The Dirty Secrets Club

by Meg Gardiner

  "Mother hen," he said. "Fusses over me. Thinks I need to watch my blood pressure."

  Judging from the flush that came over Fonsecca whenever he faced a stressful question, Jo thought his secretary might be right.

  She said, "One last question. Why would Callie run from the police?"

  This time his face didn't redden. He looked calm.

  "There can only be one reason. She couldn't stop. Because if she stopped, something catastrophic would happen."

  His gaze panned from Jo to Tang and back. "She was trying to keep something terrible from happening. Find out what that is, and you'll find out why she died."

  Perry waited until he was alone. People passed by in the hallway. He gave them a smile. They didn't return it. Fuck you, too.

  He knew how to present a charming facade to the world. That's what the shrinks had said. He'd read his medical chart, stolen it one day from the desk, back when they were badgering him to cope and adapt and be happy speaking like a robot with the electro-larynx, the freak machine.

  He turned on the cell phone, set to Silent. No calls. Goddammit. He hated to wait. He wanted an update from Skunk. He had been waiting too damn long, and Callie was already getting cold. He needed to finish this.

  He longed to do it himself. He bit the inside of his cheek. His desires, he was learning, didn't get met instantaneously these days. And that made him feel like strangling the next person who told him no.

  He wanted the names. He wanted to see them crossed off in dark black ink, one after another. Finally the phone lit up. 1 new message.

  The surgeons and occupational therapists and psychobabble Nazis had tried to twist him into accepting his new status as a circus freak. He had smiled and got them to believe he understood. Shallow affect, that's another term his medical chart had used to describe him. It meant he only pretended to feel friendly, that he faked emotion. No kidding. What was the point of feeling friendly? Seeming friendly, now that got you something. What else mattered?

  On the other hand, perceptual and emotional recognition deficits, that was a helpful comment. It explained things to him. He apparently didn't recognize emotions on people's faces. Love,'disgust, shame, they went right past him. That explained why he was such a lousy poker player. He couldn't read people's faces and tell what they were hiding.

  The rage was spinning up again, a black mouth with sharp teeth, screaming in front of him.

  He couldn't read people sometimes. That's why he hadn't seen it coming.

  He calmed himself. It didn't matter. He knew he was a lousy poker player—that's why he'd gotten into promoting games. When you lose at gambling, you learn: The house always wins. So he became the house. He ran an executive game. Big-time, with A-listers who could afford to gamble away tens of thousands of dollars a week. They got a buzz from the high-stakes atmosphere. And when they took the line of credit he extended to them, and lost, it didn't matter if they couldn't pay him back in cash. He busted heads, and if that didn't work he moved in on their businesses, had them buy him everything he wanted on their corporate accounts, even if it ran them into bankruptcy. He got paid.

  The doctor, David Yoshida, he liked to play poker. And Perry never had to bust his head, because he was rolling in money. Maybe if he had busted the guy's head, things would be different today. But Yoshida paid up. Yoshida kept coming back. Yoshida liked rubbing elbows with Perry.

  Yoshida was rotting in the ground.

  And it didn't matter anymore whether Perry could spot sadness or guilt on some weakling's face. He knew how to recognize anger and fear. That was what counted.

  He read the message from Skunk. Will have it by 4 p.m. He switched off the phone.

  Fear and anger. It was time to deal them out again.

  The secretary opened the door to Callie's office and stepped back as if facing a portal to a frightening dimension. "Take your time. There's no rush, not now."

  Jo lingered in the doorway. She saw the same clean order as at Callie's town house. Files were neatly stacked on the credenza, running shoes tucked tidily into a corner. Even Callie's iPod was lined up parallel with the edge of the desk.

  She went in. "How long did you know Callie?"

  The woman fussed with a heavy turquoise necklace at her throat.

  "Ten years. She never—I never—it had to be an accident. She would never hurt somebody else."

  Jo looked up. "Geli, you mean."

  Her hand worried the necklace. "And those people in the airport van. Never. Callie spent her life helping people who were victimized by others."

  It was the same tune Jo and Tang had been hearing for the past hour from everybody in the office. They had split up the interviews but were getting the same information. Callie was clever, driven, devoted to the Department of Justice. She worked hard but knew how to blow off steam. Once, faced with a witness whose credibility collapsed on the eve of trial, she frowned at her panicky colleagues, then with great style pulled at her perfect hair and screamed theatrically before she collapsed in her desk chair, back of her hand to her forehead. Everybody stared. Then she laughed at herself and said, "What else ya gonna do?"

  "How did she seem in the last month?" Jo said.

