No One Will Hear You

Chapter Thirty-two

For the two days following the discovery of the victim in the Griffith Park Observatory parking lot, the media had exploded with coverage of both Don Juan and Billie Shears. This pleased Billie very much. But there was an unpleasing wrinkle.

Though the link between the killers had apparently not been discovered by the LAPD and FBI (or for that matter, the Crime Seen clowns), an unfortunate collective moniker had been given the two killers — “The Odd Couple.”

The L.A. Times and its satellites weren’t guilty of this offense — a local radio station started it, and the national media picked up on it, with several twenty-four-hour news services using the nickname freely. This tabloid approach did have its pleasing aspects, as when one wild-eyed Fox commentator spoke of the Odd Couple being responsible for “fear gripping Hollywood.”

She did not, however, follow the commentator’s logic that somehow the Don Juan and Billie Shears killings represented “the sins of show business coming home to roost,” nor did she think a reference to her and her brother as “sick fame-seekers hoping to suckle at the reality-show teat” was in the least bit fair.

Still, what was the old press agent’s axiom? It didn’t matter what they said, as long as they were talking about you. Or what they printed, as long as they were spelling your name right. And now they were spelling it B-i-l-l-i-e, weren’t they? Ha!

Her brother had the video camera set up now, with Billie Shears’s latest — and very special — victim-to-be spread-eagled on the bed, hands and feet lashed to the frame with heavy, hurting cord.

Now that they’d entered Act Three, brother and sister for the first time were deviating from their established pattern — their “M.O.” as Crime Seen would have it. This time their special guest star was not drugged, though he was indeed out cold, and naked, of course, and about to feel Billie’s shearing bite... but he had not been so fortunate as to enjoy the ego-boosting attentions of a beautiful young woman who had picked him up in a bar.

Maybe she could make that up to him.

Their special guest had been whisked on set from right outside his hotel room door. In fact his room became the set! Across the way, “Sam Wild” was registered — the Lawrence Tierney character in the classic Robert Wise film noir, Born to Kill. After all, hadn’t she and her brother been born to kill?

No, not born. Shaped. Molded. Created by the old man...

She took pride in this latest scenario, devised only yesterday, in a brother/sister brainstorming session, as they searched for a way to guarantee that Crime Seen would have to showcase them next Friday. This diverged from their original outline, but was a worthwhile, imaginative revision.

Tracking their guest performer to this hotel, this room, had been a breeze, given her brother’s computer skills. They had to forgo their usual in-depth “recon” (as her brother liked to put it). But risk carried a rush...

Not long ago, she had watched from the cracked door across the way as their guest approached his room and was digging for his key card. She waited till he had opened the door and was about to step in.

Then she stepped out — a blonde vision in spiked heels, a curvy female dream in a black mini with a sheer, black silk top with spaghetti straps, ideal for her creamy complexion.

He heard her, turned, and she smiled at him.

“Looks like you’re coming,” she said, “and I’m going.”

He gave her a goofy grin and seemed to be fishing for something clever to say in response to that loaded remark — men... give them a look and the blood runs from their big head to the little one and makes them stupid.

For all his supposed worldliness, their guest star had been no different.

Then his expression turned to a puzzled frown as she stepped aside and her brother emerged and brought up the Taser.

And fired.

The two darts struck the victim, dropping him mostly into his room, to flop and flap like a freshly landed carp.

Her brother dragged their catch by the arms inside and closed the door. She knelt and jerked the man’s handgun from its holster. When their guest began to come around and push up on his hands, she used the commandeered gun to club him.

He sagged back, unconscious.

From then on, it had been easy — strip him, get him onto the bed, tie him down. Duct-tape his mouth. Simple, straightforward, right to plan, but somehow exciting, exhilarating, since it varied from their established routine.

They had made sure the hallway was clear before moving the camera and their equipment in from across the way. While her brother set up, their guest star remained unconscious.

Or pretended to be.

Anyway, he was still breathing, with a strong, steady pulse. So if he wasn’t faking, and already conscious, he soon would be.

Finally, however, she became impatient, and cracked an amyl nitrate capsule under his nose. He shuddered awake, struggling with an invisible foe, then seemed to get a least a vague fix on the situation, trying to pull free.

