The Dirty Secrets Club (12 page)

"It was one a.m. and pitch-dark. I had on a hat. Nobody could recognize me. I melted back into the crowd."

"Then?"

"It was a chain reaction. The paramedics showed up. The cop waved them to the van, and Meyer was still just lying there."

"And you hoped she would simply die without attention?"

"It was bedlam, man. It almost worked, too. Then this other woman came, and out of the blue ran to the wreck going apeshit, calling the paramedics, fucking everything up."

Perry thought about it. His gut was tight, but things might be all right. "What's Meyer's condition?"

"I'll find out."

"Do that. And listen to me. I don't want her to die."

She was vital. Meyer worked in Harding's office. She was a bright spark, the do-gooder law student, all eyes and ears, eager to learn everything Callie Harding had to teach her.

"She may have the information we need," he said.

He stopped in front of his desk. His Scrabble board was set up. He picked up a handful of tiles, thinking.

"Boss. I understand how important this is. We're going to find them. No question. We're going to make things right."

Despite the tightness in his gut, Perry smiled. This was why he employed Skunk. The man could be stupid, but he was brutal and utterly reliable. Not just because of his greed, either. Skunk was outright loyal. He even believed in honor among thieves.

"They'll pay, boss. In full," he said.

"Yes, they will."

Object lesson.
That's what they had called Perry Ames when they finished with him. They dropped the chain, threw down the crowbar, took everything, and left him choking in his own blood. They laughed as they walked away. They were still laughing at him today, and they thought they were safe.

Honor? They couldn't spell the word if he shoved Scrabble tiles up their asses with a cattle prod. Yes, they were going to pay. If they all had to die. If the whole city of San Francisco had to die.

"I'll be downtown tomorrow afternoon. The Civic Center," Perry said.

"Tomorrow's Halloween."

His anger ignited so fast and hot that the room seemed to flare white. "Is that a crack about me?"

"What?"

He rubbed the lumpy trail of scar tissue that ran around his neck. "You calling me Frankenstein?"

"No, Jesus, no—I just thought, Halloween, maybe it's a holiday."

"At the courthouse? I'm dealing with the law, Levon—it never takes a holiday; you know that. It's always after your ass."

"Fuckin' A, boss."

His anger subsided. He thought for a moment. "We're at a tipping point. We need to move faster. A prosecutor's death, so public—it's going to bring a huge law-enforcement response."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Talk to the wide receiver again."

"Southern? He's a walking disaster zone. He can't cope."

"Give him one more chance. Let him know it's now or never. He gives us the information or that's it. He'll either be our source, or be an example to the others."

"An object lesson," Skunk said.

"Precisely."

"You got it, boss. What are you going to do?"

Perry placed the tiles on the board.

"Pray?" Skunk said.

"I don't do that anymore. No, I'm going to work out. Then meet with the lawyers. Then I think I'll play Scrabble."

He moved tiles around.
Carjack,
that worked. And—yeah, add letters here, triple word score.
Exsanguination.

"Scrabble?" Skunk said.

It was time to cut off the call. Lingering on the phone any longer would be risky. Besides, this much talk was more than his throat could bear. Perry pressed the voice synthesizer one final time to his ruined larynx.

"Yes, Levon. I wish the rules let me turn
cocktail
into
Molotov cocktail,
but they don't." He dropped the rest of the tiles on the board. "That's up to you."

The U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park is measuring the earthquake at 4.1 on the Richter scale. We have reports of minor damage in the South Bay, so let's go to our traffic chopper—"

Jo punched the radio dial. She was ten miles up the freeway heading back to San Francisco, window open, hair batting in the breeze. A new station came in.

"... My cats sensed the quake coming, and they freaked out. If the Big One hits, I tell you, I'll know it beforehand—" Punch.

"... Some experts think this swarm of tremors is a sign of the coming apocalypse predicted in the ancient Mayan calendar—" Punch to the stereo.

Music poured out, a trancelike Sahara track in an odd key. Sunlight sparkled on the bay. She stared at the road and tried to stop thinking about Gabe Quintana. His cool, his warmth, his self-assured presence. His concern for her.

Her phone beeped. It was a text message from Lieutenant Tang.
At Harding's autopsy. Important you come.

She was forty minutes from the medical examiner's office. She replied
K,
and sped up. The music was hypnotic and insistent. It was Cheb Mami, the singer who had recorded "Desert Rose" with Sting. She had started listening to this music after Daniel died. Back then, melody had become a minefield. Classical music choked her up in ten seconds flat. Rock reminded her of climbing trips and sleeping with

Daniel under the stars. And country music made her want to kill herself. It made her want to buy a gun so she could blow away any radio playing a song with slide guitar.

But this music carried her off, because it carried no memories. Nothing tied it to Daniel. And yet it caught her imagination and pulled her in, but somewhere exotic and safe. Childhood memory. All she needed was a magic carpet to take her away.

She touched her necklace, rubbing her fingers over her white-gold wedding ring.

Rock music had been playing on that last morning with him. She could still hear it clearly. The Police, "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic." That ascending baseline in a minor key. Seven thirty a.m. and Daniel had turned it up.

It was his day off. He worked sixty hours a week as a trauma physician at UCSF Medical Center, but he had that day free, and so did she—a rarity. She was in the middle of her forensic psych residency, and moonlighting in the ER. A single day off didn't give them time to drive to Yosemite, so they planned to hit the climbing gym. She heard him on the phone from the other side of the bed, early, talking to the Air Ambulance service.

Sure, if they got any emergency calls he'd go, no problem. Page him if anything happened. Moonlighting, no better way to spend a day off.

