“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 force, 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.”