Eventually he stopped struggling, apparently figuring out he had nowhere to go. Maybe the blood had moved back to the big head.

She smiled sweetly down at the naked man spread-eagled before her. He blinked rapidly, as if trying to wake from this bad dream, wild eyes swiftly scanning the room. Now and then he would struggle against his bonds — apparently more in anger and frustration than out of any sense of really escaping.

Leaning forward, putting a gentle fingertip on his hairy bare chest, she said, “Welcome to our world, Special Agent Rousch.”

Beneath the duct-tape gag, he roared with rage, so pitiful a sound she might have laughed, if she’d been truly heartless.

She ran fingers through the FBI agent’s chest hair. She found hair on a man’s body strangely compelling if somewhat gross; she had come to prefer her own hairless body. And her brother’s.

She said, “You’ve been looking for us — well, here we are.”

Now he was silent beneath the duct-tape strip. His eyes were wide — unblinking now.

“My brother and I — we’re brother and sister, you know... but you didn’t know, did you? My brother and I are a team — like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? Or more, Fred and Adele. Anyway, my brother and I have been very disappointed in you. You’ve been in town for weeks now and haven’t done any better than the LAPD or those TV fools. Or have you been keeping secrets?”

She clutched his chest hair and yanked out a clump. He bucked on the bed and yelled under the tape. When he came to rest, a bald patch in the jungle of curlies was pink and pearled with blood droplets.

“Perhaps we should torture you, my brother and I — and find out what you people really know. How close you really are? You figured out I was B-i-l-l-i-e, not l-y. But you don’t seem to’ve known Don Juan and Billie Shears are partners. The media almost guessed it, with their stupid, insulting ‘Odd Couple’ thing. That pisses me off!”

He lay very still. His expression had changed. Not angry now. Scared, but... something else, something she’d never seen in a victim, because both Billie and Don Juan had in the past struck mercifully quick, and this was a new stage to her: pleading.

Eyes begging for mercy.

It was somewhat unsettling.

She patted his nest of chest hair, and moved a few steps from the bed.

“You’re probably wondering about the camera,” she said. “That’s usually a Don Juan specialty, and Billie isn’t known for making performance-art videos. But you’re a special case. A special catch. A special guest star...”

Rousch lay limp now. She’d seen him go through a lot of changes, a lot of stages, in a short time. What were the stages of the grieving process, anyway? He was grieving his own death, after all.

She’d studied them in an acting class — shock and guilt and anger and denial and depression were in there. Was this acceptance? And what was the other one? Hope?

Not tonight, Josephine.

She dropped her pose. She didn’t feel like acting.

“I could tell you our whole story, about what our father did to us and so on, but it’s very unpleasant. It’s not the kind of thing somebody in your position would want to hear.”

The FBI agent came alive, suddenly — he was trying to get something across. What? He wanted to talk! He wanted to exchange views and ideas and try to talk them into freeing him, because he understood they couldn’t help themselves, and he could help them, and...

That was it! Bargaining! The other stage...

Ironic, because she had just been about to bargain with him.

“I will give you a chance, Agent Rousch. To save yourself. All you have to do is love me. Just love me.”

His eyes tensed, his forehead beaded with sweat, bulging with veins.

“If you love me... your love will set you free. If you love me. But you have to love me. Understand?”

She slipped the spaghetti straps off, let the silky top fall to her waist, revealing firm milky white breasts with bright pink tips (a little lip rouge had made them even pinker).

Rousch was wide-eyed, and against all odds — naked, tied spread-eagled, facing two serial killers — he proved her point about the big and little head: that flaccid thing of his twitched.

Stirred.

“Do you love me, Agent Rousch? But that’s so impersonal... your name is Mark. Mark — do you love me? If I believe you love me, I will let you go.”

She did not look at the camera or over where her brother stood behind it; she was too professional, but she felt him with her, his presence, his love for her.

“Love is important, Mark. Do you love me?”

She pulled down the skirt, taking the blouse with it; she stepped from the puddle of clothes, wearing nothing beneath — just her sleekly naked, hairless form. A blonde vision. She would leave the wig on. He might not like her really naked...

