The Dirty Secrets Club (5 page)

Cruz gazed into the distance. He had an Aztec profile. It was a warrior's face, but he looked young and wound up.

"Officer?"

"She topped herself. I don't see how she didn't. Right? What else could it be?" he said. "But why? I don't get it."

Jo touched his elbow. "Let's start finding out."

"But, Christ, why'd she take all those people with her?"

The deadshrinker didn't know.

He held back a moment longer, his shoulders working their way upward. The sense that something was wrong intensified. The blue emergency lights, the flash from the photographers' cameras, the jagged shine in Cruz's eyes were giving her a sense of situational vertigo. Jo held his gaze. She was trying to take in this first burst of information, but mixed with it was concern for the young cop. He felt somehow responsible. He had been the one on the scene, and Callie Harding had died. He thought he had failed.

"Cruz. Don't even start thinking you could have stopped it."

"Never seen anything like the look in her eyes." His own eyes looked pained. "Not that it shocked me. I mean . . ."

"I'm not here to evaluate you. What about the driver's eyes?"

As sharp as the flash from the photographer's camera, understanding came to her. Ice water seemed to shimmer across her skin.

The look in her eyes.

She turned and bolted back down the stairs. Three steps at a time, grabbed the railing and swung herself over, dropped with a thud, and ran toward the wreckage, yelling at the medical examiner.

"Cohen, get the paramedics,
stat."

The ME glanced at her in alarm.

The eyes. In the photographer's digital display, the passenger's face had looked powder-white and her eyes had been half shut, dark and unseeing. But when Jo had seen her up close, her eyes were wide open and glossy blue. Blue because her pupils had contracted.

Dead people's eyes don't react to light.

"Barry, she's alive," Jo yelled.

Heedless now of CSI protocol or preserving the scene, she leaped onto the wreckage. Cohen hustled toward her.

The passenger hadn't moved. Her eyes were still open. Blood had run into her lashes like mascara.

Jo pressed two fingers to the woman's neck to search for a carotid pulse.

"Can you hear me?" she said.

No response. No movement. She couldn't feel a pulse. But her own heart was rabbiting so hard that she couldn't feel anything else.

"Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me."

Cohen approached. "What are you doing?"

Had she imagined it? Was she so spooked that it was all—

The woman blinked.

"Oh, my God," Cohen said.

Jo's whole system went into overload. She felt adrenaline dump into her veins, chills skitter along her arms, her heart jack into sixth gear, blood pressure spike so hard that her vision jumped.

"Don't move. We're going to get you out of here," she said.

She heard Cohen calling for the paramedics. She thought, finally, she felt a pulse in the woman's neck. She was young, Jo thought, younger than her, and smashed to dust. Behind them flash photography bleached the car.

Lips moved. The woman was struggling to breathe.

Through the pounding of the blood in her ears, Jo thought she heard a sound come from the woman's mouth. She leaned in. Another flash turned the woman's face to flour. Her pupils contracted again, and pain striped her eyes. Her lips parted.

"What?" Jo said.

Her voice was nothing but a trace. "Stop it."

Jo turned to shout at the police photographer—but it wasn't him, it was press people beyond the yellow tape. She leaned across the passenger's face to shield her from the cameras.

"Hang on. The paramedics are coming. The firefighters are going to cut you loose." She turned and shouted, "Come
on."

"Stop it," the passenger whispered.

She touched the woman's shoulder. "I know it's hard. We're going to get you out of here."

Fingers to her neck again. There, she had the pulse.

The paramedics came running with their equipment. Firefighters brought the Jaws of Life. They crowded around, ready to take over.

Jo leaned back. "Conscious and vocal. Pulse weak and thready. Pupils equal and reactive."

The rescue crews jostled around her. The passenger's eyes shifted. Blue, sharp as glass, they stared at her. The woman's cold fingers crawled around Jo's wrist.

"Stop it,"
she said.

A firefighter moved Jo aside. "Doctor, let us go to work."

Stop
what?

Her stomach felt hollow. She pressed a hand against it and forced herself to breathe slowly. She looked around. Cruz was near the bottom of the stairs.

She walked toward him. "Officer," she called. He turned. "What did the driver say?"

Cruz frowned, seemingly uncertain. Jo kept walking.

"When the BMW stopped next to your car. What did Harding say to you?

Cruz's guard went up at the urgency in her tone. She walked up to him.

"Tell me," she said.

He scanned her face, and when he spoke, his voice was distressed. "'Help me.'"

Jo felt the blood drain from her face.

"She slapped her palm against the driver's window and looked straight at me. And she said 'help me.' I swear to God." He held Jo's gaze, and the pain came out from behind his warrior's eyes. "She was begging me to save her."

C

O
n three."

The paramedics counted it off. With the firefighters they lifted the passenger just enough to fasten the cervical collar around her neck. They inched her free from the wreckage with the tenderness of someone carrying a torn butterfly. Her blond hair fell around her head like corn silk.

Jo tried to catch the young woman's eye, but the girl looked unfocused, staring at nothing. The paramedics strapped her to a backboard and rushed her to an ambulance, one of them holding an IV bag. Intravenous drip for Raggedy Ann. Jo had rarely seen such a delicate and damaged human being. She'd seen even fewer who'd survived.

