We stared at the other side of the room. Two bodies lay on the floor.
One was Vanessa Mueller, shot in the neck.
The other was Joseph Grolin, bleeding from the chest.
A strip of black gaffer’s tape was secured over Grolin’s mouth. Both of his hands were tightly taped, thoroughly taped, around the grips of handguns.
Toy handguns.
57
“No, oh please, no…” gasped Tucker. “What have I done?”
Lien-hua ran to help Vanessa. I rushed over to Grolin. He was still alive.
“Put your gun away,” I yelled to Tucker. “Now.”
Grolin couldn’t get the guns off his hands. He couldn’t drop them. And he couldn’t rip the tape off his mouth to tell us. I removed the tape from his face, and he spit out a bloody white pawn.
“Who did this to you, Joseph?” I asked. “Who?”
He swallowed hard, searching for breath. “I didn’t hurt her,” he managed to say. Tears burned in his eyes. He’d been crying for a while, probably knew the cops were coming and had been trying to get free.
“Who?” I said. “Who did this?”
The crimson light beat around us. Brum, brum. Brum, brum… He spit up a mouthful of blood.
“Get an ambulance, now!” I shouted at Tucker, who was standing in shock beside me. I leaned closer to Grolin. He was trying to say something.
But it was too late. He gasped one last time and slumped to the ground.
No!
I started chest compressions, but with two gunshot wounds to the chest like that, it wasn’t going to do much good. Brum, brum. Brum, brum… “We need that ambulance!”
Lien-hua radioed for help. Tucker was still in shock. “What have I done?” he was mumbling. “What have I done?”
“Why did you have to rush in here, Tucker?” I yelled. “Why couldn’t you wait?”
Sirens. The police were on their way.
Brum, brum. Brum, brum…
I tried to beat the life back into Grolin’s shredded heart. It was no use. Joseph Grolin was dead.
And he wasn’t the Illusionist.
Ten minutes later the ambulance was pulling away to take Vanessa Mueller to Mission Memorial Hospital. She might very well die at her place of work. The mood at the scene was grim.
“He rushed me,” said Lien-hua. She was stunned. We all were. “I kicked at his hand when it looked like he had a weapon. He wouldn’t drop it.”
“Each of us is going to have to file a full report on this,” I said. “Figure out exactly what happened here.”
“You saw him, right?” Tucker said to us. “He was waving the guns at me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. In the end, Brent probably wouldn’t get into disciplinary trouble. After all, the guy was waving what appeared to be two guns at us and wouldn’t verbally respond or drop his weapons.
Of course, he couldn’t do either.
He was just another one of the Illusionist’s pawns.
I was beginning to think we all were.
“The killer lured us here through Vanessa,” I said. “No one shot at her, though, right?”
We all shook our heads.
“All right,” I said. “Then he was here, somewhere. We’ll have the CSIU guys scour the place and have ballistics check the bullet in her neck to see if it matches the bullet that was taken out of the neck of that guy at the parking garage.”
Then I turned to Tucker. “I hate this part, but I have to do it. As the senior agent here, I need you to hand me your weapon. It was used in a lethal shooting, and until a complete investigation can be-”
“I know.” He slapped his gun into my hand. “I know.” His face clouded over, and I couldn’t tell if it was shock or guilt that was sweeping over him. Maybe it was both. He turned and slouched away. I let him go. I felt bad for him, sick to my stomach about the whole thing. But I didn’t really know what else to say.
For the next two hours I answered questions and filled out paperwork for the responding officers until I was bleary-eyed. I was the last one from our team to leave the scene. After catching a ride to my hotel with one of the officers I collapsed on the bed. Tried to sleep.
Ended up doing pull-ups instead.
But my shoulder hurt so bad I had to do them with only one arm.
And with each pull-up I vowed I would catch the Illusionist.
My anger was laced with fresh fire, and nothing short of stopping him was going to put it out.
58
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid stood outside the gathering room for a moment and listened.
Beyond the door he could hear a man speaking in a measured, calming, rambling way. He knew the voice. It was Father’s voice, the Reverend Jim Jones’s voice.
And he knew the tape. It was the one in which Father convinced his followers, his family, to line up and die. Over the years Aaron had taught his own family the words. They recited them as blessings over their children, believed in them as if they were holy prayers.
Some people called it the Death Tape.
Kincaid just remembered it as the Final Message.
He opened the door and found his family waiting cross-legged on the lush carpet. A few of the women softly sang an old-time hymn, swaying, their eyes closed.
As he stepped into the room, all the singing stopped. One of the men turned off the recording, and the family members bowed their heads out of respect, lowering their foreheads to the floor, holding their arms out to the side, palms up, like broken wings. He hadn’t taught them this gesture; hadn’t asked them to do it, but over the years it had just become the natural response. They were only trying to honor him, and he wouldn’t deny them that. There was no reason to deny them that.
He loved this group more than he’d ever loved anything in his life-at least it seemed like love to him. It was difficult to tell. They’d taught him so much about himself, so much about his possibilities. But whether it was love or not, whatever he felt toward them, it was a noble feeling. He was sure of that.
“Thirty years ago a great tragedy unfolded,” he began, and as he spoke they sat up again one at a time. “One of the greatest tragedies of that generation. It didn’t need to happen. There was no reason for it to happen. Parents died that day, parents who loved their children. Brothers and sisters died that day. Men and women just like us who had done no wrong, who had broken no law, who had hurt no one, died on that day. Good people. People like you and I died on that day. On that terrible day.”
His followers nodded in agreement as he spoke. They knew the story well.
“Life was not an option to them if they could not live free. They would rather cross over to the other side than live enslaved by the society that chained them to repression, that hated them for their beliefs.” Kincaid drifted among them now, grazing his fingers along their cheeks in an act of silent blessing.
“Their only crime was dreaming of and fighting for and believing in a better world.” He paused. It wasn’t for dramatic effect, although it served that purpose. He paused because the memories were catching up with him, chasing him just like the Peoples Temple gunmen had done in the twilight. He remembered the babies and the river and the syringes. “But what breaks my heart the most is not that they died but that the legacy of their lives has