She said, “You wouldn’t want me to feel unwanted, would you?”

She cupped her breasts, stepped near the bed, and watched as his thing slowly rose. Like when the Frankenstein monster roused himself from that slab.

She got on the bed and knelt between his spread legs and began to stroke his half-hard member.

Even not fully erect, it was bigger than the old man’s. She watched, impressed, as it grew and grew the more she touched it.

It was very hard now. Throbbing in her hand.

She let it go, slapped it away, and stormed off the bed.

“That’s not love,” she said.

She watched as the thing wilted, almost comically; she could hear the slide-whistle sound effect in her head: WHEEEE-ooooop.

He was begging with his eyes again. Before, it had touched her somewhere deep, distant within. Now she felt merely disgust.

“Agent Rousch, just as a courtesy, since you must have many questions, I will brief you on the rest of our method of operation. Why not? It’s not like you’re going to share it with anybody.”

Now he strained manfully at his bindings and his chest filled as he screamed behind the duct tape, yelled bloody murder, but for all that effort, the result was more annoying than likely to attract attention or help. Kind of like when a guest in the hotel room adjacent is playing the TV too loud, and you’re trying to sleep.

“When they get as excited as you were? Up to a minute or so ago? I tell them I’m going into the bathroom... to get ready for them. You do know we drug them? Roofies? Sure. Anyway, a couple of minutes alone in the dark and the guy is so stoned and horny, he doesn’t even know whether the person who comes back, in the dark, is me or not... Allow us to demonstrate.”

She rose and walked over to her brother at the camera, the FBI man’s bugged eyes following. She pulled off the blond wig and covered her brother’s bald head with it. Arranged it, getting it just right.

Don Juan stepped forward, arcs of the woman’s wig swinging like scythes. He was naked, too, which their special guest had not realized before, the camera and its position making that tough.

When her brother approached a victim’s bed, he had his naughty bits tucked back between his legs, as if he didn’t have any.

He would say, “In the dark, it makes me look like a girl. I can’t fool them that I’m you, if I’m swinging my meat.”

That always made her laugh. Always just killed her...

Billie Shears stepped behind the camera and assumed its operation. Her brother stooped, then rose — re-entering the FBI agent’s range of vision — with the garden shears gripped in two hands.

What a pleasure to finally be able to do a little camera movement, she thought, as she zoomed in on Rousch’s face.

His eyes were wide with terror. She panned down to his thing — little now, shriveled, limp as a morning glory at nightfall. She swish-panned to her brother as he stepped forward, oddly pretty as a sexless blonde, opening and closing the shears, their grating metal music sending the FBI man into a twisting, yanking frenzy.

She was in a wide shot, and glad she was, because it was very cool the way Rousch tried to look brave, his eyes glued to the blades as her brother closed them one last time and raised them over his head for the Aztec sacrifice.

When the closed shears came down, swift, hard, a diving bird, Rousch screamed into the duct tape. It was as though someone had died in a faraway place.

His body lurched with the impact as his flesh and organs were disrupted. The sound was like boots moving through mud.

Then Rousch gurgled under the gag and was gone.

She had caught the whole thing on video, though this production would probably not be sent to Harrow’s team — it would be saved for the special-edition boxed set. Bonus features.

For once they didn’t wait for lividity to settle in and make the collection of the trophy less messy. She rather wanted this to be a horror show for the agent’s colleagues. A splashy mess would be good stagecraft, in this instance.

And when they had finished with their production, and she had taken her trophy (her brother did the killing, but she collected the terrible toll), they packed up. One suitcase held everything, even the collapsible tripod.

Across the hall, they showered and — in wigs and nice clothes — exited the room, just another upper-middle-class couple out for the evening.

In the lobby, she found a quiet corner and used Rousch’s cell phone, which she’d taken, but not as a souvenir exactly. She thumbed through screens until she found what she wanted.

When she had the number, she dialed.

“Rousch,” Harrow’s voice said, “what’s up?”

“Sorry,” she said pleasantly, “wrong number,” and clicked off.

With a hanky, she wiped the phone free of prints, dropped it in a trash receptacle, took her brother’s arm, and they strolled out into a pleasantly warm California night.

You could see the Hollywood sign from here.