He rolled back beneath the covers and ran his arm across her belly. He smiled at her. Morning, mutt.

Morning, dawg. She smiled back. No better way to spend a day off? If you think that, you're suffering a severe failure of imagination.

They'd been married three years. And she still felt like she'd rolled double sevens, because her husband was both a colleague and her passion. Danny was serious, capable, a climber with a head of rusty hair that only looked good when he sheared it close. He wasn't handsome—he was intense, with green eyes that always looked ready to cut through her. He not-so-secretly hoped she would switch her specialty to emergency medicine, and she had half a mind to do it. He was a shining example of everything she wanted to be. He had more enthusiasm, more curiosity about the world, than anybody she'd ever known. At work he was so calm that friends joked that he'd been doped with horse tranquilizers. All his storms raged inside, and he let her sense them only at moments of pressure. And when he smiled, when he laughed, it transformed him.

They made love like wolves wrestling, with an energy edged with hunger. Outside, the weather was already turning blustery.

The page came at ten a.m., when they were having breakfast at Ti Couz. Child with a ruptured appendix needed a medevac from Bodega Bay, up the coast in Sonoma County. The girl was six, and had underlying medical issues. A surgical team was being assembled at UCSF. The helicopter would go once Daniel got there, if they could round up a second medic—their nurse wasn't answering her pager.

Daniel looked at Jo.

She often wondered if things might be different now had she said something else. The wind was beginning to knock rain against the restaurant windows. She could have shaken her head and told him,
Don't go.

But she didn't. She grabbed the car keys and said, "I'll come with you."

Now the sun blared off the windshield. Her memories were interrupted by her cell phone ringing. She turned down Cheb Mami and answered it.

It was Amy Tang. "You get my message? I'm at Callie Harding's autopsy. Cohen found something. You should get over here."

"On my way."

Tang hung up. No good-bye.

Kisses to you, too, sunshine. Jo changed lanes and accelerated.

Jo pushed through the door into the medical examiner's office, hoping Tang wasn't pulling a stunt by calling her here. Cops, like the medical examiner's staff, occasionally goaded psychiatrists into watching autopsies. Hoping for the
Quincy
reaction—vomiting, fainting, any adverse and entertaining outcome. The front desk was decorated with jack-o'-lanterns. Jo checked in and was directed to the bowels of the building.

The ME's office was no quieter than a hospital, and equally clinical. The fluorescent lighting gave everything a sterile sheen. The indelible whiff of formaldehyde lurked beneath the paint.

Autopsies were not her favorite activity. Dissecting a human cadaver in anatomy class hadn't bothered her, perhaps because people who donated their bodies to science had taken years to consider the decision. It was a gift, and their remains became a teaching tool. But autopsies happened to people who weren't expecting to die. Watching a pathologist root around inside a body—with its chest prized open like Sigourney Weaver's worst nightmare—left her emotionally dumbfounded. She hated the thought of it happening to people she loved. And it had.

Rounding a corner, she found Amy Tang at a drinking fountain. Tang was wearing black clothes and black eye makeup, and her hair looked punk. She practically had to stand on tiptoe to reach the arc of water. Spiky, the Goth Gnome.

Quit it, Beckett. "Lieutenant."

Tang touched the back of her hand to her lips. "This way. Cohen's about half finished."

"What did he find?"

"Stuff that falls on your side of the fence."

Tang led Jo into the autopsy suite. Jazz was playing on the boom box, Coltrane from the sound of the sax, cool and melancholy. Blue— the music, the surgical drapes, the mood. Cohen's red beard stood out in contrast. He was well into the dissection.

Jo slowed her breathing and pulled her emotions back to the quiet room where sights and feelings are muffled. Behind Cohen an assistant was weighing Callie's liver. Tang loitered in the corner, arms crossed, face cross. Jo approached the table.

Callie's toes were blue. Her runner's tan was dulling to gray. The red letters scrawled on her left thigh seemed to scream.
Dirty.

The word was written with a severe slant, as if a left-hander had scribbled it without looking. Lipstick, no question.

Jo looked at Callie's face.

No wonder Gregory Harding had acted like an ass. He had seen this. It must have been like having a live electric cable jammed against the back of his head. Callie's face, a face sculpted by Michelangelo, was crushed.

"I suspect you may list cranial trauma as cause of death," she said.

Cohen pointed with his scalpel. "Air bag inflated when the car hit the bridge, and deflated almost instantly. It was useless when they hit the shuttle van. And she was already headed for an up-and-out by then."

"No seat belt."

"No. Her injuries were unsurvivable."

"Dr. Cohen?" Tang said.

He glanced at her. "I'm coming to it."

"What do I need to see?" Jo said.

"We discovered it during the external exam, when we removed her clothing."

He pointed at Harding's left arm. It lay against the table palm up.

Jesus.

Jo said nothing, but her temples felt tight.

Cohen's assistant turned around. "Ready for me to put these back?"

He had Callie's heart and lungs in his hands. Behind her, Jo heard a retching sound. She turned. Tang had jammed her hand over her mouth.

Cohen said, "Not in here, Lieutenant."

Sweat shone on Tang's forehead. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

"Crap," Cohen said. "Dr. Beckett, can you ..."

Jo was already moving.

Tang keeled against the counter like a crash-test dummy. Jo grabbed her under the arms and hauled her toward a chair. Her legs were like jelly. Jo plopped her down, slumped to one side.

"Put your head between your knees," she said.

The young cop's eyes were glazed and half open. Jo leaned her forward and pushed her head down between her knees to get blood flowing to her brain.