The Dirty Secrets Club

by Meg Gardiner

  Jo breathed out, counting to five, and walked back to Tang. The lieutenant's face was pinched.

  "Is that it? That's the evidence that brought me out here tonight?" Jo said.

  "No," Tang said. "We need to run this investigation on multiple tracks simultaneously. We're throwing everything at it."

  "Why?"

  "This is not the first murder-suicide we've had this week."

  Jo gauged the woman's face and saw fatigue and strain. "You're not sure this is murder-suicide. If you were, you wouldn't need me," Jo said. "These deaths are equivocal."

  "They're more than equivocal," Tang said. "That's why we want you."

  What did "more than equivocal" mean? Jo's work life revolved around equivocal death. That's what the psychological autopsy examined: the ambiguous, the vague, the oblique death, the shifty cases, those that made no sense. Explaining them was her job.

  Tang shot a glance in the direction of the news van outside the yellow tape. A dish antenna was unfurled on top of it. The light from the TV camera blazed around the silhouetted reporter. Tang lowered her voice.

  "Then I won't call them murder-suicides. How about paired deaths? This is the third."

  The cold took on a sharper edge. The stars cut through the city lights, shining like flecks of broken glass.

  "You've heard about the other cases. David Yoshida and Maki Prichingo."

  Yoshida's name rang loud in Jo's head. "You have compelling evidence Dr. Yoshida's death wasn't from natural causes?"

  "You'll get everything we have. I'm not asking you to investigate them, but you should look at the similarities. Which we'll get to."

  She nodded. "Who's Maki Prichingo?"

  "The burning boat."

  Jo looked at her, blank.

  Tang's forehead furrowed. "Maki, the fashion designer. He and his lover were found dead on his sailboat off the coast last week. You've never heard of Maki . . . ?"

  Her voice trailed off and she gave Jo's clothes another look. Un-familiarity with fashion designers seemingly made sense, and she let it go.

  "You knew Dr. Yoshida?" she said.

  "Knew of him. He headed cardiothoracic surgery at UCSF." And cardiac surgeons thought they were, if not God, then archangels. Their reputations soared above them. "Word is, he had a heart attack."

  " 'Word is' just means speculation. You'll get the files."

  "Lieutenant, why the urgency?" Jo said. "What's the link between the deaths?"

  "We don't know. But I think it's there, and you can help find it. We're attacking this on multiple fronts simultaneously."

  "Why?"

  With a chilled hand, Tang took Jo's elbow and pulled her along as she walked across the street. "This is the city's third bizarre high-profile death in the last week."

  That wasn't what had the cops twisted. "Murder-suicides?"

  "Sounds peculiar, I know, but this could be some kind of organized killing spree." She nodded at the city scene. "Something's out there."

  It was a weird time in the city. Full moon, Halloween on the way.

  The recent swarm of earthquakes had jarred the dishes and people's nerves. Jo looked at Tang and saw the twitchiness she'd observed on the street all week. Everybody was spooked.

  So was Jo. Something seemed odd, out of place.

  "We want you to figure it out," Tang said. "And I mean right damned now."

  "There isn't right damned now with psychological autopsies."

  "This time there is."

  "That's not how it works. I interview the victim's family and colleagues, review the accident report and the victim's medical history— it can take weeks. The report's credibility in court is at stake. Even more, so is the truth about the victim's life."

  "You've heard of the first forty-eight?" Tang said.

  "Yeah. And I'm not FedEx. I rush, I could do even less than a harassed job."

  Tang tightened her grip on Jo's elbow. "That's not my point. In this case, we have forty-eight hours maximum."

  "Why?"

  "That's how often people are dying."

  Jo blinked. Tang turned to look at the wreckage.

  "Victim, perpetrator, we don't know who Callie Harding is. But people are going down and taking others with them. Yoshida last Thursday. Maki Saturday night. Now this."

  "You think there's going to be another one."

  "Unless we stop it."

  The medical examiner had finished. The fire crew was now digging into the coital vehicular mess with a skill saw.

