Mass suicide I understand, group suicide has been a part of the landscape since the beginning of this, since 2011GV1 first made herself known. Spiritual pilgrims. Desperate seekers. More recently it’s only rumors: 50,000 people all dead together at Citi Field. A tribe of native Peruvian people burying themselves to the neck in the desert, their suffering meant as some kind of sacrifice to the fearsome new god streaking across the sky. Stories that can’t be true, that you hope aren’t true. Supposedly there was a group that drowned themselves in a reservoir outside Dallas, their bodies bobbing to the surface for weeks, hastening the end of the northeast Texas water supply. Supposedly there are “Last Call” party boats operating 24/7 now in New Orleans, going out on Lake Pontchartrain with champagne and caviar and enough dynamite to blow a hole in the hull once everybody on board is good and wasted and ready to go.
So this here, then, in the Rotary PD basement, this here is nothing. The plan to save the world gets scratched and this is the backup plan, one kind of craziness cross-fading into another. No one hunkering down to tough it out—it’s bottoms up, it’s ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT, it’s everybody dead in the same grave underground. Except that Nico Palace—I’m standing in the dark, still waiting for my stomach to settle, I’m staring at nothing, at the black-on-black outline of the door across the hall, thinking of my sister—Nico Palace says thanks but no thanks. Nico says I disagree, the situation is not what the situation is. Nico who, drunk at age fourteen, informed me that our father had been a coward for hanging himself over grief for Mom, “a rat-shit coward,” declines to raise a toast and gulp down a thermos full of death. She rejects plan B and heads out with her backpack full of candy on her Hail Mary bid to complete the mission and save the world.
And Jean follows to stop her, to convince her to take the easy way out, the quick way. Why would you want to leave for nothing, she tells her, why would you want to leave for nothing and be alone, when we could all be together?
She’s telling her all that when someone else emerges from that underground lair, bursts up from the ground like a hand from the graveyard at the end of a horror movie, someone follows them and catches them. Assumes they’re both slipping free from the plan and insists they both take part.
Someone. It’s Astronaut, if Astronaut has time. I’ve got him talking to Nico in the hallway at 4:30, when the move downstairs isn’t close to done. Benefit of the doubt, rapid motion after that, and it’s 4:45 before everything is downstairs. So that means Astronaut is then running back up the stairs, hunting down Nico and Jean, chasing and killing them sequentially, and then running back down the stairs before the hole is sealed at 5:30.
I glance back over my shoulder into the room full of the dead. I’m going to go back in there. I am. In just a second I will. If the Astronaut scenario is hobbled by the timeline problem, that means anyone else currently dead in that room is also eliminated, and that leaves the sixth man. It was eight women and six men who came down here, and eight women minus Nico and Jean equals the six female corpses in the ladies’ room, but six men minus who equals five dead men?
Is the answer Jordan? Jordan isn’t in the room—Jordan’s not dead from poison—where is Jordan?
But the other question, the main question really, the question that looms like a thundercloud over all of the others, is why—why—what sense did it make, whoever the killer was, why? What purpose did it serve at this late date for her to die like that, out there in a field, bleeding and gasping, what possible need could that have filled, to find those who’d slipped the suicide circle and bring them back and make them die? The word why a tenor bell clanging in my brain while I’m standing there with my back to the door, trying to get myself to go back in and take more evidence.
I can lift prints off of dead bodies with gunpowder and Scotch tape. And then if I can find the knife I can lift prints off of that too, either prove that Astronaut was the last person holding it or rule him out.
I’m close to this thing, I’ve almost got it, facts are crowding in around me and they just need to be sorted, sifted, thought through, pieced together. Stars in a distant sky, glimmering in and out of focus, almost in a constellation but not quite taking shape.
“Henry!”
Cortez’s voice, sharp, excited. He found more bodies. He must be in the other room, the one with the anatomical graffiti. He found something.
“Don’t touch anything,” I shout, feeling along the wall for the doors. “It’s a crime scene.”
“A crime scene? Henry, Jesus, come quick.”
His voice is coming from the third room, the room marked GENERAL STORE. I come out into the hallway, following my light, and I see his head poking out of the open door.
“Come in here,” he hollers. “Oh, Policeman. You’ve got to see this.”
5.
Cortez is standing in the center of the room, surrounded by packing crates stacked to the ceiling, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, man,” he says. Manic. Juiced. “Okay, okay, okay.”
“Cortez?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”