by Dale Mayer
She nodded. “I don’t think it breaks major bones, ribs yes,” she said hesitantly, “but I’m not sure about the rest. We’d have to talk to the ME. Not only that, you know that there are rocks, trees, other debris in the water. He could easily have tumbled around in there and picked up all kinds of bruising. But they would be post-mortem.”
“Not necessarily. Death isn’t always instantaneous.”
She turned to look at the traffic, heavy in both directions. Then it always was, unless in the wee hours of the morning. “And again,” she said, “if somebody else is murdering these people, he—or she—must pick up and toss the victim, while ensuring nobody saw. And that would be difficult. This is a very heavily trafficked area. So we need to check the overnight cameras.”
Frowning and still unsettled, they headed to the third jumper’s scene. This was the same bridge but farther down, on the opposite side. “Another female, I presume?” she said, turning to look at Rodney. “We need to confirm that.”
“Regardless, we’ve got both sexes so far.”
She nodded. “Which doesn’t help at all.”
“The truckers are through here at those hours all the time. And, of course, nobody reported any such scene.”
“No. We should also check the weather,” she murmured, as she searched the area, her gaze automatically going to the sky, even though it wouldn’t give her past weather.
“Are you really taking this seriously?”
“I’m not sure how not to,” she said. “Somebody is sending me those damn pictures for a reason, and, as much as I wish they’d stop, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s sending me a message of some kind.”
“No,” Rodney said, frowning, “you’re right. Not to mention the fact that notes have been on every one of those pictures he attaches.”
She said, “Exactly. Frustrating as hell but definitely not something to ignore.”
By the time they were done, she walked back to the car, tired and stressed. Somebody had once told her that stress was basically just a cover-up for fear. At this point in time, the fear was that they could have a serial killer and not know it because the victims were already counted as suicides, under an almost expected headcount. And didn’t that sound terrible? There was an expectation that a certain number of suicides would occur annually, regardless of which month of the year.
Based on past years’ data, the statistics showed those suicides would fit into the norm of reasonable error of data. And even if somebody were tossing people off these bridges, even impacting the normal data, it still wouldn’t be enough to rouse eyebrows enough to start an investigation.
As she made her way back to her desk, she retraced her steps down the hallways of her mind, replaying what she had just observed at the three scenes, wondering just what she had learned, if anything, when her phone rang in a frantic manner. Frantic? Yes. She stared down at it, wondering how she always knew when it was Simon and when it was urgent. His issues always impacted her cases. She answered the phone, her voice terse. “What’s up?”
“So … I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ve just found a few photos.” His voice suggested he was rattled.
“Photos of what?” she asked, curious as to what had upset him.
“Look. A friend of mine, he … her husband committed suicide a few days ago.”
“Was his name David by chance?” she asked, her stomach sinking.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly who it is. How did you know?”
“I was just at the site.”
“Oh,” he said in surprise. Then sounding bewildered, he continued, “Well, his wife asked me to take a look at his laptop to see if anything would explain things or if she needed to deal with or know about something unexpected.”
“And?”
“He did belong to several groups, chat groups, … on suicide.”
“I’m so sorry then,” she said sincerely. “I think battling this is something so much bigger than us, and it makes it so hard to tackle.”
“Yes, but I found signs that he was pulling away from those suicidal thoughts. He was getting support from various people, but, within each one of the groups, somebody was being an absolute dick, pushing him to go ahead. To commit suicide.”
“We’ve heard of that happening too,” she said wearily. “Sometimes people are assholes.”
“Well, in this case, I’m afraid somebody might have done more than push him,” he said. “I need to send you this stuff.”
“Okay,” she said, “go ahead and send it. I’m almost at my desk right now.”
“Good,” he said, “it’ll be in your inbox in a couple minutes.” And, with that, he hung up.
She raced to her desk, impatient for the emails to load. How terrifying. She had heard all kinds of horror stories but had yet to come up against a case where somebody had coerced someone else into committing suicide. She could only hope that people were not the complete shits that she thought they were.
As she got into her office, her rapid steps raised eyebrows around her, and heads turned as she tore off her coat. She sat at her desk and immediately started clicking away.
“Wow, somebody is hot on to something. You want to fill us in?” Lilliana asked behind her.
“In a minute,” Kate said, “depends on what the hell I see here.” She brought up the email from Simon, studied the message, and then looked at the pictures. He’d sent all kinds of screenshots as well. She shook her head. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
“Something break?” Rodney asked, coming up beside her. He looked at her screen and whistled. “That’s nasty looking.”
“Yeah. Not only is it nasty looking,” she said, “it could be a threat. Or was it just done in somebody’s idea of sick fun? I don’t know what to think of it.”
“You want to explain?” Lilliana asked.
Kate turned, dug into the physical files at her side, and pulled up what she had just collated on the current suicides. She flipped through to the second one, held it up, and said, “Remember him? Suicide number two of three in this last week?”
