The Dirty Secrets Club

by Meg Gardiner

  "Shit," she said.

  Xochi Zapata knocked again on the door of the hotel room. Still no answer. She double-checked the number she'd written down—1768. That was this room, high on the upper floors of the Marriott. The tipster who called the television station had given it to her.

  In frustration, she went to the railing and looked down. Seventeen stories below, the hotel was bustling. The hotel was built around a huge atrium. Scenic glass-enclosed elevators ferried the swanky clientele up and down. On the ground floor, a hundred people were eating in the restaurant. Halloween pumpkins tastefully decorated the scene.

  She got on the phone. Her cameraman was downstairs, searching for the tipster. The van was parked outside in a no-parking zone.

  "Forget it, Bobby. Nobody's here. Some jackass jerked our chain."

  "Crap. Then let's split. The van's gonna get dinged if we don't move it."

  Down the hall, a door opened. Xochi turned. An older couple came out of their room, dressed for walking.

  "I'm coming down," she said.

  She felt stupid. Such a hot tip—counterfeit pharmaceuticals, imported from Asia and sold under faked labels to drugstore chains that didn't check their provenance—it was a dream story. Men and women in the prime of life poisoned by adulterated drugs, that was better than fake Calvin Klein jeans. That was a local Emmy, maybe even a ticket to a network job. She snapped her phone shut and followed the older couple to the elevator.

  But this trip was all for nothing. "Stupid," she said beneath her breath.

  She waited behind the walkers for the elevator to arrive. They were poring over a guidebook. The woman took the man's hand, squeezed it, and laughed lightly. They were sweet.

  No, she decided, she hadn't been stupid to bite on the lure—to get the big stories you had to take chances. The elevator was coming down toward them. It glinted with sunlight as it descended. A maid pushed her cleaning cart past. Behind the maid another door clicked, a fire door. Xochi glanced around. A man was strolling along the hallway, hands in the pockets of his jacket.

  She tried not to snort. A Members Only jacket—how long had those been out of style?

  Jo paused the video. She stared at her computer screen.

  A dare gone wrong, Xochi had suggested. Holy Christ, gone wrong didn't begin to cover it. She felt queasy. And this story had evidently leaked. Word had gotten back to Skunk, and obviously to somebody else—to the man behind him.

  She called the television station. "Jo Beckett for Xochi Zapata. It's urgent."

  Zapata was out. They couldn't put her through.

  "Have her call me."

  Jo hung up and redialed Amy Tang.

  The

  man in the Members Only jacket walked along the hallway toward the elevators. He was small and hunched, with gray-streaked hair. His eyes darted at Xochi and away.

  With a ding, the elevator arrived. The older couple stepped in. Xochi followed. The doors started to close.

  "Oh, my glasses," the woman said. "Henry. Hold that door."

  The man grabbed the doors before they could close. They labored open again and the couple got out.

  "Sorry, sweetheart," the woman said as they trundled back toward their room. "Don't know where I left my mind this morning."

  Xochi watched them go. The man in the Members Only jacket was standing right outside.

  "Hold that," he said.

  She pushed the Open Door button. He just stood there, staring at her. She felt a frisson of excitement.

  "Are you the one I'm looking for?" she said.

  Amy Tang's cell phone clicked straight to voice mail. Jo hung up, redialed Tang's direct line at the police station, heard nothing but ringing.

  She peered at her computer screen. She had paused the video, but even frozen and silent, the image seemed to keen.

  Crossed the wrong guy, Scott Southern had written. And now that guy was crossing off the Dirty Secrets Club in revenge. Xochi needed to know that he would be coming after her.

  She ought to be aware of it already. Didn't she realize that she would be a target? Jo thought back to their meeting at the Aquatic Park. Xochi's conflicting impulses toward secrecy and exhibitionism.

  Did she unconsciously want Jo to take it public? Was she deliberately exposing herself to danger?

  Wait. Jo had Callie's files at her fingertips. She hung up and scrolled through them, picking her way down the menu until she found Xo-chi's name. Her bona fides. Your News Live. And yes—a cell phone number. She called.

