, jammed in wall to wall. But the bedding was fresh, and there was a TV and a high-speed Internet connection on the desk. Good enough for me.
I dropped my bag down on the duvet and found a phone book. I'd been in Paris for an hour, and before I did another thing I had to get a gun.
Chapter 103
The French take handguns seriously. Permits are restricted to police and the military and a few security professionals, who have to lug their guns in cases, carry them in plain sight.
Still, in Paris, as in any big city, you can get a gun if you really want one. I spent the day prowling the Golden Drop, the drug-dealing sinkhole around the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur.
I paid two hundred euros for an old snub-nosed.38, a ladies' pistol with a two-inch barrel and six rounds in the chamber.
Back at the Green Monkey, Georges took my key off the board and pointed with his chin to a small heap on one of the sofas. “You have a guest.”
It took me a long moment to take in what I was seeing. I walked over, shook her shoulder, and called her name.
Amanda opened her eyes and stretched as I sat down beside her. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me, but I couldn't even kiss her back. She was supposed to be home, safe in L.A.
“Gee. Pretend you're glad to see me, okay? Paris is for lovers,” she said, smiling cautiously.
“Mandy, what in God's name are you thinking?”
“It's a little rash, I know. Look, I have something to tell you, Ben, and it could affect everything.”
“Cut to the chase, Mandy. What are you talking about?”
“I wanted to tell you face-to-face -”