“No, not necessarily,” she said quietly. “It’s just he’s different. Comes with baggage.”
He looked over and said, “Can he read minds?” The question just seemed to burst out of him.
She stared at him in shock. “Jesus, I hope not,” she said, with a half laugh.
“Hey, it’s just a thought,” he said. “Can you imagine living with that?”
“No,” she said, “I can’t.” By the time she’d gone through her email, Kate reached for the phone and called Forensics. “Anything on the truck?”
“Lots of DNA, nothing in the database,” said Bronwyn on the other end. “We’re still working on it.”
“What about the suicide emails?”
“Yeah, now that’s an interesting one,” Bronwyn said. “We have a couple email addresses that we think we can work through the system.”
“Sounds good,” Kate said. “If you can run that down, it would be great. I really would like a chance to talk to somebody.”
“Ah, that’s still not a crime in Canada.”
“Suicide is not a crime, but aiding and abetting it is,” she said.
“You’re not thinking these are assisted suicides, are you?”
“No, not physically, but, if they’re being threatened, and it’s presented assuicide or else, that’s a problem.”
“Hmm,” Bronwyn murmured, “the prosecutors would have a heyday with that.”
“Absolutely, but I want to stop this guy. And, if we can find out how many chats he’s dealing with, it would help.”
“Well, we’ve locked it down to thirteen.”
“What does that mean though, thirteenwhat?”
“I’m saying, thirteen that he’s had success with.”
Kate froze and stared at the phone. “Success with what?”
“It looks like thirteen of the people he’s talked to have committed suicide.”
“Jesus,” Kate said, sitting back and looking over at the others in her team. Immediately aware that something was happening, the others turned toward her. “So you’re saying that this guy, through the chat, had communications with thirteen people who followed through and committed suicide.”
“He had communications with a lot more people than that,” Bronwyn said. “But thirteen of them committed suicide. And we don’t have a private personal email that we can check to see if they did something off chat. This is just what we found through the online chats,” she said. “I highly suspect that, if we could track down that private email address, we could get more information.”
“What about the emails you got from David’s laptop?”
“That’s the one we’re working on right now,” she said. “We’re close, really close.”
“So, we’re thinking that he may have thirteen victims?” Kate said.
“Depending on how you want to phrase it, yes,” Bronwyn said. “Based on the tone of the chats, I’d say he’s had a hand in at least thirteen.”
“And are they all local?”
“The thirteen are. As for everybody else, I have no idea. You’ll have to do some running around online and through other jurisdictions to answer that question.”
“So he could be doing this globally too.”
“These chats are local,” Bronwyn said, “specifically for the Vancouver Lower Mainland, although there are branches for Surrey, Burnaby, Langley, Chilliwack.” She paused. “We haven’t gone through all of those yet.”