The Dirty Secrets Club (6 page)

For a vivid instant she saw Daniel, felt his hand take hers, heard again the words he gave her when the world turned to shit.

No, she thought.

She exhaled and shook off the embers that guttered in her mem-

The
DIRTY SECRETS CLUB 39

ory, threatening to ignite. She dug her fingernails into her palms to stop her hands shivering. The shivering was nerves, just nerves. It had been a long time since she'd had to jump into a trauma situation.

She whispered to herself, "Get over it."

This wasn't about her. It was about the three people dead in the wreck behind her, and a young woman who was close to joining them. A young woman who seemed to be calling out a warning.

She blinked the chill from her eyes and walked on.

The vibration from the cell phone brought his eyes open. He inhaled, staring at the dark ceiling, instantly alert.

It would be news, an automatic text update. Quietly, so as not to disturb the night, the dark, his privacy, Perry turned the phone in his hand to read the display. He was looking for confirmation, and he found it in a single word.

Dead.

His hand curled around the phone. The prosecutor was gone.

He didn't read the rest. The how, or the how many others. For a moment his eyes stung and his throat burned, and tears threatened to boil up. He fought them back. His gaze lengthened and he let his mind fly free. He would learn the details soon enough. Right now, he wanted to savor the moment.

Harding was dead. Gone, the dirty bitch.

His mind tried to race, but he forced it to slow down. His heart felt large in his chest, beating slowly, full of blood.

Full of joy.

He hoped she had suffered. That she had died screaming, weeping, maybe choking on her own blood, unable to breathe. Slowly he smiled.
How does it feel to be on the wrong end of the pain, Callie?
He leered at the ceiling, picturing it, until the dark ceiling above him became a movie screen. And in this private movie epic, he saw panic on Harding's face, and knowledge; watched her fighting for air
through
a throat that was broken and swollen, hands too smashed to
_m
ove. He hated the fact that he hadn't been on the scene, at her side
_a
t that moment, to witness it live.

You want justice? Here it is. Turnabout's a bitch, ain't it?
He bit back a laugh. His eyes were wet.

Did she give up anything? Names, knowledge, secrets? He hoped, he wished.

Wished he'd been able to walk up to the prosecutor and kiss her good-bye. The thought excited him.

In his vision he saw her. She realized death was coming. God, how he hated her. Hated them all.
I paid. Now you pay.
He saw her cry like a little child. Saw her piss herself. Saw her lips move.

She was praying.
Not this, no. Forgive me, I'm dirty, dirty, dirty. No.

In the dark Perry Ames lay rigid, feeling as he always felt at these moments. Completely frustrated. He couldn't be with Callie Harding when she left this life, and picturing her exit relieved his rage only for a few lonely minutes. Solitude is the best defense, because in the end you can't rely on anything but yourself.

That, and death. Dirty, dirty, dirty bitch.

6

T
he foghorn woke Jo, lowing its warning across the bay. She rolled over and opened her eyes. Sunlight needled the ceiling, gold flecked through the leaves of the magnolia tree outside. The foghorn moaned again.

Sun and fog, together. San Francisco was a city of multiple personalities.

It was six forty-five. Jo felt the late night as a low note of fatigue echoing down to the bone. She got up, pulled a kimono arounc herself, and raised the blinds. A vivid day greeted her. The sky was acrylic blue and the more flamboyant homes on the hilltop—blue, yellow, and green with gingerbread gables—looked Easter-egg bright. In the distance, past dense rooftops and Monterey pines, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge glowed red in the dawn. Mist clung to the water below it, but here above Fisherman's Wharf her neighborhooc gleamed.

She was lucky to live here, and she knew it. Her house was a classic San Francisco Victorian, adobe-red with white gables. Tuckec back from the street, it looked unassuming. And it was Plain Jane compared to the faux mansion next door, which had a rooftop terrace adorned with statues of Roman godlets. Cupid was covered in pigeon crap.

Curtains twitched in one of the mansion's upstairs windows. She sighed. Her neighbor was checking to see if her lights were on. She lowered the blinds and hit the shower.

If her house looked humble from the street, inside it was all air and space, and saturated with color. Big windows captured each ounce of sunlight the capricious weather offered. Her bed frame was Japanese,
lacquered
to a black shine, covered with a scarlet comforter and gold pillows. Hot colors were good. They helped her wake up, reminded her of heartbeats and action. The orchids on the dresser were a fiery orange.

She loathed confined spaces, and the house let her breathe. It even
boasted
a million-dollar view of both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. To see it, she just had to shinny up the downspout to the roof. Piece of cake.

She loved this place. But it could be too quiet, now that it was just her.

Climbing out of the shower, she felt revved up. She dressed and slipped on her necklace, a silver chain on which hung a Coptic cross and a white-gold ring. Downstairs in the kitchen she booted up her laptop. Sunlight cut a wedge through the French doors. The tiny backyard was shaded by the old magnolia and overrun with sage, lilac, and an unruly wall of white-flowering clematis.

Her computer sang at her. She took a look. Lieutenant Tang had sent a hunk of preliminary information.

Callie Ann Harding. Age thirty-six. Palo Alto address. Divorced, no children. Next of kin was her ex-husband, Gregory Harding of Portola Valley. Harding had been contacted. He had identified the body.

Hell of a wake-up call for the ex. Jo pulled off the top of a pen with her teeth, opened a notebook, and made a note to contact Harding ASAP.

She pulled up the next file: Callie Harding's driver's license photo.

