Simon Says... Jump Page 2

  As she walked into the station and headed to her desk, Andy was already there, and he looked up in surprise.

  “Wow, you’re early.”

  “So are you,” she said, noting his usual overly coiffed hair and well-dressed self did not seem so pristine today. Was that mustard—or egg—on his tie? “Shouldn’t you be dragging your ass in here late, after a wild date?” As far as she knew, he hadn’t changed his ways, still in the hump-and-dump stage of adjusting to divorce—where his wife chose his best friend instead.

  He shrugged. “Bad night.”

  “Ditto,” she said.

  He looked over at her. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. It’s just finishing up all that paperwork on the pedophiles, and … you know.” She shrugged.

  “I’m sorry that you never found your missing kid brother in all of this.”

  “Me too,” she said. “One day.”

  “That’s got to be tough. All you can do is keep looking.”

  “Of course,” she said, “but it does give me a certain empathy for the families in similar cases. I know what it’s like to not have answers. I know what it’s like to be looking for that closure that never comes.”

  “Still not a healthy way to go through life, always looking for a ghost.”

  Well, that was a conversation stopper if there ever was one. He turned back to his work; she got up, grabbed a coffee cup, surprised to see a mostly full pot sitting there, just waiting to be consumed. Deciding that maybe she should be nice, she grabbed another cup and brought Andy one at the same time.

  He looked at her, surprised, a smile breaking across his face. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” she said. She sat down at her desk. “How many open cases do we even have right now?”

  “Six, I think,” he said.

  She nodded. “Hopefully most of those will go by the wayside pretty quickly.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he said.

  She looked over at him, seeing the fatigue ravaging his face. “How are you doing?”

  He looked up, saw that she meant it, then shrugged and said, “Well, I’m working on getting time with my kids now,” he said. “I’m starting to find a pathway forward. It’s tough though.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “Yeah, I had no idea, but suddenly it becomes your reality, and it doesn’t matter if you’re prepared or not because it’s up to you to start dealing with it. And I am the parent supposedly.”

  She nodded slowly and said, “As long as you are dealing with it, you’re moving forward—toward something better.”

  He nodded with a smile. “The kids miss me,” he said, “and I miss them, so it was really nice to see them this last weekend.”

  “Did you have them for the whole weekend?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, we spent a lot of time at Stanley Park area. Second Beach has always been one of their favorite places to go.”

  “Good,” she said in delight. “That’s a great place for kids.”

  He nodded. “It was nice. Like I said, it’s progress.”

  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 me now, 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 reason not to 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.

  “What email address did it come from?”

  “Jumpers.com,” she snapped. “Info@jumpers.com.”

  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.”

  “I know. Presumably there’s a meaning behind it,” she said. “But honestly I don’t know what that could be. Am I supposed to think that this suicide was a crime? Is this a family member, saying, ‘Hey, she didn’t commit suicide.’ Or is this an observer, just saying, ‘Hey, you got nothing else to do with your time, maybe you should check this out.’ Or … who the hell knows.” She raised both hands in frustration. “Like we have time for anything extra.”

  “Right,” Andy said behind her. “So bizarre.”

  “But then people are bizarre,” she said.

  Colby frowned at her. “Keep us informed, if you hear anything else, and watch your back.”

  “I always watch my back,” she said calmly. “I don’t think I’m being targeted.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what else you would call it,” Rodney said pointedly. “When somebody sends you a picture like that, it means that they’ve gone to the time and the energy to take your photo and then to let you know that they saw you.”

  She stared at him. “It sounds a little creepier when you put it that way.”

  “It is creepy,” Rodney said. “What was this guy doing out there at that hour anyway? I’m just saying, let’s be smart about it, okay?”

  She didn’t have any argument with being smart about it, but it just seemed like everybody was making a bit bigger deal out of it than there was reason to support.

  Colby said, “Log in the email and open a file, just in case.”

  She groaned and said, “That’s just extra paperwork.”

  “Do it,” he said. “No arguments.”

  She flipped her hands, palms up. “Fine.” And rose, headed back to her desk, got down to work. After making sure her requested file was complete, she carried on with her day. “Where are the witness statements, from that drive-by shooting down on Hastings Street?”

  “They were supposed to come in last night,” Lilliana said. “Did they not?”

  Kate shook her head. “I wasn’t tagged on them, and they haven’t been dropped into the file. Let me check,” she said. It took a few minutes for her to shake down the officer out canvassing the neighborhood. “He apologized, said that they’d been out all night with a different case, and hadn’t had a chance to send them to us.”

