The Dirty Secrets Club (3 page)

She was right: bad, and big.

Car wrecks are either/or. Few are in between. It's either a Band-Aid on the elbow, or mutilation and death. And nobody here could be helped by a Band-Aid.

Jo exhaled. There was litter everywhere—the dirt, mess, and stink of every crash site. She saw bandages and ripped packaging, caps from disposable syringes, an IV line that had fallen to the ground. This chaos had been created by rescuers' frenzy to save lives. Somebody had survived the collision, at least long enough for the paramedics to arrive.

"How many?" she said.

"Four dead, five injured."

The BMW had hammered down onto another vehicle. She couldn't identify the make, but painted on a door the firefighters had pried open was
Golden Gate Shuttle.
The BMW had speared through the roof of an airport shuttle minivan.

A forensic team was collecting evidence. The medical examiner was bent over his equipment case. A police photographer snapped photos. Each flash of the camera was like a silent shriek.

The deformations of wrecked machinery always shocked her. Once-gleaming metal had shredded, collapsed, been strewn across the road like bomblets. Like the lives of the people inside. Fragmented into shards of remembrance that cut like shrapnel. Firefighting foam lingered on the street, though there had been no fire. She saw no charring, smelled the residual stink of gasoline, not burnt rubber. Not, thank God, burnt flesh.

Two police officers unfurled a blue plastic tarp to cover the worst of whatever could be seen from the bridge.

The cop cleared his throat. "Medics had to amputate one guy's arm to get him out."

The officers slid the tarp across the top of the minivan. God, Jo thought, what a lousy job they had. You had to admire these guys.

She studied the bridge. It was illuminated by bright kitschy signs for the Green Door Massage Parlor and Tunnel Top Bar. The posts that made up the bridge railing were concrete. The BMW had slammed through them like they were Lego blocks. The words
ramming speed
sprang to mind.

Beyond the bridge, Stockton Street ran uphill. For two blocks here, Stockton was a split-level road. The original street ran over the crest of the hill, and was lined with apartment buildings. Directly below it, the tunnel cut through the base of the hill, straight across to Chinatown. It looked like a throat. And it could collapse like a crushed windpipe, she knew. All it would take was a magnitude nine quake.

The cop nodded at a woman standing near the mouth of the tunnel. "That's Tang."

He caught her attention. She walked over like somebody who'd been in a rush her whole life and was still scrapping to get ahead. She was tiny, sheathed in black, with hair spiked like a hedgehog. Her cheeks were red, but she looked contemptuous of the cold. She also looked chilled to the bone. She extended her hand.

"Dr. Beckett?"

They shook, and she lifted the police tape to let Jo duck under.

"What do you have for me?" Jo said.

Instead of enlightenment, Tang gave Jo the once-over, eyeing her Doc Martens, combats, jean jacket, red scarf wound around her neck for warmth, brown hair that tumbled in random curls down her back. Tang's expression was cool. Maybe she thought Jo looked a mess, or too young. Jo didn't care. Her clothes were functional, easy to run in, though she hadn't been called here to deal with a violent psychotic. Nobody was going to grab her by the neck and try to strangle her. She wouldn't have to run, or jump out a window, or kick anybody with the good heavy toes of her boots. Not tonight.

Nobody at this scene was going anywhere.

Tang scanned Jo's face, as cops do. They gauge anxiety and truthfulness and the potential for violence, but Tang was also doing the standard California genealogy check.
What are you?
Tang was herself San Francisco Chinese, Jo guessed from the name and the California accent. She seemed to be searching for some box to tick.

"What's your rush to get me involved?" Jo said.

Tang gave her a shrewd glance. She knew that Jo Beckett, M.D., was not a first responder but a last resort.

"The driver of the BMW was Callie Harding. Know the name?"

It took a few seconds to click. "Federal prosecutor?"

"Assistant U.S. Attorney. She's still in there."

Tang blew on her hands to warm them, and looked at the wreck. The forensic team was poking at the wreckage as if it was a downed alien craft that had crashed on Stockton Street.

"Why did you call me on scene?" Jo asked again.

She didn't work for the police department. She was an independent consultant. The SFPD had given her a fair amount of work, but never in the first few minutes of an investigation, before the blood was even washed from the street. Something strange was going on here. And it wasn't just the cold street or the neon glow of strip club marquees, a seedy Dashiell Hammett glare that played counterpoint to the emergency lights. She hadn't formally agreed to take the job yet, and this scene was urging caution on her, a professional case of the heebie-jeebies.

And the dead were waiting for her, as usual.

"Even if it turns out to be a suicide, why call me out here? What's the urgency?"

"Know what Callie Harding did at the U.S. Attorney's Office?" Tang said.

"Criminal Division."

"She was one of their heavy hitters. A star prosecutor."

"She put bad guys in prison. And?"

Tang lowered her voice, though the helicopter hovering above the scene made overhearing her nearly impossible. "And she was their blue-eyed girl. Lean, mean, and clean."

Tang nodded across the street at an older man who seemed mesmerized by the wreckage. Slouched and nervous, he kept running his hand through his hair.

"That's Harding's boss, head of the Criminal Division. He's a mess. This is a mess. Which means the feds are going to go nuts over it—and they won't want to hear that maybe their prom queen just offed herself in public and took a bunch of innocent people out as well."

Tick two boxes. Turf. Politics. Jo's reluctance to take the case increased.

She put her hands in her pockets. "If this was a theatrical public suicide it's more than just awkward. It's appalling. But I still don't know why you want me in at the start."

"Certain factors here would seem to call for your expertise," Tang said.

