The Dirty Secrets Club (44 page)

"Callie wasn't running from anybody that night, was she? Nobody was chasing her," Jo said.

"I got her to run," Meyer said.

Jo wanted her to say it. She knew what the video footage from the bridge showed, but wanted Meyer to explain it.

"What did you tell her in the car?"

"I told her about Perry. I made her understand. About the extortion, the robbery, how the Dirty Secrets Club destroyed his life. I told her about the injustice." Her eyes were agitated. "If he has to stay in prison he'll kill himself. That's what I told her, how bad it is for him. He begged me to help him, because nobody else will. And without justice, he'll kill himself."

"Is that what he told you? If you didn't help him, he'd kill himself?"

"Yes. Jesus Christ. Aren't you listening? That's how bad it is."

Jo leaned on her knees. Pray had manipulated her into helping him by threatening suicide. The man was a sociopath.

"Callie wasn't running
from
something when she passed Officer Cruz's patrol car, was she? She was running
toward
the Stockton Street Bridge. Because time was running out," Jo said.

Meyer's face turned sly.

"We saw the CCTV footage from the bridge," Jo said. "We know Skunk was there."

That's what the stairwell cameras showed. Skunk on the bridge, pacing back and forth immediately before the crash.

"Callie went nuts," Meyer said.

"Why?"

"Because she thought she needed to get there in a hurry."

"Why was that?"

"Because she was too stubborn to tell me what I needed to know."

"What did you threaten her with?" Jo said.

"Nothing real. I told her Skunk was there with some other members of the club, and was going to do something."

"What kind of something?"

"Get one of the DSC members to kill somebody."

"Who?"

"Toss Scott Southern's kid off the bridge."

Jo's heart shrank, but she kept her voice even. "But you made all that up."

"It was easy. She panicked. She totally freaked. I found her notes on the Dirty Secrets Club. I found out about Xochi Zapata and Scott Southern. And I knew Callie was all twisted up over this dare thing. She was obsessed. She liked to punish people." Meyer shook her head and laughed. "She believed every bit of it."

"And Callie couldn't disprove anything you were saying, because you'd isolated her in the car and taken her phone."

Tang said, "So Callie floored it, hell for leather, thinking that this grand plan of hers, the Dirty Secrets Club, which was supposed to bring people to justice, was instead going to get innocent people killed?"

Meyer nodded.

"And it backfired," Jo said. "You got nothing."

"Not nothing—I got Southern's and Zapata's names, and gave them to Skunk."

"But you wanted the name of the person who ordered Xochi and William Willets to attack your father, and you didn't get that." The passion in Meyer's eyes began to dim. "Instead Callie drove straight down Stockton Street. Do you remember the rest?"

"She begged the cop for help. But it was too late. I was on the phone with Skunk. I told her he was gonna have the club people carry out the dare and throw the kid over."

"And she floored it."

"Like a maniac."

"Stop it.
That's what you said to me, Geli. You wanted me to stop the Dirty Secrets Club. But you're the one who's been stopped." Jo leaned back. "And now three innocent people are dead. You're going to go to prison. And you'll never see your father again."

Meyer looked at her for a moment. When she started screaming, Jo didn't think she'd ever stop.

T
he sun stayed out for the rest of the week. When Jo walked into Java Jones Friday morning, the city was running at 90 percent. There were still pockets without electricity and gas, dozens of buildings condemned or uninhabitable. But things were going ahead. The 49ers were playing a home game on Sunday. They'd already passed out black armbands in memory of Scott Southern.

Tina looked particularly puckish behind the counter. When Jo walked in she smiled. "Americano for my lovely sister." The music was lush and sweeping, a piano concerto to break the heart, apparently, because halfway through pouring Jo's coffee Tina had to stop, listen, and regain her composure.

She put Jo's mug on the counter. "Rachmaninoff. You should be crying, too."

"Not today, sis."

Jo carried her coffee to the table by the window where Amy Tang was having her breakfast. She sat down and handed her a copy of her preliminary report.

"You can check for corrections, but the gist is there," she said.

"Bottom line?"

"The crash of Callie Harding's BMW was deliberate."

Tang leaned back. "What convinces you?"

"That during the race across town in the BMW, Callie wrote
Pray
on her wrist and
Dirty
on her thigh, as clues."

"Clues about?" Tang said.

"About what was behind her death."

"She knew she was going to die? She killed herself?"

"She became willing to sacrifice herself," Jo said. "Callie wrote clues on her own body, to let the police know what was going on. That meant she didn't think she would be alive to tell the police. She had to get the information to them somehow. She may have hoped to live, but she was willing to die to stop what she thought was a murder at the bridge."

And maybe she thought it was the only way she could redeem herself for the mess she had unleashed.

Tang said, "And on the race to the bridge, Callie caught a lucky break. She drove past a cop."

"She ran the red light because she wanted Officer Cruz to join the chase. At that point Meyer knew she'd blown it. She thought she'd set things up to keep Callie under her control, to isolate her and spring all this on her as a trap. But she let her keep control of the one thing that ended up being a deadly weapon."

"The BMW."

"Right. Once Cruz joined the chase, Meyer desperately wanted to stop the whole thing and get away. That's when she fought with Callie and tried to jump from the BMW." Jo sat back. "And then the whole thing went even more wildly wrong."

Callie saw Officer Cruz in her rearview mirror, gaining on her. She thought she had time to ask him for assistance. She stopped, backed up, and shouted to him.

" 'Help me.' She even stuck her left hand up to the driver's window, with the word
Pray
written on it." Jo shook her head. "But that's when Meyer got through to Skunk and told him to go ahead with killing the kid. It wasn't for real, but there was no time for Callie to explain to Officer Cruz. She knew Cruz would continue following her. She accelerated toward the bridge."