  Xochi pressed her thumb against the Open Door button. Mr. Members Only glanced along the hallway first in one direction and then the other.

  "I'm the one who called. Let go of the button," he said.

  She did. He stood there. Her phone rang, but she left it.

  "Are you getting in?" she said.

  He looked at her.

  As he pulled his hands from his pockets she knew this was wrong. She knew by his face and the smell that suddenly filled the air. Fear came as an instant and all-encompassing shriek inside her mind.

  It was too late to run. He was blocking her exit. The elevator doors were sliding closed. She backed up against the glass wall of the car. Close, fuck it, close now—

  The man had a lighter in his right hand. He flicked it and touched the flame to the gasoline-soaked rag that was stuffed in the mouth of the bottle. It was filled with clear liquid and she knew it wasn't water.

  The flame lit orange. "I'm the one. Sorry, sweetheart."

  He flung the bottle through the doors as they closed.

  25

  Standing near the sculpture of dancing nymphs in the lobby of the Marriott, Bobby waited impatiently for Susan to come downstairs. He refused to call her Xochi. As long as she called him Bobby the Cameraman, he would continue to call her plain Susan Daly.

  He didn't know whether he looked at the elevator because he was in a hurry to move the van out of the no parking zone, or whether his eye was drawn upward by the flash. But training and a photographer's instinct led him to raise his camera and start shooting. Reflexively he focused the lens. It zoomed on the elevator and his brain stuttered. He tried to process what he was seeing, but his mind rejected it.

  He felt like he was melting, heard a noise pour out of his own throat. It was an incoherent moan. He kept filming. The glass-enclosed elevator descended toward him, and with every floor the horror inside grew brighter and more ferocious. It reached the ground. He stood petrified, staring through the lens at Susan. Her face was pressed against the glass, mouth open in agony. The flames filled the elevator. It was a holocaust, red and frenzied. The door opened and he heard screams. Flames erupted into the lobby. The next thing he remembered, he was on his knees, emptying his stomach onto the marble floor.

  Jo walked along Post Street toward Union Square with a sense of deja vu. Police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance, and a television news van surrounded the Marriott. Her hands were tingling with dread. The wind funneled down the street. The hotel's doormen looked spooked and pale. She walked into the lobby and saw Officer Pablo Cruz ushering looky lous away from the elevator bank. The whole gang was here.

  The hotel atrium soared all the way to the roof. She got halfway across the marble floor and saw the sooty windows of the scenic elevator. The glass had cracked. Jo smelled smoke, and the unique, ineradicable smell of burnt human flesh.

  She stopped. Her throat clamped shut and she fought to keep from gagging.

  Officer Cruz appeared at her elbow. "Doc?"

  She stared at the elevator. "Zapata's dead?"

  "Yes." His voice was gentle. "You okay?"

  He was a solid blue presence. She looked at his Aztec face. "Hardly." Her field of vision seemed inordinately bright. "Are you?"

  He nodded. His jaw was tight.

  "Nobody's going to claim this was suicide, are they?" she said.

  "No."

  "Who murdered her?"

  "White man. Five seven, early forties, greasy hair with
gray streaks. Red jacket."

  "His name's Skunk."

  "Two witnesses saw him." Cruz indicated a man and a woman in their seventies, sitting on a sofa in front of a large fireplace. The woman dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. The man rested his hand on her knee, comforting her.

  "Lieutenant Tang?" Jo said.

  He pointed toward the front desk. "Talking to the victim's cameraman."

  Tang looked like a bite-size storm cloud, in a black V-neck sweater and black slacks, black hair spiked in all directions. Her arms were crossed. Jo walked over. The cameraman was talking in halting bursts.

  "... Anonymous tipster called the station with a story about counterfeit prescription drugs," he said. "It was a lead on a big story."

  The man was scratching at his arms like he wanted to scrape off his top layer of skin. Maybe gouge out his eyes, too, to purge the memory of what he'd seen.

  Tang said, "Hang around a few minutes. We may have more questions."

  "I couldn't drive right now if I tried," he said.

  He headed to the bar and asked for a glass of water. Tang nodded Jo farther away from the crowd. If she crossed her arms any tighter, she'd wrestle herself to the floor.

