by Dale Mayer
And, with that, he turned and walked out, ignoring her. When he got to the car, he stopped, took a look up at the house on a sigh. “Do you hear the sound of the breaking of a very old friendship?”
“Well, if something is wrong, she’ll forgive you. And, if not, I’m sorry. It obviously wasn’t meant to be.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Is it that easy for you?”
“Well, part of the issue is, who was your friendship with?” she asked quietly. “Was it with him or with her?”
“With him of course.”
“And he’s gone,” she said. “So outside of being there for moral support, I don’t know if that relationship is something you could have continued anyway. You said you didn’t have very much to do with her in the last few years.”
“I didn’t have much to do with them,” he corrected thoughtfully. “And you’re right. I didn’t, and I certainly hadn’t thought about what I would do and not do, should David die,” he said. “It’s all just happened. There hasn’t been any adjustment period.”
She nodded. “I get that,” she said. “I really do, and I’m sorry if this line of questioning has hurt your relationship with Louisa. Generally that’s not what happens, from my experience.”
“Then again, what you’re saying is, if this breaks up the friendship, then it was time to break it up anyway?”
“Look. I’m not a shrink or anything,” she said. “All I can say is that I’m sorry if this in any way contributes to the loss of a friend.”
Muttering an expletive under his breath, he got into the vehicle and said, “Hop in. I’ll drive you home.”
She didn’t argue and got in. When they got closer to the area of her apartment, she said, “Drop me anywhere. I’m heading back to the office.” He looked at her in surprise. She shrugged. “Just because that job is done doesn’t mean anything else is,” she said. “I still have a ton of work pending, and I don’t have time to let it all slide.”
“Slide?”
“All I can tell you is that she’s not the only widow right now, or widower, for that matter,” she said. “And I really would like to make sure we don’t have any more.”
*
Pissed, Simon watched as Kate walked up the sidewalk toward the station, hating to see her walk out in the dark alone. He shook his head at his own foolishness, since her martial art skills were probably better than his. But he got out and waited until she was safely inside. Then he stepped back into his vehicle and headed to his place. As he walked into his penthouse apartment, his phone rang. Not thinking, he answered it.
“Hey,” Caitlin said.
“Oh,” he said, his voice dropping in disgust. “What do you want?”
Her voice sad, she said, “I know you don’t have any reason to be nice to me, but I wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you did.”
“That’s nice,” he said, tired and fed up. “You also put me through hell before that.”
“And I guess that’s why I’m apologizing,” she said quietly. “I know it’s stupid, and I shouldn’t have done it, but I was pissed off and upset that you broke up with me.”
“Maybe, but you sure as hell shouldn’t have played all those games with my life.”
“Right,” she said, “big bad you and all that.”
“Don’t even go there.” She was so damn irritating. But then he seemed to have a problem with irritating women because he was certainly fascinated with the very prickly Detective Kate Morgan. “Whatever,” he said. “It’s water under the bridge, as long as you don’t continue your shenanigans.”
“No,” she said, “I won’t.” She hesitated and then said, “Are you seeing someone else?”
He stared down at the phone. “We’re well past the point of that being any of your business to even ask that question,” he said coolly.
“Oh,” she said, “I guess I was just wondering if maybe you wanted to go for a coffee or something sometime.”
“No,” he said, “I do not. I went down that pathway and didn’t like the place I ended up.”
“No,” Caitlin said, “I understand that. I really do. I wasn’t a great person. I understand why you broke up with me.”
“Yeah, the problem is what you wanted and what I wanted were very different things, and I wasn’t about to be controlled,” he said quietly.
“But seeing Leonard go missing like that and realizing that it was through my own actions and inability to respect the needs of a seven-year-old, then coming so damn close to not talking to him or not getting him back,” she said, “honestly I’ve changed.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” And he was sincere in that. If she did change, it would be a good thing because, wow, it was needed. The fact that she was even now apologizing was amazing. “I’m glad you’ve had a change of heart.”
“I was really a bitch before, wasn’t I?” she said sadly. “I do want you to know that I’ve changed and for the better, and I have you to thank for that. I won’t bother you again.”
And, with that, she hung up on him.
Chapter 8
Kate Working Late
Kate buried herself in work and tried to forget the look on Simon’s face—and on Louisa’s—when they heard Kate’s questions. But they were necessary. Something really strange was going on, and, at the very worst of all this, somebody was quite likely causing people to commit suicide. Kate wasn’t even sure what charges the prosecutor would put against this bad actor, and she didn’t give a damn as long as she got them to stop. So she was primed to pull an all-nighter.
When Rodney came in the bullpen, she lifted her head. “You staying late too?”
“You busy?” he asked.
“Always,” she said. “I talked to the wife of the one male jumper.”
“And?”
“The one who had the laptop,” she said.
His eyes lit up, understanding. “How did that go?”
