Swimsuit Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2009 by James Patterson

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05264-1

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05264-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One: THE CAMERA LOVES HER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: FLY BY NIGHT

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Part Three: BODY COUNT

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Part Four: BIG GAME HUNTING

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Preview of "Witch and Wizard"

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  About the Authors

  A complete list of books by James Patterson

  is on pages 406–407. For previews of upcoming

  books by James Patterson and more

  information about the author, visit

  www.JamesPatterson.com.

  To the home team:

  Suzie and John, Brendan and Jack

  Prologue

  JUST THE FACTS

  I KNOW THINGS I don’t want to know.

  A true psychopathic killer is nothing like your everyday garden-variety murderer. Not like a holdup guy who panics and unloads his gun into a hapless liquor store clerk, or a man who bursts into his stockbroker’s office and blows his head off, and he’s not like a husband who strangles his wife over a real or imagined affair.

  Psychopaths aren’t motivated by love or fear or rage or hatred. They don’t feel those emotions.

  They don’t feel anything at all. Trust me on that one.

  Gacy, Bundy, Dahmer, BTK, and the other all-stars in the twisted-killer league were detached, driven by sexual pleasure and the thrill of the kill. If you thought you saw remorse in Ted Bundy’s eyes after he’d confessed to killing thirty young women, it was in your own mind, because what distinguishes psychopaths from all other killers is that they don’t care at all. Not about their victims’ lives. Not about their deaths.

  But psychopaths can pretend to care. They mimic human emotion to pass among us and to lure their prey. Closer and closer. And after they’ve killed, it’s on to the next new and better thrill, with no boundaries, no taboos, no holds barred.

  I’ve been told that it’s “distracting” to be so consumed by appetite, and so psychopaths screw up.

  Sometimes they make a mistake.

  You may remember back to the spring of 2008 when the swimsuit model Kim McDaniels was abducted from a sandy beach in Hawaii. No ransom demand was ever made. The local cops were slow, arrogant, and clueless, and there were no witnesses or informants who had any idea who had kidnapped that beautiful and talented young woman.

  At that time, I was an ex-cop turned mystery writer, but since my last book had gone almost straight from the shipping carton to the remainder racks, I was a third-strike novelist doing the next best thing to writing pulp fiction.

  I was reporting crime for the L.A. Times, which, on the upside, was how the highly successful novelist Michael Connelly got his start.

  I was at my desk twenty-four hours after Kim went missing. I was filing yet another routinely tragic story of a drive-by fatality when my editor, Daniel Aronstein, leaned into my cube, said “Catch,” and tossed me a ticket to Maui.

  I was almost forty then, going numb from crime scene fatigue, still telling myself that I was perfectly positioned to hook a book idea that would turn my life around one more time. It was a lie I believed because it anchored my fraying hope for a better future.

  The weird thing is, when the big idea called me out — I never saw it coming.

  Aronstein’s ticket to Hawaii gave me a much-needed hit. I sensed a five-star boondoggle, featuring oceanfront bars and half-naked girls. And I saw myself jousting
with the competition — all that, and the L.A. Times was picking up the tab.

  I grabbed that airline ticket and flew off to the biggest story of my career.

  Kim McDaniels’s abduction was a flash fire, a white-hot tale with an unknown shelf life. Every news outlet on the planet was already on the story when I joined the gaggle of reporters at the police cordon outside the Wailea Princess.

  At first, I thought what all the journos thought, that Kim had probably been drinking, got picked up by some bad boys, that they’d raped her, silenced her, dumped her. That the “Missing Beauty” would be top o’ the news for a week, or a month, until some celebrity bigot or the Department of Homeland Security grabbed back the front page.

  But, still, I had my self-delusion to support and an expense account to justify, so I bulled my way into the black heart of a vile and compelling crime spree.

  In so doing, and not by my own devising, I became part of the story, selected by a profoundly psychotic killer with a cherished self-delusion of his own.

