“Of course not,” he said. “Since when have you become some psychic specialist?”
She snorted at that. “I don’t know if you know this,” she said, “but I had fairly strong feelings about psychics to begin with, and they weren’t pleasant.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “My mother married a charlatan, supposedly a psychic. She ended up giving him basically everything she could possibly give him, and he took it and ran.”
“I can only imagine the bedtime stories you and Simon have together.”
She shot him a fulminating look. “Not happening.”
“The bedtime stories or the one about charlatans?”
“Either,” she snapped. She got up and said, “How can we get more information on these cases?”
“The suicides?”
“Unless”—she frowned—“he also said something about a feeling of being watched.”
“Who said what?”
She shook her head. “Simon. He said something about a sensation of being watched while on the bridge.”
“Did he now?”
“I wonder if, like our drive-by shooter, who’s hanging around to see the aftermath of his destruction, if our jumper guy is sticking around to see if his actions bear fruit?”
“Please don’t tell me that you’re talking about him physically pushing these people over.”
“No, no, no,” she said, but she sat back and looked at him. “But how would he know if it worked? I mean, he sent that email to David. How would he know if David committed suicide?”
“The news, the obituaries?”
“I don’t know that Louisa’s put in an obit yet, and would the news have identified this jumper?”
“Maybe a random phone call to the wife?”
“Meaning that our inciter must have tracked down who David even was and where he was in order to do something like that.”
“But we already knew that he did, otherwise how did he get a picture of David’s wife? We can’t hack the emails of every other person in the chat, so how could we possibly know if somebody is threatening them?”
“My only thought is if he’swatching,” she said, with a frown. “And that would mean retrieving all the videos of whatever bridge cameras we have available, before and after any jumper. And not only that, this instigator could be a long way away from the bridge. I mean, just think about it. He could be on land, miles away, depending on how good his set of binoculars are.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Don’t you think he’d want to be a little more up-front and personal with that?”
“Maybe,” she said, “I honestly don’t know. This is a very remote way to commit murder.”
“Well, we can give it a try,” he said. And, with that, they split up the three recent suicides they’d identified. She didn’t even want to think about the other jumpers this year or the thought of them being manipulated into this.
“And what about your thought on it being two people?” he asked.
“It could be a pair of them,” she said, nodding slowly. “Or at least in the encouraging stage. After that, I don’t know. Or it could be just the one, using both the taunting emails and the threatening pictures.”
“And it’s not a psychic thing you’re worried about, right? At least not on the part of the perpetrator,” he said, tossing her a sideways glance.
“No,” she said, looking at him in surprise, “at least, I don’t think so.”
He nodded. “As long as that’s the way we’re going. The last thing I want to think about is that you’re taking that a step too far and considering that maybe this is somebody psychically causing trouble.”