Tang fiddled with a coffee stirrer. "On the bridge, Skunk ran out of the way. Why didn't Callie chase him?"

"No time. Panic. Miscalculation," Jo said. "She went racing down Stockton toward the bridge. She saw Skunk standing there. She saw he didn't have the kid."

"Didn't that tell her it was a hoax?" Tang said.

"She thought they'd already thrown the boy off. She kept going headlong, straight into the wall."

They sat for a minute. Tang finished her coffee. "They?"

"It's not over," Jo said.

"Don't tell me that. I'd rather eat a raw egg than hear that."

"There's one piece missing." And it was like a piece of broken glass. Hard to see and liable to cut without warning. "Somebody tried to initiate me into the Dirty Secrets Club with that anonymous note about Daniel's death."

"Pray?"

"No."

"Is somebody still threatening you . . . ?" Tang said.

"The threat's there. And I want to stop it."

"What do you have in mind?"

"Meyer said something. That she got Callie to think Dirty Secrets Club
members
were conducting a dare that night on the bridge, messing around to win points by threatening to toss Scott Southern's little boy off the bridge. I think I know who Callie thought it was, and why it got her so hysterical. And I think the same somebody took a dare to see if they could bring me down."

The door opened and Ferd Bismuth trundled in. When he saw Jo he pushed his glasses up his nose, glanced around furtively, and came over. He slumped down at the table. The aroma of Brylcreem filled the air.

"Can we speak in confidence?" he said.

"Ferd, this is Amy Tang." Jo gestured at the lieutenant. He gave Tang a salute. Jo said, "I can give you ninety seconds."

"It's about Mr. Peebles." His brow crenellated. "Can monkeys develop psychological problems? Neuroses? Unhealthy obsessions?"

She sighed. "I'm not a simian therapist, but yes."

"Oh, dear. That's what I was afraid of. I think the trauma of his near-death experience has caused him to snap." He hunched lower, eyes darting. "He's become a kleptomaniac."

Jo felt herself heating. "He'd better not have lifted my wallet."

Ferd reached into his pocket and pulled out a baseball. He set it on the table. He gestured at it and spread his hands frantically, like
Help!

Jo and Tang gaped at it. It was an old Willie Mays autographed ball.

"I've seen this before," Jo said.

Tang nudged it with a clean coffee stirrer. "I think I know where this came from."

Ferd wrung his hands. "Can he be treated?"

"Don't worry," Tang said. "We'll take care of this."

"And Mr. Peebles won't even have to testify. I'll get him immunity," Jo said.

Ferd balled his fists with relief. "Thank you. Thank you." He shook Jo's hand, stood up and shook Tang's. "Thank you."

When he dashed out the door, they looked at each other.

"Does this relate to what you were saying, about people in the club daring each other to do crazy things?"

"Yeah. And to them trying to toy with me. The monkey could only have gotten that ball from Skunk's Cadillac. And if Skunk or Pray had it, there's only one person who could have given it to them."

"What do you want to do?"

Jo parked the rental car and got out into bracing autumn sunshine. Cypress trees and Monterey pines stood like sentinels all along the roadway at Lands End. The hills of Lincoln Park were verdant. People sat on the benches, watching the tide flow in. The Pacific was a booming blue, pricked with whitecaps. She walked to the overlook.

Below, the ocean frothed white around the rocks. To her right she could see the Golden Gate Bridge. Straight ahead, the brown hills of Marin County rolled north to Point Reyes, Bodega Bay, the rocks where Daniel had died, to San Rafael and the cemetery where he was buried. Jo leaned on a fence post. The wind lifted her hair. She waited.

It was half an hour before the silver Maserati thrummed into the parking lot. The driver's door opened and the sounds of Nirvana tumbled out. Jo gazed out to sea and waited for Gregory Harding to join her.

Callie's ex-husband was wearing a banker's slick suit with an open-collared shirt and his Rolex. He propped his sunglasses on top of his arctic blond head.

"What's this about, Dr. Beckett?"

"A courtesy. You were Callie's next of kin. I thought you should know what my psychological autopsy report is going to say."

"Shall we cut the crap? What nasty news do you have to break to me?"

"I got an anonymous letter this week. It was an invitation to join the Dirty Secrets Club." She turned to face him. "It set my hair on fire. But when I calmed down, I wondered, why send it? And it came down to this. I got the note because somebody was trying to wreck my investigation and expose me to danger."

"And?" Harding glanced at his watch. "I'm sorry, but what does this have to do with Callie? I have a busy day. Can yoil get to the point?"

"You sent the note, Greg."

He put a foot on the anchor chains that made up the fence. He stared at his hands, checked his cuticles, smoothed down a hangnail.

She took hold of his wrist and looked at his Rolex. "Custom detailing, very nice. How much did it cost to get the black diamond inserted on the face?"

He withdrew his wrist and put his right hand over the watch.

"You're a member of the Dirty Secrets Club. And you're playing Truth or Dare. With my life."

His expression didn't change. He reached into his inside pocket and took out a portable radio frequency scanner. He turned it on.

"Hold out your arms."

"You think I'm wired?" she said.

"You're a police consultant. Of course you're wired."

He waved the scanner over Jo's shirt. It squelched. Harding looked at her as he would at a toad he was about to step on, and moved toward her.

She put out a hand. Reluctantly, feeling the wind on her neck, she unbuttoned her peacoat, reached around beneath her shirt, and unstrapped the digital micro-recorder she had taped to the small of her back. Harding held out his hand. She gave it to him.