  The book you hold in your hands is the true story of a skillful, elusive, and, most would say, first-rate monster who called himself Henri Benoit. As Henri told me himself, “Jack the Ripper never dreamed of killing like this.”

  For months now, I’ve been living in a remote location getting “Henri’s” story down. There are frequent electrical brownouts in this place, so I’ve gotten handy with a manual typewriter.

  Turns out I didn’t need Google because what isn’t in my tapes and notes and clippings is permanently imprinted on my brain.

  Swimsuit is about an unprecedented pattern killer who upped the ante to new heights, an assassin like no other before or since. I’ve taken some literary license in telling his story because I can’t know what Henri or his victims were thinking in a given moment.

  Don’t worry about that, not even for a second, because what Henri told me in his own words was proven by the facts.

  And the facts tell the truth.

  And the truth will blow your mind, as it did mine.

  — Benjamin L. Hawkins

  May 2009

  Part One

  THE CAMERA LOVES HER

  Chapter 1

  KIM MCDANIELS WAS BAREFOOT and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.

  Where was she? What the hell was going on?

  She wrestled with the blanket draped over her head, finally got her face free, realized a couple of new things. Her hands and feet were bound. And she was in some kind of cramped compartment.

  Another thump jolted her, and Kim yelled this time, “Hey!”

  Her shout went nowhere, muffled by the confined space, the vibration of an engine. She realized she was inside the trunk of a car. But that made no freaking sense! She told herself to wake up!

  But she was awake, feeling the bumps for real, and so she fought, twisting her wrists against a knotted nylon rope that didn’t give. She rolled onto her back, tucking her knees to her chest, then bam! She kicked up at the lid of the trunk, not budging it a fraction of an inch.

  She did it again, again, again, and now pain was shooting from her soles to her hips, but she was still locked up, and now she was hurting. Panic seized her and shook her hard.

  She was caught. She was trapped. She didn’t know how this had happened or why, but she wasn’t dead and she wasn’t injured. She would get away.

  Using her bound hands as a claw, Kim felt around for a toolbox, a jack or a crowbar, but she found nothing, and the air was getting thin and foul as she panted alone in the dark.

  Why was she here?

  Kim searched for her last memory, but her mind was sluggish, as if a blanket had been thrown over her brain, too. She could only guess that she’d been drugged. Someone had slipped her a roofie, but who? When?

  “Helllllllpppp! Let me out!” she yelled, kicking out at the trunk lid, banging her head against a hard metal ridge. Her eyes were filling with tears and she was getting mad now on top of being scared out of her mind.

  Through her tears, Kim felt a five-inch-long bar just above her. It had to be the interior trunk release lever, and she whispered, “Thank you, God.”

  Chapter 2

  KIM’S CLAW-HANDS TREMBLED as she reached up, hooked her fingertips over the lever, and pulled down. The bar moved — too easily — and it didn’t pop the lid.

  She tried again, pulling repeatedly, frantically working against her certain knowledge that the release bar had been disabled, that the cable had been cut — when Kim felt the car wheels leave the asphalt. The ride smoothed out, and that made her think the car might be rolling over sand.

  Was it going into the ocean?

  Was she going to drown in this trunk?

  She screamed again, a loud, wordless shriek of terror that turned into a gibbering prayer, Dear God, let me out of this alive, and I promise you — and when her scream ran out, she heard music coming from behind her head. It was a female vocalist, something bluesy, a song she didn’t know.

  Who was driving the car? Who had done this to her? For what possible reason?

  And now her mind was clearing, running back, flipping through the images of the past hours. She started to remember. She’d been up at three. Makeup at four. On the beach at five. She and Julia and Darla and Monique and that other gorgeous but weird girl, Ayla. Gils, the photographer, had been drinking coffee with the crew, and men had been hanging around the edges, towel boys and early morning joggers agog at the girls in their little bikinis, at the wonder of stumbling onto a Sporting Life swimsuit shoot right there.

