She nodded slowly and returned to her files. Her email was overflowing as usual, but she dove in and soon got through it. Toward the bottom was one with a picture. She opened it up and froze. It was a picture of her standing at the bridge before dawn today, just staring at the shoes. Under her breath, she whispered, “What the hell?”
“What have you got?” Andy asked from behind her.
She twisted her monitor slightly and said, “An email with a creepy picture.”
He got up, walked over, and said, “What the hell is that?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t sleep this morning. I heard on the scanner about a jumper on Lions Gate Bridge, so I headed down to the spot.”
He looked at her in surprise, but she shrugged and said, “I’ve spent more than a few days sitting there myself.”
“Ouch,” he said. “We need to talk.”
She laughed. “Really?” she said. “Are you really saying that to menow,with you dealing with your divorce by hooking up with nameless women nightly?”
He winced at that. “Okay, so I’ve been a mess lately. I get it, but I haven’t been suicidal.”
“There are a lot of ways of killing yourself,” she said, with an arched eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he said, “okay, but back to you. So you went down there and then what?”
“I talked to the cops. While I was there, the divers were bringing up the body.”
“And she left her shoes there?” He tapped the picture on his monitor. “I’ve always wondered about that. Why do they leave their shoes? I mean, if she’s got on a good pair of shoes, doesn’t she have on a beautiful dress to match? Why don’t they take that off? Do they take off their jewelry? No,” he said. “It’s like the shoes have some weird significance.”
“I know. But speaking of weird significance,” she said, pointing at the picture, “why is somebody taking a picture of me standing there? And then sending it to me?”
He sat back, studied it, then her. “Just because I gotta ask, were you doing anything wrong being there?”
She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t so much curious as solemn and maybe more than a little disturbed by the harsh increase we’ve had in suicides this last year.”
“Right, I noticed the numbers have gone up.” He shook his head at that. “I mean, it is a little macabre that you go down to the spot, but it is what we do.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And, at the same time, it was like a visit to a place that I had been to before but will never go back to again. At least I hope not.”
“But you never tried to jump, right?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I never did. I wasn’t really suicidal but knew several who had jumped.”
“So why do you think this guy took a picture of you?”
“Not only did he take a picture of me,” she said, “but he then emailed it to me. And it’s my work email.”
“The address isn’t all that hard to figure out,” Andy pointed out. “If a person had any dealings with the department before, all the email addresses are in a pretty standard format.”
She nodded. “And I get that, but why? Why does anybody care enough to send it to me and to let me know that I was seen?”
“That’s why I was asking if you had any reasonnotto be there.”
She shrugged. “Not that I know off. Did I break some rule? Is a homicide detective not allowed to go to another scene like that?”
“No, no rules like that,” he said, “not that anybody would care if there were.”
“Well, that’s what I thought. But obviously somebody seems to think differently.”
“No message?”
She shook her head.