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, thisPlease 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.”