“Not very well,” she said. “She didn’t like the line of questioning at all.”
“When do they ever?” he said, with a shrug. “Seems like we’re always half-praised and half-hated.”
“Feels like a lot more of the hate these days,” she said, with a grim smile. And she knew it. She’d seen it when she was out patrolling the streets every day. But, when she got into the homicide unit, it was like everybody wanted answers now, and, when they didn’t have them, the detectives got a ton of abuse sometimes.
“Do you think she had anything to do with it?” Rodney asked Kate, sitting at his desk, prepared to stay a while, it seemed.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I think she was clearly traumatized over the loss of her husband, and finding something in his laptop seems to have freaked her out even more. She did say something along the lines that he had been despondent and upset at times. But the reason she had given the laptop to Simon was that she was afraid he was having an affair or something similar.”
“Right, like what? His affair broke up, and he was so despondent that he only had his wife left, so he dove off the bridge?” he said, with a quirk of his lips. Rodney was recently divorced, so any comments he made on the status of relationships had to be taken with a grain of salt.
“I’m not exactly sure, but maybe the coroner’s office can help,” she said. “I need to talk to Dr. Smidge about that. It’s quite possible that maybe David had some underlying health condition too.”
At that, Rodney nodded. “Good point.”
Kate picked up the phone and contacted the coroner. When she couldn’t get him, she left a message, saying that she had a question about the suicide and that she needed an in-depth look, if possible. And potentially on all three jumpers that had come in this week. She hung up and carried on with her work.
When the phone rang, she answered, not surprised to hear the coroner on the other end. “So we’re both tied to our desks. And they were definite suicides,” he said, puzzled. “They jumped off the bridge, hit the water at a horrific for
ce, and drowned.”
“Did they drown or did they die from the impact?”
“One of them, the male, broke his neck, but he drowned. Drowning was the cause of death in all three cases, but the injuries were significantly different, depending on where and how they landed. Why do you think there’s a suggestion of murder in this? Are you saying somebody picked them up and threw them off the bridge?”
“No,” she said, then explained the little bit that she knew. “It’s definitely something we’re looking into.”
“Jesus,” he said, “as if the world isn’t screwed up enough. Now we have others trying to force people to commit suicide.”
“I know. I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I know you don’t need more work.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’ll take another look. We didn’t do any autopsies since the cause of death was pretty simple. When the bodies are found like that, jumpers rarely get autopsied.”
“Right,” she said, “and, in this case, the wife had no idea why he had done what he’d done. But we do have an email proving that somebody was pressuring him to jump or his wife would end up with a bullet in her forehead.”
With him muttering still, he rang off, and she sat down to work on her notes. The notes were important, and her file was getting thick and ugly. She grabbed a whiteboard, parked it in front of her, and started putting up everything that she had on the jumpers’ cases. The trouble was, she had enough cases to get a second whiteboard.
As she walked past Lilliana, the woman snorted. “And here I thought you had gone home already. You do like to collect cases that run on.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’m worried about this one.”
“Why is that?” Lilliana asked, coming to stand behind her. “I mean, besides the fact that it’s got such a creep factor to it.”
“How long has he been doing this?” Kate asked, looking at her teammate. “How long has this asshole been pushing others to commit suicide and for what reason?”
“Often it’s just for kicks,” Lilliana said. “There was a case of one young woman, down in, uh, … I can’t remember what state, but she ordered her boyfriend to get back into the truck to kill himself. He was parked in the garage or something, with the motor running.”
“And he was already out and free and clear?”
Lilliana nodded. “He was. But they had text messages of the girlfriend ordering him to get back in the vehicle and complete the job. As if it’s what he really wanted.”
“Jesus Christ, please tell me that he was at least eighty years old.”
Lilliana shook her head. “Nope, I think he was like twenty-one, twenty-two, if that.”
The horror of somebody who would actively push somebody to do that instead of stopping him and calling for help just made her heart cry. “People suck,” she muttered, and she turned and headed to sit down again at her deck. She studied the boards and then started pulling up reports.
“Now what are you doing?” Lilliana asked, as she parked her hip on the side of Kate’s desk.
“Pulling up all the suicides this year for Vancouver and all neighboring cities.”
“Oh, Jesus, that should be an interesting number.” And that total number, when it came, was sixty-seven. Lilliana winced at that. Then filtered by drowning, and it dropped to twenty-five. “Good God, that’s even worse than I expected.”
“I know,” Kate said. “Now what we need to do is cross-reference these names to the chat sites.”
“And you don’t think that Forensics is already doing that?” Lilliana asked.
“I just wanted to nudge them a little,” Kate said. “The problem is, we need these names, and they won’t match up to the emails.”
“They never do,” Lilliana said. “Notice how everybody uses a strange email address when they’re doing something they shouldn’t.”
