“I will.”

Hodges ends the call and looks up, wanting to fill Holly in, but Holly is no longer beside him.

“Bill.” Her voice is low. “Come in here.”

Puzzled, he walks to the door of his office, where he stops dead. Jerome is behind the desk, sitting in Hodges’s swivel chair. His long legs are splayed out and he’s looking at Dinah Scott’s Zappit. His eyes are wide open but empty. His mouth hangs ajar. There are fine drops of spittle on his lower lip. A tune is tinkling from the gadget’s tiny speaker, but not the same tune as last night—Hodges is sure of it.

“Jerome?” He takes a step forward, but before he can take another, Holly grabs him by the belt. Her grip is surprisingly strong.

“No,” she says in the same low voice. “You shouldn’t startle him. Not when he’s like that.”

“What, then?”

“I had a year of hypnotherapy when I was in my thirties. I was having problems with . . . well, never mind what I was having problems with. Let me try.”

“Are you sure?”

She looks at him, her face now pale, her eyes fearful. “No, but we can’t leave him like that. Not after what happened to Barbara.”

The Zappit in Jerome’s limp hands gives off a bright blue flash. Jerome doesn’t react, doesn’t blink, only continues staring at the screen while the music tinkles.

Holly takes a step forward, then another. “Jerome?”

No answer.

“Jerome, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Jerome says, not looking up from the screen.

“Jerome, where are you?”

And Jerome says, “At my funeral. Everyone is there. It’s beautiful.”

17

Brady became fascinated with suicide at the age of twelve, while reading Raven, a true-crime book about the mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana. There, more than nine hundred people—a third of them children—died after drinking fruit juice laced with cyanide. What interested Brady, aside from the thrillingly high body count, was the lead-up to the final orgy. Long before the day when whole families swallowed the poison together and nurses (actual nurses!) used hypodermics to squirt death down the throats of squalling infants, Jim Jones was preparing his followers for their apotheosis with fiery sermons and suicide rehearsals he called White Nights. He first filled them with paranoia, then hypnotized them with the glamour of death.

As a senior, Brady wrote his only A paper, for a half-assed sociology class called American Life. The paper was called “American Deathways: A Brief Study of Suicide in the U.S.” In it he cited the statistics for 1999, then the most recent year for which they were available. More than forty thousand people had killed themselves during that year, usually with guns (the most reliable go-to method), but with pills running a close second. They also hung themselves, drowned themselves, bled out, stuck their heads in gas ovens, set themselves on fire, and rammed their cars into bridge abutments. One inventive fellow (this Brady did not put into his report; even then he was careful not to be branded an oddity) stuck a 220-volt line up his rectum and electrocuted himself. In 1999, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America, and if you added in the ones that were reported as accidents or “natural causes,” it would undoubtedly be right up there with heart disease, cancer, and car crashes. Most likely still behind them, but not far behind.