  "Skunk threw a Molotov cocktail into the elevator. He would have killed that older couple, too, except they got out at the last second." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "This is one vicious fuck."

  "I know."

  "And you thought they got people to kill themselves."

  "They did. Today they switched from one form of torture to murder."

  "Why?"

  "Two possibilities. One, this was the culmination of their terror campaign."

  "How so?"

  "Xochi Zapata was the leak."

  "What?" Tang said.

  "I got into the files on Callie Harding's iPod. She kept records of people's qualifications for the Dirty Secrets Club."

  "They bragged about their dirt, on paper?"

  "In detail, with proof. And Xochi Zapata was the key."

  "What happened?"

  "The club ripped off a new applicant. Somebody in the DSC set him up. They stole five hundred thousand dollars from him."

  Tang ran a hand over her hair. "Half a million—just flat-out robbery?"

  "The deal was a double-cross. The wannabe showed up, thinking he was buying his way into the club by setting up a high-stakes poker game. Big-time, illegal."

  "An executive game," Tang said.

  " A-list high rollers. He was going to be their casino and their banker. He showed up with cash to fund some extravagant lines of credit."

  "But they took the money."

  "Worse. He put up a fight, and they attacked him."

  "Killed him?" Tang said.

  "No. Tortured him, seemingly for sport." Jo felt dirty even thinking about it. "Beat him to a pulp with a crowbar. Zapata said the guy begged for his life, but they ignored him. It was like that egged them on."

  Tang seemed to shrink into herself. "Jesus Christ, this was somebody's idea of Truth or Dare? Strong-arm robbery?"

  "Not everybody in the club is like Scott Southern, seeking forgiveness for their sins. That's obvious."

  "That's psychopathic. What does this have to do with Zapata's death? It's retribution?"

  "Definitely." Jo reached into her satchel and took out Harding's iPod. She found the file. "Zapata doesn't say what his name was. She didn't know."

  Jo scrolled through the files. "Here." She set it to Play.

  Tang frowned. "It's a music file?"

  "Video." Jo tried not to look at the elevator. "One thing you have to know first. I talked to her this morning. I promised her I'd keep our conversation off the record, unless she told me she was going to commit murder."

  "Beckett—"

  Jo put up a hand. "She told me she'd had a career in porn, but I thought she was holding something back. When I got into her file on the iPod, I found out what it was. During filming, the sadomasochism got out of hand. An actor was accidentally strangled on-set."

  "Aw, shit." Tang looked toward the elevator. "A snuff film. Goddammit."

  Jo worked the controls of the iPod. "Just keep that in mind when you see what happened during the strong-arm robbery." She scrolled down. "Xochi was a lot of things, a bunch of them extremely troubling. But aside from anything else, she was a reporter. I found her application to join the club's highest level. Black diamond."

  She plugged in her headphones, gave one bud to Tang and stuck the other in her ear. She pushed Play.

  They saw Xochi sitting under warm light in her apartment. Her makeup was perfect, her hair spilling over her shoulders. She was leaning forward, her dark eyes shadowed, speaking directly to the camera. Her voice was sultry, as though describing an act of base violence had excited her.

  "Every time the guy begged for it to stop, he only got beaten harder. First with boots and then the crowbar." She exhaled. "The guy was down on his back on the floor of this empty warehouse, just a bloody mess, and he'd stopped fighting, was just trying to crawl away."

  She took a drink from a shot glass. "I don't know who set me this dare. But it's the last one I'll ever do. You wanted me to distract this wannabe so he'd let down his guard, and I did. He wasn't really a fan, but it still worked."

  She poured another shot. Cuervo, it looked like. "I never should have told you about the rosary thing." She drank. "Okay. Fade in."

  Jo paused the video. "Xochi told me a dare had gone wrong. She didn't tell me she was there when it did."

  She pushed Play again. Xochi faded out and a new video began. It was a static shot of a warehouse. Crates were stacked ten feet high. The view was poor. The camera was placed in a corner, under a jacket. Clearly the filming was clandestine. The wannabe was standing in the shadows beyond the crates. He was unidentifiable.