Barry Cohen stood nearby, running his fingers through his red beard. The medical examiner watched the paramedics load the passenger into the ambulance.

"I don't know how I missed it," he said.

The ambulance drove away, lights casting red and blue streaks across the street. Cohen seemed to feel them as a lash.

"Did you examine her?" Jo said.

"Axial palpation. I didn't detect a pulse. And I didn't notice any reactivity to light." He turned to her. "That was a good catch."

A thread of adrenaline crawled down her arm. It was a sick feeling. She fought it away, watching the lights of the ambulance wane to city glare as it turned onto Market Street.

"Thank God I didn't take a liver temp to gauge TOD," Cohen said.

Stabbing
the equivalent of a meat thermometer into the girl's internal
organs
would have established Time of Death as
Oh, shit.
"Who
declared
her? The paramedics?"

"Yeah. I'll get to the bottom of it."

And if it was his fault, he wouldn't flinch from admitting it. "I
don't
doubt you will, Barry."

He offered a weary smile. "Thanks."

She gave him a thumbs-up as a good-bye.

At the edge of the scene, Lieutenant Tang was talking to Callie Harding's boss. Jo headed over. The chill in the air had seeped into her.

Harding's boss looked washed out. "This is a loss to the law enforcement community, no less than if a police officer had died. I want to be kept apprised of your investigation."

Tang's arms were crossed. "Certainly." She gave Jo a look that seemed full of warning. "Jo Beckett, consulting forensic psychiatrist—Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Fonsecca, head of the Criminal Division."

Fonsecca was slight and rumpled. Under the harsh street lighting he looked sepulchral, with thinning gray hair and a basset-hound face behind rimless glasses. He seemed disconsolate. But his voice was smooth and pointed, like a pungee stick.

"I don't understand why SFPD has called in a psychologist. I don't believe for one second that Callie killed herself," he said.

"Psychiatrist, Mr. Fonsecca," Jo said. "And I can help determine whether Ms. Harding committed suicide or not."

"Whatever. I want you all to find out what happened to my prosecutor. No politics, no propaganda, no bullshit."

Tang was bristling. "We will, sir. I imagine Dr. Beckett will want to talk to you at length. Tomorrow. Right?"

"Certainly." Jo was getting Tang's message:
Not here, not now. Keep quiet.

"Call my secretary," he said.

Officer Cruz walked past. Tang collared him, possibly as an excuse to end the conversation with Fonsecca.

"Could another vehicle have been pursuing Harding's BMW besides you?" she said.

"Not that I saw," he said. "And the streets were empty. I would have noticed another vehicle peeling off."

"Check with businesses near the start of the pursuit. See if you can get CCTV footage." She pointed at the tunnel stairwells leading up to Bush Street. "Grab the footage from the stairwell surveillance cameras, too."

"Right."

Jo said, "Are you certain Harding's passenger tried to jump out during the pursuit?"

"Positive. She was frantic to escape from that car. Even at high speed."

Again, like a tic, Cruz looked up at the bridge railing. Jo's gaze followed.

Jumpers often take their time, give it a last glance. But once they step off, they don't want to see the ground rush at them. They take off their glasses. Sometimes when they leap, they turn to see the sky and not the fatal pavement flying to meet them.

But it's almost always a leap, a determined burst into space and oblivion. They don't topple. They propel themselves away from buildings, bridges, cliffs.

And Callie Harding's exit from the world certainly looked propulsive.

"Have they identified the passenger?" Jo said.

"Driver's license lists her as Angelika Meyer," Cruz said.

Fonsecca straightened. "What? Are you sure?"

Cruz looked at his notes. "That's the name."

"No, that's—oh, dear God. She's an intern in our office. A law student at Hastings." Fonsecca touched a hand to his forehead. "This makes no sense. Why would Angelika . . . Oh, this is horrendous."

He pulled out his cell phone. "Excuse me." He walked away, punching numbers.

"What is going on?" Tang said.

Jo watched him go. "I don't know. Why didn't you want me to talk to him?"

"He's not part of this investigation, no matter how hard he tries to butt in. He doesn't know about the writing on Harding's thigh, and he doesn't need to know. Don't reveal that information unless I authorize it."

"I won't."

Cruz said, "Understood, Lieutenant."

"Good." Tang squinted at Jo. "The passenger said 'Stop it' to you?"

"Clear as ice." Jo stared back. "I know. Forty-eight hours."

"And counting down."

Jo nodded. She touched Cruz's arm and handed him her card. "If you think of anything else, call me. Anything at all."

He nodded and she walked away, heading down Stockton toward Union Square.

That was a good catch.
For a second she seemed to hear machinery tearing itself to pieces. She seemed to hear voices speaking her name. Familiar voices, wounded and yearning. Momentarily she wanted to run. The glare of the Caltrans construction spotlight dimmed behind her. In its wake, the street lighting looked dingy. Office windows were yellow slicks on the walls of a canyon rising above her to the stars. Ahead, the street opened into Union Square. She reached the corner and inhaled as though she'd just found oxygen.

Good catch.
Barry Cohen didn't know how his words would hit her.