Jo didn't know if the police lieutenant was seeking a go-between, or cover for some looming PR battle with the U.S. Attorney's Office. She didn't know Tang at all. But she knew this was going to be high stakes, high profile. She should feel pleased that they'd called her. Instead she felt suspicion sliding around her like an eel through dark water.

"Please fill me in, Lieutenant."

"Harding's death may involve elements of sexual fantasy."

"This wreck? You're joking."

Tang didn't smile. She looked completely humorless and lacking in irony.

"No, of course you're not," Jo said, all at once knowing what Tang was going to say next.

"I understood that you have experience analyzing deaths of that
sort.
Am I misinformed?"

"No."

"Good. Then let's talk to the ME."

Now Tang smirked. That meant she knew the details of the Nagel investigation. She gestured to Jo, inviting her to go first.

Damn right, too. Make way for the princess of autoerotic mortality. Wasn't that just the reason she'd gone to medical school? Mom and Dad would be so proud.

Though irked, she kept her expression mild. The medical examiner turned to look at her as she crossed the street. On his face she saw excitement and worry. Her annoyance evaporated.

Barry Cohen was stout, red-bearded and, in her experience, as unexcitable as a pet rock. If he was geared up, she should be, too. Despite her caution, she had a feeling she was going to take this job.

Cohen nodded, grim. "Jo. Didn't expect to see you on the graveyard shift."

She didn't extend her hand; he was gloved and dressed in protective gear to keep from contaminating the scene. "Looks like a full metal mess."

"Two dead in the BMW. Two in the minivan. Bodies in situ."

"What's got you cranked up, Barry?"

"We found something that set the detectives' radar pinging."

Behind him the police photographer lit the night with his flash. Cohen called to him and the photographer sauntered over, checking his light meter. Jo felt a twinge of relief. Cohen was not going to ask her to view the carnage in situ. She would have put on coveralls and gloves if he'd asked, but if he didn't think she needed to view the bodies of the dead, she had no urge to disagree.

Cohen said, "Show Dr. Beckett the shot with the writing."

"Right." The photographer was breathing through his mouth, as People did to shut out the smell. His eyes were watering.

His camera was slung around his neck from a strap, its heavy lens dangling. Peering at the view window, he flipped through the shots he'd taken.

"Here."

He turned the camera so Jo could see. The small display showed a shot taken through the driver's window of the BMW. A woman's arm was visible, tanned and slim and fractured as if it were soft clay. It nestled in the flaccid white pillow of the deflated air bag. Below it, the woman's left thigh was visible. Jo saw letters, thick and red, scrawled on her skin.

They were awkward, childish almost. Shiny.

"Written in lipstick?" she said.

She glanced at Cohen and Tang. The word crawled up the dead woman's thigh to the black skirt that was hitched around her hips.

The skirt's position could well be the result of the crash. Bodies, clothing, jewelry, lives—all went horribly awry in the milliseconds of impact. The cameraman tilted the display to give her a better view.

ir

There were more letters, but the camera's flash and the angle of the driver's leg had combined to make them unreadable. The woman's thigh was shattered so badly that it looked foreshortened. The femur had been driven backward into the pelvis by the impact, causing an acetabular fracture typical of car crashes.

"Have any clearer shots?" she said.

The photographer flipped through the shots. Various angles. Head buried in dash. Passenger equally still, face this way, unseeing eyes half open, pupils blown.

She turned to Cohen. "Barry?"

"You should take a look," the ME said.

She looked at the wreckage. "Got any rubber bands?"

Cohen had them in his pocket. She put two around the front of her Doc Martens so that any footprints she left would be distinguishable from the rest. With the third she tied her hair back into a ponytail. Cohen held out a pair of latex gloves.

"I know you won't touch anything," he said, but gave them to her anyway.

She snapped them on, waited while the cops logged her as entering the scene, and walked with the photographer to the heart of the mess. The wreckage sat astride the road. The BMW was partially embedded in the left side of the minivan.

"Gives
kiss of death
visceral meaning," she said.

Skid marks trailed behind the van like a giant's finger paint. She smelled rubber. The van driver had seen the car plunging toward him and tried to stop.

"They never had a chance," she said.

The BMW was Reaper-black. She walked toward it, felt her heart punch in her chest, and drew the cord across her mind and emotions. Slow breath in, count to five. See what's in front of you. See clearly. Take note. Clarity, not feeling, would make the difference. Slow breath out.

It was a tomb, and inside it was the proverbial Other Side. And she was here to be the bridge, the thin link between this world and that, in the shape of an explanation.

She noticed the photographer take a harsh breath. Ten meters from the mangle he started breathing through his mouth.

The smell crept into her nose. Gasoline. Feces. Urine-soaked cloth, and a stale smell that she knew was flesh. The metallic tang of blood, faint like an aftertaste. It was the remains. What was left, organic, particulate, interacting with the living. It could have been much worse. This was recent death, a smell as insubstantial as perfume that traced the path of a woman who had left the room. The photographer's lips were retracted, his teeth clenched.

"Give it a few minutes and you won't notice it," she said.

"Yeah." His tone said,
Not.

"I know—give it a few minutes and you wouldn't notice a stake through your skull, either. But really, you'll stop smelling it. Your olfactory nerves go numb."

"Hope I won't be around here long enough to test out that theory."

They walked toward the car. The vehicular sarcophagus was motionless. Utterly inert—unlike death, which is final but not still. Decay is a busy organic process, almost as messy as grieving.

The photographer stopped two feet from the car. "Stand here." He gave Jo an analytical glance and said, "You may have to stand on tiptoe."