The team gathered around her and nodded. “Simon is friends with the family.”
At that came some rolled eyes and raised eyebrows. She ignored them all.
“This guy, David, his wife asked Simon to come take a look at some stuff on his laptop. Simon said that she was afraid there might be something of a sexual nature that she didn’t want to stumble across on her own, like an affair or if he was gay or even had lost all their money. Some explanation. She didn’t know, but she didn’t want to go there on her own, and she’d found a bunch of log-ins and password information that she didn’t recognize.
“As their trusted friend, she wanted Simon to do it instead, so at least she’d have some support. What he found was membership in several suicide-related online groups and chat sites, which makes sense, considering he committed suicide. Simon also found that somebody was pushing him to do it, not just one person but several different people pushing for him to go ahead and do it, like the world and his wife would be better off if he were dead. Things like that.”
“We do get a certain amount of that,” Rodney said quietly. “Some people are just dicks.”
“I get that. But then Simon checked David’s email accounts against the one email address that he had from the chat, and, of course, that then is something trackable, except that the message wasn’t in David’s normal email account. It wasn’t one that he used for everyday occurrences. You might wonder how Simon accessed all this stuff, but David had left the log-in data all right there in a black book. Simon found three email accounts. One was unused and empty. One was the current one he used for almost everything, and the third was the one that David used only for these chats. In that inbox was a message with a subject line Do it or else. There was also a picture attached. Take a look.” And she clicked on the image.
“So you’re saying that this guy, whoever he is, was telling David to commit suicide, and, if he
didn’t, his wife would get a bullet?” Rodney asked, shocked.
“That appears to be what this message is saying,” she said. “Now, was it just for shock value? Was it a real and substantial threat? I don’t know.”
“And, even if it wasn’t,” Lilliana said quietly, “the fact is, this guy did commit suicide. It could be that he did it in order to save his wife.”
“But how would he know that his wife would be safe, even if he did the job?” Kate asked. “Because that’s the worst thing, isn’t it? You do something. You try to keep your family safe, and then you turn around and find out—of course this guy wouldn’t find out anything because he’s dead—but you find out that it was a lie all along, and they were planning on killing the wife anyway.” Kate took a long, very long, deep breath and let it out slowly. “Either way,” she said, “I really feel like we need to check into the other two recent suicides and make sure we don’t have something similar.”
“Good,” Colby said, making her spin around. He gave her an approving smile. “It’s an angle. I don’t know that it’s a good angle, but it’s an angle.”
“But it does mean,” she said, “that these suicides—”
“—are no longer suicides,” he said. “It sounds suspiciously like murder to me. We’ll snag these cases as ours.”
She nodded slowly. “And it would mean that nobody would have had to see these bodies going over the bridges because there wouldn’t be anybody helping them over. No struggling. No defensive wounds. These people would be willingly throwing themselves off a bridge and committing suicide in order to save their families.”
“After being coerced by a threat, and, therefore, that’s murder,” her sergeant said. “It might not be the easiest thing to prove, unless we get something forensically, but emails like that are a really good start.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but whoever it is remains hidden behind this email.”
“Well, we have a team just for that,” he said. “Did you send them the other emails and the other images from your computer?”
She stopped and stared. “I wonder,” she said. “Shit, I just wonder. What an idiot I am.”
“Wonder what?”
She sat back down in her chair, clicked away on the keys, bringing up the emails. “Crap. Remember the headlines, the messages? Each one was specific, like the last one was, ‘Are you there?’ As if to say, ‘Hey, I killed somebody. Glad you’re finally on board, or maybe you’re not on board, and now it’s, ‘Hey, do you see this?’ Right?”
Colby took several steps forward, looked at them over her shoulder, and said, “You’re saying that he’s egging you on to see if you’re in the game, to try and catch him.”
“I’m afraid so,” she said quietly. “And it really makes my stomach churn.”
“But she did get a lot of notoriety over that pedophile case,” Rodney said quietly. “And most of us have had a sicko target us at one time or another for something.”
She looked at him in surprise. “You have?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s never fun, but they always seem to think that the name of the game is to stay out of jail, but that alone is just way too boring for some. So they challenge us, almost to make a game of it.”
She shook her head. “You’d think that they would just want to disappear. They got what they wanted. The guy kills himself, tormented right to the last moment. Why the hell can’t these dicks just disappear and be happy that their sick game worked?”
“Not only can they not just disappear but they seek out the notoriety that goes with it,” Lilliana said. “They want to know that somebody realizes what they’ve done, and, if they can’t tell anybody because they don’t have anyone they can tell safely,” she said, “then they need the police involved because that keeps us engaged with them too.”
