Swimsuit (6 page)

“I’d say, ‘We love you, darling. Please be
strong,
’ ” Barbara said with a quavering voice. “And to everyone hearing us, please, we’re offering twenty-five thousand dollars
for information leading to the return of our daughter. If we had a million, we’d offer that…”

And then Barbara’s air seemed to run out. She turned, and Rollins saw her take a hit off an inhaler. And still, questions
were fired at the supermodel’s parents:
Levon, Levon! Have you gotten a ransom demand? What was the last thing Kim said to you?

Levon leaned toward the microphones, answered the questions very patiently, finally saying, “The hotel management has set
up a hotline number,” and he read it to the crowd.

Rollins watched the journalists jumping up like flying fish, calling out more questions even as the McDanielses were stepping
down, moving toward the embrace of the hotel lobby.

Rollins looked through his lens, zoomed in on the back of the McDanielses’ heads, saw someone coming through the crowd, a
semicelebrity he’d seen on C-Span hawking his books.

The subject of Rollins’s interest was a good-looking guy of about forty, a journalist and best-selling detective novelist,
dressed in Dockers and a pink button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. Kind of reminded him of Brian Williams reporting from
Baghdad. Maybe a little more rough-and-ready.

As Rollins watched, the writer reached out and touched Barbara McDaniels’s arm, and Barbara stopped to speak with him.

Charlie Rollins saw an interview with the legitimate press in the making. He thought,
No kidding. The Peepers will love this. Kim McDaniels is going big-time. This is turning into a very big event, indeed.

THE JOURNALIST in the Dockers and pink shirt?

That was me.

I saw an opening as Levon and Barbara McDaniels stepped away from the lectern, the crowd closing in, circling them like a
twister.

I lunged forward, touched Barbara McDaniels’s arm, catching her attention before she disappeared into the lobby.

I wanted the interview, but no matter how many times you see parents of lost or abducted children begging for their son or
daughter’s safe return, you cannot fail to be moved.

Barbara and Levon McDaniels had gotten to me as soon as I saw their faces. It killed me to see them in such pain.

Now I had my hand gently on Barbara McDaniels’s arm. She turned, and I introduced myself, handed her my card, and lucky for
me, she knew my name. “Are you the Ben Hawkins who wrote
Red
?

“
Put It All on Red,
yes, that’s mine.”

She said she liked the book, her mouth smiling, although her face was rigid with anguish. Right then, hotel security made
a cordon with their arms, a path through the crowd, and I walked into the lobby with Barbara, who introduced me to Levon.

“Ben’s a best-selling author, Levon. You remember, we read him for our book club last fall.”

“I’m covering Kim’s story for the
L.A. Times,
” I told Mr. McDaniels.

Levon said, “If you want an interview, I’m sorry. We’re out of steam, and it’s probably best that we don’t talk further until
we meet with the police.”

“You haven’t spoken with them yet?”

Levon sighed, shook his head. “Ever talk to an answering machine?”

“I might be able to help,” I said. “The
L.A. Times
has clout, even here. And I used to be a cop.”

“Is that right?” Levon McDaniels’s eyelids were sagging, his voice ragged and raw. He walked like a man who’d just run his
feet off in a marathon, but he was suddenly interested in me. He stopped walking and asked me to tell him more.

“I was with the Portland PD. I was a detective, an investigator. Right now I cover the crime desk for the
Times.
”

McDaniels winced at the word “crime,” said, “Okay, Ben. You think you can give us a hand with the police? We’re going out
of our minds.”

I walked with the McDanielses through the cool marble lobby with its high ceilings and ocean views until we found a semisecluded
spot overlooking the pool. Palm trees rustled in the island breeze. Wet kids in bathing suits ran past us, laughing, not a
care in the world.

Levon said, “I called the police several times and got a menu. ‘Parking tickets, press one. Night court, press two.’ I had
to leave a message. Can you believe that?

“Barb and I went over to the station for this district. Hours were posted on the door. Monday to Friday, eight to five, Saturday,
ten to four. I didn’t know police stations had closing hours. Did you?”