  "We need to know why Callie Harding died, and we need to know yesterday. Don't worry about protocol or court proceedings. Cut any corners you need to. You have two days."

  Jo watched the firefighter saw into the metal. Sparks hissed, white and fevered. Her spooky feeling returned. Something about the wreck was out of kilter.

  "Give me everything. I'll run with it," she said. "Good." Tang released her grip. "And you won't have to start from scratch. If you move fast you can talk to our eyewitness." "Who?"

  "The patrolman involved in the vehicle pursuit. Officer Cruz." Tang gave her a cool glare. "Welcome to the front line."

  4

  Straight up crazy, that's what I thought at the start. Then the

  rest of it happened and I thought—yeah, straight up crazy."

  Officer Pablo Cruz drew a breath and licked his lips as though they were dry, as though he'd been drawing a lot of sharp breaths. His eyes shone brightly. A blocky young man, he seemed both eager and anxious about telling Jo the story of his first-ever vehicle pursuit.

  She spoke gently. "So you turned onto Stockton and saw her put the BMW into reverse. What happened?"

  "It got wild weird." He looked at the hill above the tunnel. "I hit the brakes. You can see the street up there—those vehicles parked along the curbs didn't leave me much room to maneuver. She came at me, tires spinning. I thought, she's going to ram me." He swallowed. "I yanked it onto the left side of the road to avoid her. But I didn't need to. She laid on the brakes. Slammed 'em, must have pulled the hand brake, too. She stopped it on a dime, right next to my passenger-side window. At that point I was reaching for my weapon. But she ..."

  He looked up at the wrecked bridge railing. The muscles in his jaw bulged.

  "Officer?"

  He shook his head. "It makes no sense. She drove through the railing on purpose, I have no doubt."

  "What happened when she stopped next to your patrol car?"

  He continued gazing up at the railing. Jo didn't see a need to push him, not at this stage. It was okay to let everything come out—his narrative, his impressions, his emotions, even if it was all a jumble right now.

  "I saw her face, clear as day. She was—I mean, she was a beautiful woman, I saw that. And she was desperate."

  She was ninety seconds from death. Desperate, yeah, that about covered it. "What did she do?"

  "She slapped her hand against her window and yelled to me. I heard it. I saw the words on her lips." Again he looked at the bridge. "I have no doubt she did it on purpose." He glanced at her sharply, as though she had just disputed his assessment. "Come on, I'll show you why."

  Cruz took her to the stairwell that led up to Bush Street. His shoulders filled the dark blue uniform shirt. The heel of his hand rode his nightstick. He seemed more than uncomfortable. Something was bothering him, and it wasn't the sleeping bags of the homeless in the stairwell.

  Something was bothering her, too. She felt a scratch at the base of her brain. The feeling that the scene was askew returned.

  "What's on your mind, Officer?" she said.

  He slid her a glance over his shoulder. "Little late to talk the driver down off the ledge, isn't it?"

  "That's not why I'm here."

  They headed up the stairs. What was scratching at her? What was aggravating Cruz?

  His mouth was a taut line. "You gonna ask me how I feel?"

  Was that it? "I'm not here to give you trauma counseling, or to evaluate your mental stabili
ty as a witness."

  His glance was sharp. "So who are you?"

  "I'm the deadshrinker."

  He slowed. "What?"

  "I don't shrink heads. I shrink souls." Her footsteps echoed in the stairwell. "I'm a forensic psychiatrist."

  His shoulders inched down. He looked at her with fresh curiosity. "Exactly what is it you do?"

  "I perform psychological autopsies to determine whether equivocal deaths are natural, accident, suicide, or homicide," she said. "I figure out why the deceased got dead."

  Relief seeped across his face, and the beginnings of a smile. "You have trouble getting DBs to pay?"

  "Just zombies. I charge them up front, before they wander away moaning."

  They reached the top of the stairs. "And you don't do your voodoo in a nice warm office?"

  She saw why Cruz thought Harding had crashed deliberately. Her voice went quiet. "Not when the juju's this bad."

