Keenu told the detectives that the suicide pact had been under discussion for weeks, possibly since before Kauri's trip to Sedona. The pair were spotted at the Royal Gorge on October 13, the same day Kauri called about the plumbing. And surveillance video police obtained from a gun shop in Cañon City reportedly shows Keenu attempting to purchase a pistol, failing, then Kauri entering the shop and also being rebuffed. They checked into the Denver Marriott Tech Center the next day.
Kauri had long been interested in end-time movements of one kind or another. She was a member of the Singularity Action Group, an online network of futurists and others fascinated by the notion of artificial intelligence evolving to a point well beyond human comprehension. Her notebooks are full of links to sites promoting "transhumanism," a patchwork of hopeful musings about extreme technological modification of human subjects to defy disease and even death. A common idea in transhumanism, though, is closely related to the New Testament parable about the grain of wheat's sacrifice and transformation — unless it dies and goes into the ground, it cannot bear fruit. Quoting sci-fi writer David Zindell, one of the transhumanism sites declares that man is a seed, "an acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."
Tara Schinn, who had several tattoo sessions with Kauri, says her friend "did not want to die like this."
Kim Kosnar, who had "girl talks" with Kauri weeks before her death, says her friend gave no hint of being suicidal.
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Perhaps Kauri regarded her own death as a similar transformation. Her last tattoo client told one friend that Kauri had talked during the session about "ascension" and how her work was done here. It was not a term that Reed, Kosnar, Schinn or other confidants had heard her use before. But then, Kauri's ideas about life and death and her place in the universe were always changing, always evolving.
With her, nothing was fixed in stone, nothing was permanent — except death, maybe, and a good tattoo.
After Kauri left with Keenu, Kosnar texted her cell several times without a response. At the end of the week, she finally got a message back. It was the Denver police, using Kauri's phone to try to get in touch with her friends.
Kauri left no will. The state became the executor of her estate, and officials went to the warehouse and took her computer and personal effects. Kosnar went to the public auction to try to rescue what she could.
It was a grim scene. Strangers were rummaging through boxes of Kauri's stuff, her books and artwork and even her clothes, still suffused with her scent. "Look at these," someone snickered, holding up a pair of boots that reflected Kauri's flashy sense of fashion. "She must have been a hooker."
By the time it was over, Kosnar was in tears.
After weeks of effort, an investigator in the Denver coroner's office located Kauri's mother. The body was cremated, the ashes returned to Arizona. Some of her friends felt a sense of relief and closure at the news. Others were still turning over the inescapable questions: Why did Kauri do this? How could Keenu, a man with no history of violence, do what he did?
"I went from really sad to really angry," says Kosnar. "No ends were tied up. If they wanted to die painlessly, why not pills and alcohol? As disgusting as it sounds, I'd like to hear it from Keenu. I'd like to hear his side."
Keenu appeared briefly in court last week in putty-colored jailhouse scrubs, his hands and feet shackled. With his piercings removed, he seemed shaggy and washed-out — a study in gray, except for the bright red-and-turquoise cosmic scene on his left biceps. His preliminary hearing was postponed until February. His side of the story may have to wait until the day, if ever, that the contents of the notes he and Kauri left behind are divulged at trial.
The colors in Tara Schinn's cherry blossom half-sleeve are as bright as ever. But in her last few weeks, Kauri had started work for several clients that she never finished. They remain bare sketches on flesh, mere shadows of what they might have become.