The look in Levon’s eyes was heartbreaking. His daughter was missing. The police station was
closed
for business. How could this place look the way it did — vacation heaven — when they were slogging through seven kinds of
hell?

“The police here mostly do traffic work, DWIs, stuff like that,” I said. “Domestic violence, burglary.”

I thought, but didn’t say, that a few years ago a twenty-five-year-old female tourist was attacked on the Big Island by three
local hoods who beat her and raped her and killed her.

She’d been tall, blond, sweet-looking, not unlike Kim.

There was another case, more famous, a cheerleader for the University of Illinois who’d fallen off the balcony of her hotel
room and died instantly. She’d been partying with a couple of boys who were found not guilty of anything. And there was another
girl, a local teenager, who called her friends after a concert on the island, and was never seen again.

“Your press conference was a good thing. The police will have to take Kim seriously,” I said.

“If I don’t get a call back, I’m going over there again in the morning,” Levon McDaniels said. “Right now we want to go to
the bar, see where Kim was hanging out before she vanished. You’re welcome to join us.”

THE TYPHOON BAR was on the mezzanine floor, open to the trade winds, wonderfully scented by plumeria. Café tables and chairs
were lined up at the balustrade, overlooking the pool and beyond, a queue of palm trees down to the sands. To my left was
a grand piano, still covered, and there was a long bar behind us. A bartender was setting up, slicing lemon peel, putting
out dishes of nuts.

Barbara spoke. “The night manager told us that Kim was sitting at this table, the one nearest the piano,” Barbara said, tenderly
patting the table’s marble surface.

Then she pointed to an alcove fifteen yards away. “That would be the famous men’s room over there. Where the art director
went, to ah, just turn his back for a minute…”

I imagined the bar as it must have been that night. People drinking. A lot of men. I had plenty of questions. Hundreds of
them.

I was starting to look at this story as if I were still a cop. If this were
my
case, I’d start with the security tapes. I’d want to see who was in the bar when Kim was there. I’d want to know if anybody
had been watching her when she’d gotten up from this table, and who might have paid the check after she left.

Had Kim departed with someone? Maybe gone to his room?

Or had she walked to the lobby, eyes following her as she made her way down the stairs, her blond hair swinging.

What then?
Had she walked outside, past the pool and the cabanas? Had any of those cabanas been occupied late that night? Had someone
followed her out to the beach?

Levon carefully polished his glasses, one lens, then the other, and held them out to see if he’d done a good job. When he
put them back on, he saw me looking out at the covered walkway beyond the pool area that led to the beach.

“What do you think, Ben?”

“All of the beaches in Hawaii are public property, so there won’t be any video surveillance out there.”

I was wondering if the simplest explanation fit. Had Kim gone for a swim? Had she waded out into the water and gotten sucked
under by a wave? Had someone found her shoes on the beach and taken them?

“What can we tell you about Kim?” Barbara asked me.

“I want to know everything,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to tape our conversation.”

Barbara nodded, and Levon ordered G and Ts for them both. I was working, so I declined alcohol, asked for club soda instead.

I had already started shaping the Kim McDaniels story in my mind, thinking about this beautiful girl from the heartland, with
brains and beauty, on the verge of national fame, and about how she had come to one of the most beautiful spots on earth and
disappeared without trace or reason. An exclusive with the McDanielses was more than I’d hoped for, and while I still couldn’t
know if Kim’s story was a book, it was definitely a journalistic whopper.

And more than that, I’d been won over by the McDanielses. They were nice people.

I wanted to help them, and I would.

Right now, they were exhausted, but they weren’t leaving the table. The interview was on.

My tape recorder was new, the tape just unwrapped and the batteries fresh. I pushed Record, but, as the machine whirred softly
on the table, Barbara McDaniels surprised me.

It was
she
who started asking questions.

BARBARA RESTED her chin on her hands, and asked, “What happened with you and the Portland police department — and please don’t
tell me what it says in your book jacket bio. That’s just PR, isn’t it?”