  A woman moved into the frame.

  Tang leaned toward the screen, mouth open. "You're shitting me."

  "It's Xochi," Jo said.

  She was wearing a black rubber mask, Jimmy Choos, and little else. Sister Mary Erotica. Beside her a weedy man was gesticulating. He looked like a Gatsby character with cocaine nerves.

  "Who's that?" Tang said.

  "Can't tell."

  They watched, and Tang's face went sallow.

  The beating came like an explosion. The weedy man attacked. The wannabe fought back furiously. A briefcase skidded across the floor. Poker chips spilled everywhere. Xochi ran back and forth along the edge of the scene like a caged dog.

  The beating intensified. The wannabe battled, but took a blow to the head and went down. And once you go down, you're done. Jo forced herself not to look away, but her eyes were aching. Here came the moment she knew she'd never forget.

  The Weed was beating the wannabe with a crowbar but couldn't finish him. The wannabe reached out and grabbed his ankle.

  Xochi pointed. "The chain. Get the chain."

  The Weed grabbed it. He whipped it down across the wannabe's shoulders.

  "No," Xochi screamed. "He's going to kill you. Will you—around his neck; throw it around his neck."

  "Oh, shit," Tang said.

  They garroted him.

  Jo and Tang stood immobile, watching the scene on the small screen. The chain, the wannabe being dragged across the floor, legs flailing. Xochi storming back and forth, moaning like a coyote.

  The video faded back to Xochi with her perfect makeup and third tequila.

  "It nearly killed him. He lay there clawing at his neck, gasping for breath. We left him there." She paused and drew herself up. "It just went wrong. He was not a person we should ever have let apply for membership. If we hadn't protected ourselves, he would have killed us."

  She didn't look convinced.

  "I don't know his name. But I know what we called him afterward. The applicant. The Object Lesson." She looked away, and back at the camera. "We called him Pray. Because that's what he did when he was attacked. He prayed."

  26

&
nbsp; Tang leaned toward the display screen. "Pray?"

  "It's not a directive; it's a person," Jo said. "It's the nickname of the man who's directing all this carnage. He's taking down the Dirty Secrets Club."

  Tang stared at the screen. "And Zapata didn't give his name?"

  "No. I've watched the entire video. She never knew it."

  "But she supplied the club with this video of the attack." Tang ran her hand into her hair. "What happened? Did word leak out?"

  "That's my guess," Jo said. "Somebody talked. Word got back to him."

  "Pray. Now it makes sense. We never get a clear view of him in the video. Are we sure Pray isn't the guy we've been calling Skunk?"

  "There's another segment of video, where Zapata describes him as tall and thin—almost ghoulish. Doesn't sound like Skunk to me."

  "Thanks, Beckett. This is major."

  Jo glanced at the elevator. Forensic techs were moving in. A photographer's flash caught her like a sick flashback to Callie's crash. Everything briefly looked crooked.

  She blinked until the feeling passed. "As I said, it's possible Pray was after Xochi all along. Maybe he and Skunk have been pressuring other club members into giving up her identity, and today they found her."

  "But?" Tang looked up sharply. "But then why lure her to a random public place?"

  Jo felt a catch in her throat. "Maybe they wanted to send her down in flames."

  "Or?" Tang said.

  "I don't know. But I don't think we know the whole story. It feels like shifting sands underneath."

  At the bar, Xochi's cameraman put down his water glass, picked up his portable shoulder-mounted television camera, and left. Jo excused herself and went after him.

  Outside, the fresh air was bracing. She drew a clean breath. The cameraman had the same thought, different method. He lit a smoke. His hands were shaking as he cupped the lighter to the end of the cigarette.

  Jo walked over. "Can I ask some questions about Xochi?"

  "Susan," he said. "She was Susan."

  "Did you see the man who called in the anonymous tip?"

  "No. When we got here she went to the concierge desk—the tipster said he'd leave a message for her. All the note said was 'seventeen sixty-eight.' The room number. Nobody was there. I came down to look around the lobby for him, and she—" He squinted, and took a drag. "I figure he set it up to separate us, get her alone."