“What email address did it come from?”
“Jumpers.com,” she snapped. “[email protected]”
He looked at her and said, “Please tell me that’s not a real group.”
She said, “I just checked, and it’s not. It comes up as a blank website, but, hey, it’s full of ads for building a website, if I want.”
“Well, thank God for that,” he said. “So, a joke maybe? I don’t know.”
“Maybe somebody related to another case?” she suggested. “Maybe one of the pedophiles?” she added. “Like somebody who is absolutely certain we must have fixed the case and their poor little Johnny is being framed?”
“You know what people are like,” he said, shaking his head. “There will always be family members who can’t believe that somebody in their family did something wrong.”
“I know,” she said heavily. She frowned. “Well, I’ll just park it off to the side and see if anything else happens.”
“You need to tell Colby and the others.”
She looked at Andy in surprise. She hadn’t considered the need to tell her sergeant, but maybe keeping Colby in the loop could be helpful. But more likely not. “Why?”
“Just in case,” he said. “That’s just smart.”
She shrugged and agreed; then she never thought anymore about it, until after the team meeting. While Kate still wrote down notes of everything they had to work on today, Andy spoke up. “Everyone, Kate has something to say.”
She looked at Andy in surprise. “I do?”
He nodded and said, “That email.”
“What email?” Colby asked Andy, then turned to Kate.
She wrinkled up her face and said, “Oh.”
“You would like to ignore it,” Andy said, with emphasis, as he rolled his eyes, “but I don’t think it’s something we ought to forget.”
Colby turned toward her. “Kate, what’s up?”
“I got an email this morning,” she said, “with a picture of me that goes back to about an hour and a half before that email.”
Everybody immediately stood around her, and she brought up the email on her phone.
They said, “What the hell is that? You were standing at the bridge?”
She nodded. “I had a really shitty night’s sleep. I woke up early and was sick of tossing and turning. Then I heard on the scanner that a jumper went off the bridge, so, for whatever reason, I went down there to take a look.”
At that, she felt several of them stiffening around her.
“So, as a matter of full disclosure, way back when at one point in my life, I spent a lot of time myself on that bridge. No, I never jumped, and, no, I don’t think I ever seriously considered jumping, but I knew several who had jumped. I never saw anybody commit suicide there, but, because I’d spent quite a bit of time there myself, the whole scene drew me.
“As I walked over, I noticed a beautiful pair of white shiny women’s pumps sitting there, carefully placed off to the side. Already several cruisers were there. I talked to an officer briefly for a few minutes and was told the body had already been found, and they were bringing her up. At that point, I headed back to my car and drove down to False Creek and had a coffee, watching the city wake up.”
There were a couple not-so-hidden smirks at that.
She ignored them. “From there I came into the office, chatted with Andy, checked my email, and this popped up.”
“So somebody saw you there and thought enough to take a picture of it and email it to you?” Colby asked.
“Yes,” she said. “What I don’t know is why they would think that I would care or what the message could possibly be behind it.”
Colby stepped forward, looked at it, and said, “That makes you wonder.”