Barbara let me know by her focus and determination that if I didn’t answer her questions, she had no reason to answer mine.
I wanted to cooperate because I thought she was right to check me out, and I wanted the McDanielses to trust me.

I smiled at Barbara’s direct interrogatory style, but there was nothing amusing about the story she was asking me to tell.
Once I sent my mind back to that place and time, the memories rolled in, unstoppable, none of them glorifying, none of them
very pleasant, either.

As the still-vivid images flashed on the wide screen inside my head, I told the McDanielses about a fatal car wreck that had
happened many years ago; that my partner, Dennis Carbone, and I had been nearby and had responded to the call.

“When we got to the scene, there was about a half hour left of daylight. It was gloomy with a drizzling rain, but there was
enough light to see that a vehicle had skidded off the road. It had caromed off some trees like a two-ton eight ball, crashing
out of control through the woods.

“I radioed for help,” I said now. “Then I was the one who stayed behind to interview the witness who’d been driving the other
car — while my partner went to the crashed vehicle to see if there were survivors.”

I told the McDanielses that the witness had been driving the car coming from the opposite direction, that the other vehicle,
a black Toyota pickup, had been in his lane, coming at him
fast.
He said that he’d swerved, and so had the Toyota. The witness was shaken as he described how the pickup had left the road
at high speed, said that he’d braked — and I could see and smell the hundred yards of rubber he’d left on the asphalt.

“Response and rescue vehicles showed up,” I said. “The paramedics pulled the body out of the pickup, told me that the driver
had been killed on impact with a spruce tree and that he’d had no passengers.

“As the dead man was taken away, I looked for my partner. He was a few yards off the roadside, and I caught him sneaking a
look in my direction. A little odd, like he was trying not to be seen doing something.”

There was a sudden flurry of girlish laughter as a bride, surrounded by her maids of honor, passed through the bar to the
lounge. The bride was a pretty blonde in her twenties. Happiest day of her life, right?

Barbara turned to see the bridal party, then turned back to look at me. Anyone with eyes could see what she was feeling. And
what she was hoping.

“Go on, Ben,” she said. “You were talking about your partner with the guilty look.”

I nodded, told her that I turned away from my partner because someone called my name and that when I looked back again, he
was closing the trunk of our car.

“I didn’t ask Dennis what he was doing, because I was already thinking ahead. We had reports to write up, work to do. We had
to start with identifying the deceased.

“I was doing all the right stuff, Barbara,” I told her now. “I think it’s pretty common to block out things we don’t want
to see. I should have confronted my partner right then and right there. But I didn’t do it. Turns out that that sneaky, half-seen
moment changed my life.”

A WAITRESS CAME OVER and asked if we wanted to refresh our drinks, and I was glad to see her. My throat was closing up and
I needed to take a break. I’d told this story before, but it’s never easy to get past disgrace.

Especially when you didn’t earn it.

Levon said, “I know this is hard, Ben. But we appreciate your telling us about yourself. It’s important to hear.”

“This is where it gets
hard,
” I told Levon.

He nodded, and even though Levon probably had only ten years on me, I felt his fatherly concern.

My second club soda arrived and I stirred at it with a straw. Then I went on.

“A few days passed. The accident victim turned out to be a small-time drug dealer, Robby Snow, and his blood came back positive
for heroin. And now his girlfriend called on us. Carrie Willis was her name. Carrie was crushed by Robby’s death, but something
else was bothering her. She asked me, ‘What happened to Robby’s backpack? It was red with silver reflecting tape on the back.
There was a lot of money in there.’

“Well, we hadn’t found any red backpack, and there were a lot of jokes about Carrie Willis having the nerve to report stolen
drug money to the police.

“But Robby’s girlfriend was convincing. Carrie didn’t know that Robby was a dealer. She just knew that he was buying a piece
of acreage by a creek and he was going to build a house there for the two of them. The bank papers and the full payment for
the property — a hundred thousand dollars — were in that backpack because he was on his way to the closing. She put all that
money in the backpack herself. Her story checked out.”