The Dirty Secrets Club (4 page)

When she did, the puzzle pieces assembled themselves. The driver's tanned and pulverized arm nestling in the flaccid air bag. The woman's back. She was forward, twisted around the steering column. Blond hair fanned out. Jo couldn't see her face. The front of her melded into the almighty mess that was windshield, engine block, and minivan. She wasn't wearing a seat belt.

Jo saw her leg. The letters. She stretched to see more clearly. They were written in greasy scarlet lipstick on the corpse's thigh.

"You read it the same way I do?" the photographer said.

"Without a doubt."

Under the fizzing lights the driver's skin had a waxy sheen, and the massive acetabular fracture distorted what must have been a long, well-muscled thigh. Her leg looked bunched and flattened. The letters were unmistakable.

Dirty

"What do you make of it?" the photographer said.

"Don't know."

"Think she wrote it? What does it mean? Is it a suicide note?"

"I have no idea yet."

She stepped back to get an overall impression. No blood was visible on the body from this angle. With the woman's skirt rucked up to her hips, the curve of her thigh was visible all the way to her buttocks. She was wearing a lacy black thong. Though harsh light and shadow distorted the optics, Jo could see lividity starting. With the driver's blood pooling via gravity, the top of her thigh was paling, setting off the garish letters.

"Get some more shots," she said.

She stepped back as he raised his camera. The flash blanched the scene.

She caught a glimpse of the passenger, flung like a rag doll against the dashboard. She was paler than the driver. She too was wearing a
skirt,
but hers was too tight to have ridden up. Her legs hadn't begun to show lividity yet. She looked crooked. Her face was turned toward Jo, eyes open. They were the frozen blue of the emergency lights.

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 stability 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."