  The secretary took her time. Jo had learned that given the chance, most people tried to help her. The trick was to know when they were trying too hard, or shading their remembrances toward falsehood and fantasy. She analyzed all information with what the psychiatric rubrics called a "high index of suspicion."

  "She was in a good mood, full of energy," the woman said.

  Jo looked in the only nontidy spot in the office, the wastebasket. It was full. She tossed out half a dozen crumpled pieces of paper and found a paper bag from General Li's Chinese restaurant. It smelled distinctly of vinegar and fried dumplings.

  She smoothed out the receipt on the desk. Pot stickers, Szechuan prawns—five dishes in all. Last night's date, and the time, 11:15 p.m. The food had been delivered. Callie had been working very late.

  In the sack were two sets of disposable chopsticks and two crumpled paper napkins. One bore the neat imprint of pink lipstick, a SWAK imprint. She was willing to bet the pink kiss would match the tube of lip gloss in Angelika Meyer's purse. The other napkin had a swipe of darker lipstick, long and ragged and red, the same shade as the word scrawled on Callie's thigh.

  "Were she and Geli close friends?"

  "Friendly. But just around the office, as far as I know."

  Also more of the same. Nobody had known them to socialize outside of work.

  Jo sat down, got the iPod and scrolled through the menu. The calendar, games, contacts—empty. The playlist was nine hundred songs and no clues.

  Notepad. She spun the controls. DSC.

  She went still, but her heart rate bumped into third gear. "Does DSC mean anything to you?"

  The secretary shook her head. "Unless it's Discovery. You know, the parties gathering documentary evidence or taking depositions ahead of trial."

  Jo scrolled down. "I don't think so."

  Jo flipped through Callie's desk calendar. She saw no references to DSC. But in several places she spotted the abbreviation disc.

  She continued scrolling through the iPod. Oh, my.

  Maki.

  She scrolled further down the submenu.

  Yoshida.

  Fonsecca had instructed the office not to give her access to Callie's case files. But Callie's active prosecutions were a matter of public record.

  "Is either of these names a witness or a party in a case?" she said.

  The secretary raised an eyebrow. "Them? I would have known ..." But to double-check, she went out to her own desk to check court dockets and computer records. However, Jo thought this stuff was off-the-record in a big way.

  She checked Callie's desktop computer. Global searches for Yoshida, Maki, and Maki's dead lover, William Willets—no hits.

  They weren't in Callie's work system. Just on her iPod.

  She leaned over Callie'
s desk calendar for a closer look. It took her twenty minutes, but four months back, she found the drawing of a heart. She could think of two possibilities: a crush, or a cardiac surgeon. She kept looking and found four other places where Callie had drawn a simple little heart. In the more recent entries, another mark was drawn beside it, a black diamond.

  Next to it was a telephone number.

  She picked up the phone and dialed. A recording intruded. The number you have dialed is not in service. She hung up. Then she looked at the number again.

  The last three digits, if reversed, were a UCSF prefix. She dialed the number from back to front. It clicked straight to voice mail.

  "You have reached the office of David Yoshida, M.D. Please leave a message."

  Jo hung up and sat for a moment. Her heart was thumping.

  She returned to the calendar, looking at today's entries. Reading about appointments that would never be kept could be depressing. She blocked that impulse by looking at the calendar like a puzzle. Sudoku of the dead.

  Halfway down, two sets of initials. XZ. SS. Beside them was a neatly drawn black diamond.

  The Aquatic Park, on the bay near Ghirardelli Square. Four p.m.

  She glanced at her watch. Crap. It was three thirty-five. Could she make it?

  She jumped up and called to the secretary. "I'm taking the iPod and calendar."

  "Okay." The woman looked perplexed to see Jo moving fast after sitting quietly at Callie's desk for so long.

  Jo rushed out and looked around. "Where'd Lieutenant Tang go?"

  "I don't know."

  Jo jogged down the hall, looked in the conference room, jogged back. Checked her watch again. Heard the elevator ping and saw Leo Fonsecca step out, back from court. He walked down the hall, frowning at her.

  To the secretary Jo said, "Tell Tang I've gone to the Aquatic Park to keep Callie's four o'clock appointment."

  Fonsecca said, "What's going on? What do you have there?" "I'll bring it all back." She ran to the elevator.

  It was midafternoon when Scott Southern got the information written down. He folded the sheets of paper in three, like a letter, and put them in the inside pocket of his letterman's jacket. He got out of the Range Rover and walked along the path through the park.

  Scott had decided what to do. Skunk wanted the names of certain people in the DSC, so his boss could go after them.

  Scott was going to give him more than that.