  Stockton Street dead-ended at the Bush Street Bridge. Each end of the bridge had a staircase leading up from the street below. At the top, the staircases pointed toward the center of the bridge. They were guarded with metal railings. Jo ran her hand along one. It was cold and solid. The vertical pole that held up the end of the railing was striped with black paint and deformed from the force of the BMW striking it as it went past.

  Jo estimated that there was no more than eight feet between the two sets of stairs.

  Either/or. Callie Harding had either suffered unfathomably bad luck, or done a damned precise piece of driving.

  Uphill on Stockton two police officers were walking the road with a pedometer, measuring. A camera flashed, somebody photographing the pavement.

  "Skid marks?" she said.

  "They're looking."

  She walked to the curb. It was heavily scored where the BMW had hit it. Across the street, under a streetlight, she saw fresh gouges in the asphalt. The BMW must have bottomed out when the angle of the road flattened. But scraping the roadway didn't look to have slowed it down much, if at all.

  And she'd seen enough crash scene photos, studied the accident statistics, hell, driven the Bayshore Freeway enough, to know that when a driver wants to avoid a crash he keeps his foot hard on the brake all the way to the point of impact.

  There was no evidence of that here, just a series of gashes in the road. Callie Harding: Until one a.m. she had been on her way to being a celebrity prosecutor. But now the trail of gouges marked her path to a noisy death.

  Jo turned back to Cruz. "What do you recall about the moments before the crash?"

  "Thinking, holy shit, she's aiming for it."

  "Did she have her lights on?"

  "Yes. Headlights, taillights, all in working order. You asking if she braked before she hit the bridge, if I saw the brake lights? I don't remember. But her brakes worked a minute earlier when she screeched up next to my patrol car. She stopped it like pulling up a horse. Sharp."

  Cruz gazed into the distance. He had an Aztec profile. It was a warrior's face, but he looked young and wound up.

  "Officer?"

  "She topped herself. I don't see how she didn't. Right? What else could it be?" he said. "But why? I don't get it."

  Jo touched his elbow. "Let's start finding out."

  "But, Christ, why'd she take all those people with her?"

  The deadshrinker didn't know.

  He held back a moment longer, his shoulders working their way upward. The sense that something was wrong intensified. The blue emergency lights, the flash from the photographers' cameras, the jagged shine in Cruz's eyes were giving her a sense of situational vertigo. Jo held his gaze. She was trying to take in this first burst of information, but mixed with it was concern for the young cop. He felt somehow responsible. He had been the one on the scene, and Callie Harding had died. He thought he had failed.

  "Cruz. Don't even start thinking you could have stopped it."

  "Never seen anything like the look in her eyes." His own eyes looked pained. "Not that it shocked me. I mean . . ."

  "I'm not here to evaluate you. What about the driver's eyes?"

  As sharp as the flash from the photographer's camera, understanding came to her. Ice water seemed to shimmer across her skin.

  The look in her eyes.

  She turned and bolted back down the stairs. Three steps at a time, grabbed the railing and swung herself over, dropped with a thud, and ran toward the wreckage, yelling at the medical examiner.

  "Cohen, get the paramedics, stat."

  The ME glanced at her in alarm.

  The eyes. In the photographer's digital display, the passenger's face had looked powder-white and her eyes had been half shut, dark and unseeing. But when Jo had seen her up close, her eyes were wide open and glossy blue. Blue because her pupils had contracted.

  Dead people's eyes don't react to light.

  "Barry, she's alive," Jo yelled.

  Heedless now of CSI protocol or preserving the scene, she leaped onto the wreckage. Cohen hustled toward her.

  The passenger hadn't moved. Her eyes were still open. Blood had run into her lashes like mascara.

  Jo pressed two fingers to the woman's neck to search for a carotid pulse.

  "Can you hear me?" she said.

  No response. No movement. She couldn't feel a pulse. But her own heart was rabbiting so hard that she couldn't feel anything else.

  "Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me."

  Cohen approached. "What are you doing?"

  Had she imagined it? Was she so spooked that it was all—

  The woman blinked.

  "Oh, my God," Cohen said.