“Yep, but still, this list needs to go to Forensics and to Reese.” Kate quickly attached it and sent it off, with a note saying, this Please compare this list of all the suicides this year and see if any of these people showed up in the laptop or on the chat sites. She had barely sent that off, when she got another phone call from the coroner.
“Outside of a test that I’m sending off to be run, David’s healthy, fit, and doesn’t appear to be suffering from anything. I checked his medical records, nothing recent at all.”
“Good enough,” she said. “Sadly I believe you.” With that, she hung up, only to have her phone ring again.
“At least you are working late, like we are. And are you kidding, sixty-seven, really?”
“Yeah, sixty-seven,” she said, “and that’s just this year alone. Twenty-five were by jumping off a bridge.”
“Surely you’re not expecting anybody to have committed—er, you know—had a hand in this many deaths.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said, “but, even if it’s one other than David’s, it’s too many.”
“All right, I got you,” he said. “I can run the names, but you know what emails are like.”
“I do,” she said. “Do the best you can.” And, with that, she hung up, turned to take another look at her boards. Then she printed off the list of names of suicide jumpers this year and added the list to the newest board.
“And that’s just this year so far,” she said, mostly to herself.
“You may want to take a look back a few years,” Lilliana muttered.
“And then I have to take a look at other bridges in the province,” she said.
Lilliana looked at her in surprise. “Why hold it to the province? What about other provinces? What about nations? What about globally? Everything on the internet now is global, right?”
She gasped at that. “Oh my God,” Kate said. “I wasn’t even thinking about that. I was just thinking of our own little city here. And yet this guy, this is what he’s doing. He could have coerced or threatened anybody all around the world to do this.”
“Particularly in any English-speaking country,” Lilliana murmured.
“Crap.” Kate sat down and sent off an addendum to the email on the Forensics request, saying that any areas or countries they could locate where this guy may have been active would also be very helpful.
Her contact sent her back an email. Uh, yeah, okay, we’ll get right on that.
Sarcasm in print didn’t come off quite the same, but Kate got the message anyway. The chances of him finding much weren’t great, but he could certainly look at other countries and see if this would go anywhere. He’d start with what they had.
Reese walked in, holding out the records for the last five years. Kate cringed when she quickly reviewed the data, as she found over one hundred suicides. Not all were jumpers. That number was in the sixties.
“But that’s sixty jumpers over five years, and you’ve already got twenty-five jumpers so far this year alone.” Lilliana frowned.
“So, something is increasing,” Reese said, with a nod, “this year being the worst.”
“Well, it’s been a hell of a year and a half. Doesn’t that count as a major factor?” Rodney asked, as he walked in with a fresh cup of coffee.
She lifted her nose, smelled the air, grabbed her oversize mug, and headed to the coffeemaker. It would be a long night. For her team too. At least she’d eaten something and had fueled up enough that she could be here for a while. The trouble was, only so much she could do, even with help. Online chat stuff was full-on BS because they had a department that could run some of it but couldn’t access some of these places. She had a log-in. If she found a way to join some of these groups, she could go in with suicide potential herself.
Kate frowned at that, as she turned to Lilliana. “How stupid would this idea be?” And she ran it past her.
“I was wondering about it myself,” Lilliana said. “We need somebody inside these chats.”
“I’ll do it,” Reese said. “Is it okay if I use this spare computer, Kate?”
“Sure, h
ave at it.”
“I can take a look at some of the sites too,” Andy said.
Kate asked, “Why you?” He grinned and said, “I’m often on these chats anyway.” She gasped. He shook his head. “Not suicide chats, beautiful.”
“Gross, what then? Hump-and-dump chats?” she teased.
He flushed slightly and said, “Hey, you know that it was good for a while.”
“Oh, does that mean you remember the girl you slept with last night?”
“Yeah, she’s the same one for the last couple weeks,” he said, with a big fat smile.
Kate chuckled. “Good for you. I’m glad you got through that nasty stage.”
“It did its job,” he said.
She watched him as he logged on to his computer. “Should you be doing that from the work computer?”
“Not only am I doing it from the work computer,” he said, “but I’ll also track it.”
She looked at him with added respect. “Didn’t know you had the skills. I’m working on it myself,” she said, “but it’s one thing to get into the dark web, yet it’s another thing entirely to hide your tracks on something like this.”
“Yeah, but, in this case, not only do we have to hide the tracks,” Reese piped up from the side, “but we have to keep track of our tracks as well.”
Kate shook her head at that. “It’s a spiderweb out there.”
“It is. But look here,” Reese pointed out. “I’ve got twelve different chats.”
“Twelve?” Kate said, leaning forward, and, sure enough, Reese had found twelve different suicide support groups. “Good God,” Kate said. “Wait. I have the names that match a couple of the addresses.” She walked over to her board, pulled off the copy and the little black book that she had and brought both back to Reese.
The analyst looked at it and said, “Three of those are here. Let me go in and take a look.”