  “So, is he sending them now?”

  Kate nodded. “Apparently. They should be in the file within a few minutes.”

  “Good enough,” Lilliana said.

  “I wonder what other case they had?” Kate asked. “I didn’t get tagged. Did anybody else?”

  Everyone shook their heads. Lilliana said, “Maybe check the computer.”

  “Well, they get called out on plenty that has nothing to do with us, don’t forget.”

  It took about twenty more minutes before they had all the statements that had been collected on the recent drive-by shooting.

  “What’s the point of a drive-by anyway?” Kate mused out loud.

  “To murder and to get away with it,” Rodney said, glancing over at her. “Hands off, easy escape.”

  “I get that, I do, but it’s not very personal. You do get a split-second chance to see who it is you’re shooting down, but there can’t be much job satisfaction in that.”

  “You mean, it’s not up-front and personal? Yet it is in a way,” Rodney said. “When you think about it, you get to pick the victim. You get to see the shots fired. There is that sense of power, the sense of control, but, at the same time, you have speed on your side, so you get the hell away safely. And, as you can tell with this one, we haven’t got very much to go on.”

  “That’s the other thing I don’t understand. I mean, normally we have cameras everywhere, and, while we’re still lobbying for more cameras for this area, it’s one of the heavier populated downtown streets. So we know for a fact that witnesses are around somewhere. Witnesses with cell phones. What are the chances of the shooter getting away with this?”

  “Good enough to take the risk apparently,” Rodney said. “If you think about it, their getaway vehicle would be ditched in no time, and they would change to something else. So we’ll have a pretty rough time proving that they were the ones involved.”

  She frowned at that. “Not if we can pinpoint who was driving on one of the city cameras, particularly in that area. Then, if we can put that vehicle at the scene of the crime, even better.”

  He nodded. “And I get that,” he said, “but things never seem to line up quite so nicely. Remember that.”

  She winced. “I know. I know,” she said. “We’ve still got one drive-by from a few years ago that we never closed, don’t we?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You never know. This could be the same players though.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why is that?”

  “Both … involved old Chevy trucks,” he said.

  She stared at him. “Well, in that case, they could easily be connected.”

  “Not necessarily,” Rodney said. “I’m mean, sure it’s a similarity, but it’s not enough. The trucks were different colors. I don’t have any confirmation of what years they were, and we don’t have any ID on the driver from the first one—or for this one, for that matter. If I understand it right, the victim was standing outside, smoking a cigarette.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He was on the same block as a popular nightclub. So it could have been random, I suppose.”

  “Or it could have be
en targeted.”

  “Both possibilities are still on the table right now.”

  “But the shots were also well-placed, correct?”

  He nodded. “Yes, the victim died at the scene.”

  She nodded. “And what about the one before, … the older open case?”

  “Same thing,” he said, looking at her in surprise.

  She shrugged. “It’s just one more consistency between the two cases, that’s all.”

  He frowned. “That’s pretty thin as far as consistency goes, even more than the Chevy.”

  “Hey, thin is my middle name,” she said, with a laugh. “Let me go through these statements. I’ll see if anything’s there.”

  “Yeah, thin ice maybe. Good luck with that. Most of the statements came from the partiers who were going in or out of the nightclub.”

  She nodded. “The thing is, somebody saw something. It’s just a matter of finding out who saw what, and, if they saw what they said they saw.” He blinked at her several times, frowning, but she just waved a hand. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, with a chuckle. “You carry on, and so will I.”

  *

  After the early morning start, Simon carried on through the downtown area. He had several addresses he needed to look at, to consider for purchase. One was for rehabbing; another was a potential rehab or drop. He wasn’t sure which it would be. The Realtor had tried to tell him that she already had offers coming in, and, if he was interested, he needed to make an offer soon. If that were the case, she shouldn’t have called then because he didn’t do anything under pressure and never just because somebody else told him to.

  Breathing deeply of the fresh morning air, he stopped at the first place on Hastings and looked at the surroundings. This area was really up for a lot of renewal, and it was happening, just very slowly. A lot of these buildings needed complete remodels or rebuilds, but the businesses were either older, gone, or at the lower end of what he wanted to be associated with. A sex shop was in the middle of the block and what looked like a pawn shop right beside it, with multiple For Lease signs on other windows.

  He frowned at that and studied the huge building that reminded him of the brownstones in England, where they were pinched between two other stone buildings. This one looked to have been built around 1960, and he checked his paperwork to see it was 1965. He nodded to himself. “Everything will have to be redone, from plumbing to electrical and probably even structural.”