Harrow kept his voice soft, even. “His opinion — and mine — is that pulling the show plays into the hands of these egotistical maniacs. Makes them bigger, more powerful celebrities. And may well incite them to kill more, perhaps at an accelerated rate.”
“The profiler you have on staff,” Rousch said rather acidly, “took a handful of classes under our profilers, at the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico... where profiling was invented? And they don’t agree with him.”
“Nonetheless,” Richards said, his basso profundo rumbling the room as he suddenly entered the debate, “UBC has decided to keep Crime Seen on the air.”
“Mr. Richards—”
“Unless you’re ready to meet us in court, and try to shut the show down on legal grounds — and I can’t imagine what those grounds might be — this meeting is over.”
The red had risen from Rousch’s throat to his face now. “A judge might put the public welfare over UBC’s need to ‘communicate’ or make money, whichever is the real motivation. And have any of you people even heard of the FCC?”
Harrow raised a hand. “Special Agent Rousch, this argument becomes moot if we catch the killers before next Friday. Maybe we should concentrate on that.”
Rousch, outnumbered and facing home-court advantage, let out the heaviest of sighs... then nodded.
Richards stepped forward and held out his hand; the FBI agent shook it without thinking.
“Whatever our differences, Special Agent Rousch,” Richards said, “please know that UBC and Crime Seen want these killers off the streets every bit as much as the FBI. We’ll do whatever can to help... short of taking the show off the air.”
Rousch managed, “Thank you for that much.”
Richards nodded to Byrnes, and then the white guy in shorts and the black guy from a GQ ad were gone.
The FBI man stared across the desk at Harrow. “What just hit me?”
“You’ve heard of good cop, bad cop?”
“I’ve lived it.”
“Well, you just met Lucian Richards’s good-cop side. You don’t ever want to meet the bad-cop side.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Well, that’s out of the way.” Harrow smiled at his guest. “Shall we go figure out how to catch two killers, keep my show on the air, and get you back to Quantico?”
Rousch’s eyebrows went up, came down. He sighed again, but nothing earth-shattering. “Sounds good,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-nine
The lovemaking was over.
This woman, Erica Thornton, the teller from Newport Beach with ambitions to act, had been an enthusiastic sex partner — very giving, as well as voracious (despite the drugs), and if he had been the sort of man who was really into sex, he might have been devastated knowing she would have to die.
Instead, those first postcoital moments were merely bittersweet.
The character Don Juan loved sex, but once the mechanics of the act were over, he — the actor — ceased being that character, the performance over. Much as his costar’s life would be.
Costar wasn’t right, though was it? She was more a day player, in movie parlance. His real costar was working behind the scenes, handling the stagecraft, though her time to come on stage drew near.
Funny, while he was playing Don Juan, he liked the sex, liked it well enough anyway, while the man behind the performance really only cared about the end result — how this video would further the plan and his career. Their career, his real costar and he...
In what some called the afterglow, the brunette lay limp on the bed, naked, satiated, almost as if she were already deceased, but for the gentle rising and lowering of the generous breasts.
His time on stage, on camera, was over.
He arose and left the room to take his place behind the camera. There would be no elaborate camera moves; this was strictly D.W. Griffith — level cinema, because the camera behind the two-way mirror needed to appear to have remained stationary.
All he had to do now was look through the viewfinder at the action — his voiceover would be dropped in, in post-production.
The most important part of shooting the video was to make sure he didn’t catch his sister when she came on stage, as his “stuntman” (stuntwoman? stuntperson?).
Off-camera, his sister entered with her usual swift grace, as nude as their day player but even more beautiful, supple, sleek, exquisite in her hairless beauty. She moved past her hidden cameraman, knife in hand held behind her back.
Camera trained on the brunette, his sister’s white skin soon entered frame, luminous in the soft light of the room, her pink nipples hard and erect as she moved toward the bed.
(His sister’s approach was Method, too — she lived her role, sense memory her thing.)
The day player’s mouth opened, but she did not show the shock of the others at this other naked (bald all over) woman entering the room. This one licked her bottom lip.
“Kinky,” she managed. “I’m... I’m liking this...”
She soon wouldn’t.
When his sister neared the bed and revealed and raised the knife, the woman’s face registered the requisite surprise.
Through the eyepiece, he and the camera were focused on the day player’s face, intrigued by the way this minor actress played the scene — startled at first, then giving in to resignation.
Interesting choice.
The blade arced down, the day player watching but not moving as its spear neared her neck. She, like the others, never even raised a hand in defense as the blade punctured, then slashed through flesh, blood spraying from the severed carotid artery.
Only then did the day player’s hands move to her wound, even as his sister brought the knife back and then in from a lower angle, piercing the woman’s abdomen so deep the blade might have poked out the other side.
Again and again, the blade penetrated the young woman, much as earlier he had with his dagger of flesh, his sister crying out in orgiastic fury with every thrust until, finally, the attacker moaned loudly and slumped into a ball on the floor, the day player splayed out before her, a roadmap of bloody wounds.
Now his sister, coming down from her homicidal high, lay quietly satiated. He liked that. There was a nice, artistic symmetry to it.
He had followed his sister’s descent with the camera, but that would be edited out for the video. Well, later, when all the Don Juan videos came out, in uncut director’s editions, the full sequence would at last be seen.
He helped her up and walked her to the bathroom. She was exhausted — it always reminded him of when James Brown had to be led offstage by his retinue, only he didn’t have a red velvet robe to wrap around his sister, much as she deserved one.
While she showered, he returned to the set with that familiar melancholy for when the play was over. The woman on the bed was just another inanimate object to him. Another prop. Gradually, however, during the cleanup process, the women did transcend that status.
His supplies readied beforehand, he knelt next to the body, even as the blood still dripped. Oddly, he enjoyed this part of the experience most of all — somehow, he felt more intimate with the women, after the camera had stopped rolling and his sister was off showering. Only then were he and each day player truly alone together... soft towels and gentle soap, and a woman more than just naked, opened up so he could see inside.