  Jo's whole system went into overload. She felt adrenaline dump into her veins, chills skitter along her arms, her heart jack into sixth gear, blood pressure spike so hard that her vision jumped.

  "Don't move. We're going to get you out of here," she said.

  She heard Cohen calling for the paramedics. She thought, finally, she felt a pulse in the woman's neck. She was young, Jo thought, younger than her, and smashed to dust. Behind them flash photography bleached the car.

  Lips moved. The woman was struggling to breathe.

  Through the pounding of the blood in her ears, Jo thought she heard a sound come from the woman's mouth. She leaned in. Another flash turned the woman's face to flour. Her pupils contracted again, and pain striped her eyes. Her lips parted.

  "What?" Jo said.

  Her voice was nothing but a trace. "Stop it."

  Jo turned to shout at the police photographer—but it wasn't him, it was press people beyond the yellow tape. She leaned across the passenger's face to shield her from the cameras.

  "Hang on. The paramedics are coming. The firefighters are going to cut you loose." She turned and shouted, "Come on."

  "Stop it," the passenger whispered.

  She touched the woman's shoulder. "I know it's hard. We're going to get you out of here."

  Fingers to her neck again. There, she had the pulse.

  The paramedics came running with their equipment. Firefighters brought the Jaws of Life. They crowded around, ready to take over.

  Jo leaned back. "Conscious and vocal. Pulse weak and thready. Pupils equal and reactive."

  The rescue crews jostled around her. The passenger's eyes shifted. Blue, sharp as glass, they stared at her. The woman's cold fingers crawled around Jo's wrist.

  "Stop it," she said.

  A firefighter moved Jo aside. "Doctor, let us go to work."

  Stop what?

  Her stomach felt hollow. She pressed a hand against it and forced herself to breathe slowly. She looked around. Cruz was near the bottom of the stairs.

  She walked toward him. "Officer," she called. He turned. "What did the driver say?"

  Cruz frowned, seemingly uncertain. Jo kept walking.

  "When the BMW stopped next to your car. What did Harding say to you?

  Cruz's guard went up at the urgency in her tone. She walked up to him.

 
"Tell me," she said.

  He scanned her face, and when he spoke, his voice was distressed. "'Help me.'"

  Jo felt the blood drain from her face.

  "She slapped her palm against the driver's window and looked straight at me. And she said 'help me.' I swear to God." He held Jo's gaze, and the pain came out from behind his warrior's eyes. "She was begging me to save her."

  C

  On three."

  The paramedics counted it off. With the firefighters they lifted the passenger just enough to fasten the cervical collar around her neck. They inched her free from the wreckage with the tenderness of someone carrying a torn butterfly. Her blond hair fell around her head like corn silk.

  Jo tried to catch the young woman's eye, but the girl looked unfocused, staring at nothing. The paramedics strapped her to a backboard and rushed her to an ambulance, one of them holding an IV bag. Intravenous drip for Raggedy Ann. Jo had rarely seen such a delicate and damaged human being. She'd seen even fewer who'd survived.

  Barry Cohen stood nearby, running his fingers through his red beard. The medical examiner watched the paramedics load the passenger into the ambulance.

  "I don't know how I missed it," he said.

  The ambulance drove away, lights casting red and blue streaks across the street. Cohen seemed to feel them as a lash.

  "Did you examine her?" Jo said.

  "Axial palpation. I didn't detect a pulse. And I didn't notice any reactivity to light." He turned to her. "That was a good catch."

  A thread of adrenaline crawled down her arm. It was a sick feeling. She fought it away, watching the lights of the ambulance wane to city glare as it turned onto Market Street.

  "Thank God I didn't take a liver temp to gauge TOD," Cohen said.

  Stabbing the equivalent of a meat thermometer into the girl's internal organs would have established Time of Death as Oh, shit. "Who declared her? The paramedics?"

  "Yeah. I'll get to the bottom of it."

  And if it was his fault, he wouldn't flinch from admitting it. "I don't doubt you will, Barry."

  He offered a weary smile. "Thanks."