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.”

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.

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.”