We were all scared senseless. He did not resist when we took him in. Not that we expected any resistance, but it added to our terror. We called him „the dreamer“ and we had a plan of dealing with him that just might see us still alive at the end.
Everything started as a routine investigation. Every suicide is followed up by a death investigation, typically to make sure everything is as it seems to be. At the university they teach to approach these investigations without prejudice, but years and years in the field and a typical workload too high for not taking shortcuts, and you get a feeling for what needs to be checked closely and what is actually a guy killing himself. There is a good three hundred or so suicides a year in the city, almost one every day. You just can’t check them all properly, not with the cuts in the police budget.
Until you notice a pattern. It was November when my intuition jumped me. A rainy day. The case of Christopher Neal. Some poor guy who had jumped from the roof of his apartment building for no obvious reason, without leaving a letter or anything. His wife and teenage daughter were in shock and swore up and down that everything was fine in his life. We just had decided to close the file when I had a hunch and decided to pick up a number of old cases. We had a file for them, and we called them „inside jobs“. Cases where you find no sign of foul play whatsoever, but anyway you cannot figure out why they jumped or shot or poisoned themselves. You might think the typical suicide victim leaves a note, but that is a myth. Around a third do, most do not. But the typical victim leaves other warning signs, and the psychological autopsy generally reveals them. Depression, substance abuse, changes in behaviour, such things. Some victims even start giving away their property before they end it all.
Our „inside jobs“ were cases not just without notes, but without warning signs. Suspicious cases, where we begin to think it might have been murder, but find no evidence of that, either. In the end, we conclude that whatever made the guy - it is typically men, rarely women - walk off the stage was entirely inside his head.
This is such a case. Except for one name that got stuck in my head. Robert Ricci, despite the name and distant Italian ancestors, was an introvert, slim, unassuming bloke. He appeared in the file on our current jumper as one of the co-workers we had interviewed for the psychological report. But I had seen his name before. So I searched through the „inside jobs“ until I found it. Computer technology makes it easier to reference old files and look for clues in them. Four years ago. The case of Sasha Davis. Stepped in front of a train on her commute home. No note, no warning signs, no reason anyone could figure out. We would have even filed it as an accident if it were not for three eye-witnesses swearing that she very deliberately walked right unto the train tracks and ignored their shouting.
Robert was on the interview list of that case as well. Friend of a friend or something. They had a shared social circle, and we had gone around asking everyone for signs of depression or recent changes or any of the other typical clues.
Unlucky guy to have two suicides around him in four years. For curiosity, I searched for him in the national database, and hit the lottery. Seems he moved in from another city about six years ago. And he is in their police records, this time as a suspect. His ex-girlfriend and her new lover died half a year or so after she left him for the other guy. Red flags all over that one, but Robert was on a long vacation in Asia at the time. His successor got up in the middle of the night, got a big knife from the kitchen and stabbed the girl a dozen times. Then he sliced himself open. The case got a good investigation, and a thick file. Despite samurai movies, very few people manage to murder themselves by knife. You may think you can cut your stomach, but the pain is excruciating and even the samurai had an aide standing nearby with a sword to finish the deal. But it was his prints, no evidence of anyone else being at the scene, so despite the mystery, the case was closed as a murder-suicide.
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Three is one too many.
Four and five, now that is beyond coincidence. Only marked for possible interview, without modern IT nobody would have ever found this. Both investigations closed as suicides before they got around to talking to him.
So that is how I figured out about Robert. The rest was hard police work. We went back on almost a thousand files from the past eight years. Trying to find any link to our guy. We actually pinned a bunch of pictures on a wall and drew lines between them. Everyone knows that from TV and movies, but in real police work it is rarely used. Some departments have software doing the same, and that actually gets some usage, but our department did not. So we used a wall, the only time in this decade.
Robert was somehow linked to almost twenty deaths. That would put him in the all-time top 20 list of serial killers, and near the top spot of those active in the new millennium, so far occupied by Ronald Dominique. But unlike the other guys on the list, Robert was a suspect only in that one case. Everywhere else he seemed to have known the victim, but that is all. Only in the four cases I already had on my table was his name in the files. The others we found by checking work places and social circles.
We went out to interview people, asking them flat out if they know Robert, and if so, whether or not he knew the victim. We added a couple more cases where we could not see a link but by location and date and people involved it was possible.
It was a few months of legwork. I always wonder about the police budgets in movies, where the hero has all day, for weeks or months, to investigate just one case. For us, there are typically a dozen cases running in parallel, so it can take days or weeks until you get around to interviewing that person or checking this file. And long-closed cases have the lowest priority, so it took months, despite the pure legwork involved was more like a couple days.
But we struck gold. There were now twenty-four cases on our wall, with another four we wanted to investigate more closely. Eleven cases we had discarded as unlikely. The gold, however, was in the seven cases we had found outside the homicide department. Attempted suicides with surviving victims. We found them after noticing that victim number eight, James Tokai, had an unsuccessful suicide attempt three weeks prior to his successful one. According to medical records, he claimed in hospital that he had no thoughts of suicide, and no history of sleepwalking, despite jumping out of his 6th floor window in his pyjamas. The second time, he jumped from the roof.
There was nothing in any of the cases that incriminated Robert.
We had to put the mystery aside for a few weeks to focus on a series of high-profile murders, and we were beginning to give up on it. Maybe he was really just the most unlucky guy in the universe?