The Mind Virus

Chapter 7 - Part 2

The police station was bustling with life, the murmur of all the officers reverberating off of the tile walls. The shifts were changing over, which was always a time of much activity, with outgoing officers streaming in from the streets and incoming officers getting ready for their duties. It was this latter group that Jim was after, so he found himself leaning against the wall outside one of the briefing rooms. The click of the door opening was followed by a group of cops walking out.

"Officer Spaulding?" Jim called out. He didn't know the man's face, but if the roster was correct, he would have been in this group. Sure enough, one of the officers – an imposing mountain of a man – turned around to look at him.

"Can I help you?"

"I hope so. I'm Jim." He held out a hand, praying it wasn't as clammy in reality as it felt to him.

"Cory." The officer took his hand. "What is it you need, son?"

"It's about that suicide from a few nights ago. The girl that jumped from the parking structure at the university."

"Grim stuff, that."

"No kidding. Word is it may not have been a suicide. Well, not a normal one, at least."

"Whose word is that?"

Jim hoped that was coyness rather than suspicion in his voice. "Come on, you know how this place works. Word would travel slower if it was a neighborhood association full of old hens."

Spaulding laughed. "If you've truly been keeping your ear to the ground, you'd know that there's a bit of a rift in opinion. It seems like half the police department think it's just a suicide while the other half think there's something more heinous going on."

"And which camp do you find yourself in?"

"Hey, are you with Internal Affairs or something?" Spaulding smirked. "You know no one likes the cops' cops."

"Nothing of the sort. Why would IA be interested in this?"

"Again, son, if you'd been keeping your ear to the ground, you'd know that a lot of the upper brass don't seem too keen on investigating these suicides beyond a cursory observation."

"Really? I heard that they had a detective assigned to a few of them." Jim didn't care to name-drop Miller. Thinking about that dullard didn't exactly delight him on the best of days, let alone when feeling however he was feeling this day.

"Yeah, and he closed them up real quick."

"You think he was covering something up?"

"Jesus, son, that's one hell of an accusation to throw around." Spaulding seemed amused. "What I was going for is that he may or may not have been pressured to cut his investigations short."

"I see. You still haven't told me which camp you fall into."

"And you still haven't told me who you're with. You ain't a detective, but I've seen you around with your fancy shirt and tie."

"I'm..." Jim wondered whether coming out with the truth in this moment would end the conversation prematurely.

"You're interning with the detectives, aren't you?"

Well, he's half right, Jim thought. Let's go with that. "Yeah, exactly."

"Are you glad to be taken off of coffee-making duty for once?"

The tired joke was bad enough, but more than that, it reminded him of when Emma had made the same joke, and thinking of her filled him with despair again. No, pull it together. "Yeah, just glad to be useful. So are you going to tell me what you think of the suicides, or should I tip IA off to – well, whatever it is you're spooked about?"

"Oh, please no." The tall officer feigned distress. "Anything but that."

Jim offered a polite laugh.

"I'm not spooked about anything. Well, maybe I am. I've sort of been doing the detectives' work for them since the suicide that I responded to happened."

"So you're definitely in the more-than-suicides camp."

"That's right. I haven't had the chance to speak to all the victims' families, but I spoke to the roommate of the last one and read up on the reports from some of the previous ones."

"Did you find anything?"

"Damn right I did. OK, so it's nothing damning, but it's certainly strange that all the suicides seemed to be preceded by a few weeks of vastly different moods, which were in turn preceded by normal happy lives. Not your typical profile. But I'm guessing you've already done your research."

"Indeed."

"Now I'll tell you something that you don't know. Apparently Carol, the last girl to take her life, knew Jane, the second-to-last girl to take her life. Now, again, I haven't had time to talk to everyone related to every suicide, but looking over the reports, there were quite a few overlaps between the three suicides that Detective Whats-His-Name investigated. They were all students at the same university."

"Interesting, but is it really conclusive?"

"...doing the same course and even taking some of the same classes at the same university."

"I see." Jim rubbed his chin. This was indeed new information. Looking back, he felt a bit ashamed that for all his hubris, he didn't even think to ask Carol's roommate whether there was any connection between the girl and the other suicides. "So what do you think it is? Someone killing them because of something that they know?"

"What, and staging the murders to look like suicides? I'm not ruling anything out, but I wasn't leaning that way, no. If they are murders, whoever's doing them is playing the long game. Like I said, every victim had shown a huge change in personality in the weeks leading up to their deaths. I don't know, maybe they were poisoned. But again, I'm not leaning that way."

"What about the guy that Carol was seeing?"

"What about him?"

"They met just before Carol went off the reservation, and her roommate thought he was a cop, for whatever that's worth."

"Sounds like you know more about that than I do. You got a name for him?"

"I wish. Apparently this same guy was seeing another of the girls that committed suicide."

"The same guy? Are you sure?"

"Uh, no. But apparently the other guy was a cop too, so, you know, maybe."

"Right." Spaulding didn't sound particularly impressed. In retrospect, perhaps that wasn't the most exciting revelation.

Jim steered the conversation away from that. "So how come you've been assigned to investigate the last death if the higher ups don't want it looked into?"

"I haven't been assigned anything. Quite the contrary, Commander Heggerty explicitly told me to back off after word reached him that I went to Carol's apartment."

"Commander Heggerty? I thought your team was under Commander –"

"Jones. We are. And before you ask, I have no idea why the commander of detectives cares so much about this case, even less so about shutting it down."

"So are you going to close it?"

"Nah," Spaulding beamed. "Listen, Jim, was it? I gotta jet. Duty calls. I've got other bits and pieces on this case, but I'll have to share them with you another time. Hit me up when I'm off and we can compare notes. I'd offer to put in a good word for you with the brass over this, but with how they feel about these suicides, my recommendation would probably leave you less likely to get a job offer than without it."

"Ha, yeah, I guess so. Thanks for the offer, though."

"All right, I'll see you around, son."

"Oh, wait, one last thing before you go. When you went to Carol's apartment, did you take anything away from it?" Jim had his mind on the fallen girl's missing laptop.

The tall man paused for a moment before saying, "Nope, left empty-handed. What about you?"

"Yeah, same," Jim lied.