Kate sat back, looked at the most recent jumper’s shoes photo, and said, “So that’s why the killer’s sending me the pictures. He thought that I might have seen something, and that’s why I was at the scene of one of the jumpers. So, the first one, he sees me there and covertly says, ‘Finally,’ thinking that now the game will get going. But I’m not there for the second one, and he says, ‘Maybe not,’ and then, on the third one, he’s basically mocking me, with ‘Are you there?’ suggesting I don’t even get it.”
They all just nodded.
“Ah, crap,” Kate said, sitting here. “I really don’t want to be responsible for anybody else dying.”
“And you aren’t,” Colby said sharply. “He is, so get that thought out of your mind.”
She nodded. “I can try just because you say so, sir, but it’s really not that easy.”
“I don’t care if it’s easy or not,” he said. “You stop thinking along those lines. You are not responsible for the actions of this asshole.”
“I get that in theory,” she said. “I really do. But, past the theory part, it’s really hard to stomach.”
“So, you start with Forensics,” he said. “You start with Computer Forensics. They get to take a look at this. They take a look at everything you’ve got to share. And we’ll need that evidence from Simon.”
She nodded, picked up her phone, and, when Simon answered, she said, “I need you down here with David’s laptop and that black book.”
He didn’t answer immediately.
“No,” she said. “It’s bigger than just your friend. I need both.”
He said, “On my way.”
She looked over at the others. “Okay, he’s coming down now.”
“Good,” Rodney said, rubbing his hands together.
She glared at him. “Oh, hell no.”
He nodded. “Oh, hell yes,” he said. “Simon got his nose into that other case, and now he’s got his nose into this one. How do I know he’s any good for you?”
“The last time I checked,” she said, “I was an adult, and eighteen was a hell of a long time ago.”
“Nope, nope, nope,” he said, with a big grin. “You don’t get out of it that easy.”
She sighed. “It would really be good if you’d let it be.”
“Not happening,” he said, “and you should probably stay out of this case yourself, now that you’re involved to this level.”
“Stay out of the case, my ass,” she snapped. “I can’t do that, and I’m not. This is too important.” At that, everybody turned to look at Colby.
He narrowed his gaze and said, “No point in taking her out because, if we did, this guy is likely to just keep killing if she doesn’t interact with him. I mean, in theory he’ll stop, but all he’ll stop is interacting with her. He might start with somebody else, and he might say, ‘Screw it, I’ll just keep killing because nobody can stop me.’”
“And maybe it’s a plea for help,” Kate said, stopping and turning to look at her sergeant. “It wouldn’t be the first time somebody said, ‘Somebody stop me. I can’t stop myself,’ would it?”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Colby said, with a heavy nod. “Good, it’s settled then. And you should go talk to our new shrink.”
She winced at that. She remembered the last one. The sister of two pedophiles. Not someone she wanted to talk to.
He said, “The new shrink, remember? The other one is busy dealing with her own legal issues.”
She snorted. “That woman is a psychopath.”
“Well, she was certainly the twin of a pedophile psychopath,” he nodded. “And definitely aware of his crimes and their brother’s too. Now you need to go talk to Dr. Abrams.”
“Will he give us a profile?”
“Don’t know if it’s a profile we want at this point in time. He’ll probably say we don’t have enough data but try. Get your head wrapped around the psychology behind somebody like this.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “Really not what I want to do though.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe you can tell your woes to the shrink while you’re there. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
/> She sighed. “I’m not sure that cookies are a really good topic right now.”
As her stomach grumbled, he laughed. “Didn’t you get down to the bakery?”
“Not yet,” she said, “we didn’t pick up anything while we were out, and, yeah, I’m hungry.”
He nodded. “Well, Forensics first,” he said, “and you can look after your stomach afterward.”
She didn’t have much to say to that. She just nodded and took off walking. As soon as she got to the Computer Forensic Division, she explained to Stoop what was going on, forwarded everything from her cell as she spoke. There were a couple questions back and forth as Stoop looked at her and said, “Seriously? You think somebody is trying to get others to commit suicide, based on threats against their family?”
She nodded and said, “Yes, we do.”
“What’s the motivation driving the nutjob behind that?” he exclaimed.
She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m supposed to go talk to the new shrink about it.”
He laughed at that. “Wasn’t it you who got the last one canned? That should be a great meeting.”
She winced. “Do you think he knows that?”
“Oh, you can bet on that,” he said.
She looked over at him. Stoop was a teenage girl’s wet dream. He looked like a movie star from the ’60s, with the lock of hair falling on his forehead and a smile that could melt hearts. But behind all that was the clear-cut, claw-like gaze that looked at everything analytically, rarely seeing flesh and blood.
“Well,” she muttered, “that will set a nice tone for our first meeting.” She knew the sarcasm was wasted on him, but she turned and walked out without a word anyway.
*
Simon should have expected it, but somehow, he hadn’t really thought it through. He groaned as he headed out with the laptop and the black book. He gave Louisa a gentle kiss on the cheek. “I need to take this down to the police.”
She nodded slowly. “You haven’t explained everything.”