Even under the harsh lens of the DMV camera, Harding looked strikingly attractive. Her cheekbones had the angular look common to long-distance runners. Her hair was pulled back into a serene
French
twist and dyed a platinum shade that hinted at a healthy ego and libido. It was a Monroe blonde, set against serious, no-nonsense
Dragnet
eyes. Her gaze was piercing and intensely alive.

Jo pulled out her psychological autopsy checklist. Her spirits tanked.

She worked within the NASH framework—determining whether a death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. To do that, she gathered as much hard evidence as possible. But none of the information she usually relied on would be available here.

The police report on the crash hadn't been filed yet. Forensics hadn't analyzed the BMW to determine whether a mechanical fault had caused the wreck. Harding's family, friends, and coworkers hadn't been interviewed. The autopsy was scheduled for noon, which meant Barry Cohen was clearing the decks to get it done. But toxicology screening, blood, and urine tests wouldn't be back.

She was going to have to tag along with detectives and scrounge information from the medical examiner. And neither law enforcement nor the ME's office was eager to share their findings with a psychiatrist.

She had a good working relationship with Barry Cohen, but some of his colleagues disdained the concept of the psychological autopsy. In their view, they did science. Jo did hoodoo.

They were half right. The psychological autopsy wasn't science. Like all of medicine, it was an art.

She didn't split open cadavers. Nonetheless her work dug deeply into the deceased. She investigated the victim's history—medical, psychological, educational, and sexual. She looked for early warning signs of suicide. She learned about the victim's relationships. Read their writings. Excavated their online activities. Asked about their premonitions and mood swings. She gathered reactions to the victim's death
from
friends and relatives. She asked about old and current enemies.

People did have them. And not like her mother, who kept an enemies list of every kid who'd knocked one of her children off a play ground slide.

And to evaluate the victim's mental state she uncovered their fears,
phobias,
and fantasies. Death is a physical event, but when it comes
_to
human beings, state of mind makes all the difference. Between
murder
and self-defense. Between legal insanity and manslaughter.

And in this case, between accident and murder-suicide.

Still,
her conclusions were inevitably a matter of judgment. Manner of death? We have a 9.3 for suicide, 9.85 for murder. And for
accident?
A 2.1 from the Soviet judge. Not a winner.

In the end, the police and the medical examiner determined
how
people died. Jo determined
why.
Because a forensic psychiatrist doesn't cut open the victim's body, but his life.

But in this case, she didn't even have a cause of death. Welcome to the front line. Flying blind, into a fog bank.

She printed all the files, put everything in a satchel, and headed out the door, locking the house behind her, a small house never intended for one person.

Jo jogged down her front steps. The air was brisk. In the small park across the street, trees swayed as though shaking themselves awake. She glanced at the mansion next door. This was generally the moment when her neighbor liked to intercept her. But today the curtains failed to twitch and the door stayed closed.

At the corner she caught the cable car. The gripman rang his bell and they tipped past the corner and angled down the steep hill. She held on while the neighborhood slid by. From a distance this hillside looked postcard neat, but up close Jo saw the crevices: narrow passageways that hid tiny courtyards, alleys that cloistered tie-dyed hippie hideaways. Halfway down the hill an old apartment building was being gutted and remodeled. Construction workers were sauntering around the site at a Monday-morning pace. The guy with the ham
^me
r slung from his tool belt looked kind of hot.

Jo checked herself. It wasn't him; it was the gigantic thermos of coffee he was carrying. She got off at the bottom of the hill and headed to Java Jones.

The coffeehouse was crowded. Behind the counter, Tina smiled.

"Johanna Renee, good morning."

"I need an ubercoffee, the biggest you've got, plus a blueberry muffin. And a cheese panini."

Tina gave her a waspish look.

"I want calories and caffeine," she said.

Tina was her younger sister. She had Jo's brown curls and athletic figure. She was wearing a black barista's apron, plus a nose stud and enough silver earrings to get reception from orbiting spy satellites. She was as bouncy as Tigger.

Jo spoke up to be heard over the stereo. "Who's this?"

"Mahler. Quality music."

Jo didn't comment. Tina's playlist of quality music also included Slipknot.

Tina waved to the air. "Dark and passionate. It's the way to take things. Music, literature, men ..."

"Coffee."

Smirking, Tina handed over a mug the size of a Ming vase. Jo carried it to a table by the window. She took a long, greedy swallow. Sitting down, she got out her computer and called the Central Division Police Station.

Lieutenant Amy Tang answered the phone, sounding like a switchblade, sharp and flashy. "What do you have for me, Dr. Beckett?"

"Nothing yet. I'm only getting started."

Tang exhaled with what Jo's finely calibrated psychiatric training took to be a fat breath of irritation. "What do you need?"

"Harding's vehicle and driving records."

Papers rustled. "The BMW was brand-new, purchased three weeks ago. Harding had a clean driving record. No DUIs, no speeding tickets."

Jo scribbled notes. "The Yoshida and Maki Prichingo cases. Are the files ready for my review?"

"We're swamped. It'll be this afternoon. Right now I'll send you
what
the press has reported."

It would have to do. "Any more information on Harding's pas
senger?
How's she doing?"

"Alive. Unconscious. She hasn't talked."

"Where is she?"

"St. Francis."

"Good." Jo had staff privileges at St. Francis. She would go by.

The lieutenant cleared her throat. "What do you think about the sexual fantasy angle?"

"No thoughts yet. I need evidence before I draw conclusions."

"I'd say Harding drew her own conclusion in red lipstick. She was dirty."