“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 lineDo 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.”