“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.”