“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I was just leaving.”
She took a long slow deep breath. “The case with the suicides,” she said, “we just managed to speak with the woman who has been tormenting Simon.”
His eyebrows shot up. “She didn’t jump?”
She shook her head. “No, but now I have her laptop. She’s being pressured to jump, blackmailed in a way. He’s threatening to unleash a false rumor that she murdered her younger sister, who choked to death, according to the autopsy report. But the idea that such a terrible lie would be made known, exposing her as a murderer,” she said, “was too much. She worries it would kill her parents, who are already struggling so hard over the loss of her sister. She’s already weak and vulnerable and was easily victimized.”
Rodney said, “Wow, that’s a terrible move.”
“This may match with the last picture the instigator sent me, with the unisex tennis shoes,” she said. “Better than that, she said that every time she’s been on the bridge, it’s like this guy was watching her.”
“Do you believe it?” Rodney asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I want to see if I can verify anything. I do have a record of when she was on the bridge.”
“Ah,” he said, “I can run through the video cameras to confirm that and see if we can pick out this guy.”
“Perfect,” she said, “because, if we can get this guy tonight, maybe we can stop another person from dying.”
“That’s huge that you managed to find and to talk to her,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It was driving Simon absolutely batty.”
“Well, then that’s another victim who might be saved through all this psychic stuff.”
She shot Rodney a sharp look, but he was already headed to the computers and turning on all the monitors.
As Colby walked in, he asked, “I was just about to leave. What’s going on? You guys look like something’s breaking.”
She quickly explained, and he stared at her. “You know that this guy could be watching her from a long way off.”
“That’s possible,” she said, then hesitated. “But how would that be? How would he know what she’s doing?”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” he said. “What if he’s tracking her somehow? What if he’s tracking her phone or—” He stopped, frowned, and said, “What if he’s just doing simple surveillance outside her house. Maybe he sends a message and pushes her, then manages to be outside her place and watches. Maybe that’s part of the thrill for him. If he can’t actually kill somebody, he can do it by remote control.”
She winced at that phrase because that was a horrible thought. Of course that’s what he had been doing. He’d been pushing other people to kill themselves, which gave him satisfaction somehow. “I don’t know,” she said, “but we’ll need to see what we’ve got for cameras around her place.” She quickly punched in the address she’d just come from and said, “We’ve got several video cameras in the area. Both street cameras and the parking lot.”
“Start with the parking lot,” Colby said. “It’ll be the same vehicle every time.”
“Yeah, but they’ll all be the same vehicle,” she muttered. “They’ll live there.”
“Then run them and eliminate all the license plates registered to that address. Hang on,” he said. “I’ll bring over one of the computer forensic techs to help you.” With that, he disappeared.
When Kate turned around ten minutes later, Bronwyn was walking in. “Wow,” Kate said. “When you get pulled, you get pulled. I’m so glad you’re here. We just had a break on the jumpers, and I need help on the street cams. We’re trying to see if the same vehicle was there on the nights that Mali went to the bridge. He knows somehow that she’s there, and he’s got to be following her, is there waiting for her, or he has some other way to track her.”
“Meaning, she thinks she’s being followed.”
“Not exactly. It’s not that she thinks she’s being followed per se, but she feels like she’s being watched.”
“Interesting,” Bronwyn muttered. “Let me take a look.”
It was a systematically slow and laborious process as they went through the dates and times in question. Not until the fourth visit at the bridge by Mali did Kate find something. “I’ve got this little red truck that comes and goes,” she said, tapping the screen. “I swear I’ve seen it time and time again. Can you get me the address on that license plate?” she asked the analyst.
When Kate reeled it off, Bronwyn ran it through and brought it up on the screen. “It’s not registered at the apartment, and here’s the driver’s license on that person.”
There, on the screen, was the driver’s license of the person in the red truck.
“Look at that. We’ve got a Kenneth Walker.” Kate punched in his address and said, “He has an address near the university.”