Content Warning: This section discusses drug addiction and overdose, panic attacks, kidnapping, nonconsensual drugging, incest (and an implied relationship between an adult and minor), intimate partner violence, gun violence, mutilation of corpses, police violence, attempted death by suicide, and murder.

Gretchen Wik, a real estate agent, worries that her open house for a Bushwick industrial space will go unattended until, in the last minutes of the scheduled event, Brendan Holmes, Auguste Poe, and Margaret Marple enter.

Gretchen is astonished by the detective fiction references in the three arrivals’ names, but they brush off her questions. Holmes asks about an odd smell; he is genetically hyperosmic, meaning that he possesses an usually strong and accurate sense of smell. Poe finds a clipping that reports a past unsolved murder in the building. Gretchen fears that this means the building will never sell, but the trio announces that they intend to purchase.

Poe admires the lettering of the now-open “Holmes, Marple & Poe Investigations,” feeling confident that “today [i]s the day that w[ill] put them on the map” (22). Marple arrives, frowning at Poe’s latest expensive new muscle car; he collects them. Holmes enters, chiding Marple for her inflexibility.