  Kim pictured the moments, posing with Julia, Gils saying, “Less smile, Julia. That’s great. Beautiful, Kim, beautiful, that’s the girl. Eyes to me. That’s perfect.”

  She remembered that the phone calls had come after that, during breakfast and throughout the whole day.

  Ten freaking calls until she turned off her phone.

  Douglas had been calling her, paging her, stalking her, driving her crazy. It was Doug!

  And she thought about earlier that night, after dinner, how she’d been in the hotel bar with the art director, Del Swann. It was his job to oversee the shoot and be her chaperone afterward. But Del had gone to the men’s room, and somehow he and Gils, both of them as gay as birds, disappeared.

  And she remembered that Julia was talking with a guy at the bar, and she’d tried to get Julia’s attention but Julia wouldn’t make eye contact… so Kim had gone for a walk on the beach.… And that was all she remembered.

  Her cell phone had been clipped to her belt but switched off. And now she was thinking that Doug had flipped out, rage-aholic that he was — stalker that he’d become. Maybe he’d paid someone to put something into her drink.

  She was getting it together now. Brain working fine.

  She shouted, “Douglas? Dougie?”

  And then, as though God Himself had finally heard her calling, a cell phone rang inside the trunk.

  Chapter 3

  KIM HELD her breath and listened.

  A phone rang, but it wasn’t her ring tone. This was a low-pitched burr, not four bars of Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” but if it was like most phones, it was programmed to send calls to voice mail after three rings.

  She couldn’t let that happen!

  Where was the damned phone?

  She fumbled with the blanket, ropes chafing her wrists. She reached down, pawed at the flooring, felt the lump under a flap of carpet near the edge, bumped it farther away with her clumsy… oh no!

  The second ring ended, the third ring was starting, and her frenzy was sending her heart rate out of control when she grasped the phone, a thick, old-fashioned thing, clutched it with her shaking fingers, sweat slicking her wrists.

  She saw the illuminated caller ID number, but there was no name, and she didn’t recognize the number.

  But it did
n’t matter who it was. Anyone would do.

  Kim pushed the Send button, pressed the phone to her ear, called out hoarsely, “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?”

  But instead of an answer, Kim heard singing, this time Whitney Houston, “I’ll al-ways love you-ou-ou” coming from the car stereo only louder and more clearly.

  He was calling her from the front seat of the car! She shouted over Whitney’s voice, “Dougie? Dougie, what the hell? Answer me.”

  But he didn’t answer, and Kim was quaking in the cramped trunk, tied up like a chicken, sweating like a pig, Whitney’s voice seeming to taunt her.

  “Doug! What do you think you’re doing?”

  And then she knew. He was showing her what it was like to be ignored, teaching her a lesson, but he wouldn’t win. They were on an island, right? How far could they go?

  So Kim used her anger to fuel the brain that had gotten her into Columbia premed, thinking now about how to turn Doug around. She’d have to play him, say how sorry she was, and explain sweetly that he had to understand it wasn’t her fault. She tried it out in her mind.

  See, Dougie, I’m not allowed to take calls. My contract strictly forbids me to tell anyone where we’re shooting. I could get fired. You understand, don’t you?

  She’d make him see that even though they’d broken up, that even though he was crazy for what he was doing to her, criminal for God’s sake, he was still her darling.

  But — and this was her plan — once he gave her an opportunity, she’d knee him in the balls or kick in his kneecaps. She knew enough judo to disable him — as big as he was. Then she’d run for her life. And then the cops would bury him!

  “Dougie?” she yelled into the phone. “Will you please answer me? Please. This really isn’t funny.”

  Suddenly the music volume went down.

  Once again, she held her breath in the dark and listened over the pulse booming in her ears. And this time, a voice spoke to her, a man’s voice, and it was warm, almost loving.

  “Actually, Kim, it is kind of funny, and it’s kind of wonderfully romantic, too.”

  Kim didn’t recognize the voice.

  Because it wasn’t Doug’s.

  Chapter 4