  The Golden Gate Bridge visitors' center overlooked the bay from a promontory at the tip of the Presidio. Under the sun, the water was a scintillating blue. Whitecaps tore across the surface far below. In the park tourists admired the view, hunched into sweatshirts, hair flapping in the wind. Some people put coins in the viewfinders and got a magnified look at the Sausalito ferry chugging through the chop on the bay. The vista took in Angel Island, Alcatraz and, to the east, San Francisco—a white and gleaming vision draped across the hills.

  Kelly wouldn't forgive him. That much he'd always known. That had been the worm eating at his heartwood for the past eight years. Kelly would divorce him out of revulsion at his part in Melody's destruction. His beautiful wife, his little boy—his family was about to go up in smoke. He'd never see them again.

  He had tried to empty himself by talking to David Yoshida and to Callie. He had thought purgation would save him. That it might be cathartic. It was not.

  Yoshida, a cardiac surgeon without a heart, had stirred the olive in his drink and watched Scott with cool eyes. Callie had sat stock-still, face like a rock, lips ever so flat. Hardgirl. She might have looked as sleek as Kim Novak in Vertigo, but she had crazy secrets of her own. And she had judged him. Her gaze was the proof beyond all reasonable doubt that he was guilty.

  But it took Skunk to pass sentence. The little man wouldn't ever know it, because Scott was going to deprive him of what he wanted. But Skunk was the one who would set Scott free.

  A few yards away, the 101 ran onto the Golden Gate Bridge. The sun was sinking toward the Pacific. The traffic, the wind, all of it sounded like a river of sound, pulling him into the current. He walked along the sidewalk and onto the bridge approach. Ahead the terrain fell away precipitously, through brambles and rock to cold waves that crashed against the shore.

  The world was going to know about his guilt, his lies, his failures. There was no way to prevent that now. And when this went public, the press would descend on him like jackals.

  Headlines, blame, his wife's eyes, he couldn't bear the thought of it.

  He walked. The bridge was so bright in the sunlight that it looked like a fiery hammer. Bicyclists passed him, and tourists snapping photos. One or two paused to look at him, or give a double take. They suspected who he was, but he was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, and they held back, unsure.

  Cars sped past on the roadway. The bridge railing ratcheted by on his right. The guardrail was four feet high. A Highway Patrol car drove by. Nobody was watching him. Everybody was sightseeing, jogging, taking pictures. This was the edge of the continent. A gateway. Why not? Why not here?

  Right under their noses.

  Here was certainty. Here was all he could take. The black tar had come up over his heart. But it would never suffocate him, just leave him in torment. This bridge was a crossing, but he would use it for more than that. Here he was going to put a stop to Skunk's plan.

  He was going to make sure Skunk kept his stinking hands off his family.

  Jo pulled up at the Aquatic Park at 3:58. She crept along the street below Ghirardelli Square hunting for a parking spot. The grass in the park was emerald green and seagulls hovered overhead in the bracing breeze. The curb was solid with parked cars.

  San Francisco was the black hole of parking. Garages cost twenty bucks an hour and street parking was survival of the fittest. It caused such road rage that anger management courses refused to hold classes in the city, because too many students arrived on the verge of violence.

  She saw a spot, sixty yards up. Yes. She signaled. The Audi in front of her slowed and signaled, too. Oh, no. Jo swung out and raced around it. She needed that spot. She swerved to the curb like a hawk diving on a mouse and stealing it from another predator.

  She jumped out. The Audi pulled up and the driver put down her window.

  The woman pointed at her. "I signaled for that space."

  "No time." Jo stuck quarters into the meter and shrugged in the cross-cultural gesture for sorry.

  "Road thug!"

  Jo waved uselessly and jogged across the park toward the water. She hoped Callie's contacts would turn up for this meeting. Though the Stockton Street crash had been all over the news, she didn't think Callie''s name had been released yet. They might not know she was dead.

  The grass sloped downhill toward the Aquatic Park, a sheltered cove near Fisherman's Wharf. At the pier, an old three-masted clipper ship was tied up. Down the block, tourists gaggled like geese, waiting to board a cable car. The Ghirardelli sign sat atop the old chocolate factory like a tiara.

  She reached the footpath along the water and slowed to a walk, looking around.

  In the amphitheater overlooking the cove, a dozen people sat basking in the autumn sun. In the water, a lone swimmer braved the chill. She was wearing a straw hat and doing the sidestroke at a regal pace, as if she were Cleopatra's barge rowing up the Nile.

  Jo caught her breath. The bay was dolphin-blue in the afternoon light. Sailboats were out. Against the backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge they looked like white blossoms blown across the water by the breeze.

  The driver of the Audi came walking across the lawn. She was wearing a calf-length suede coat over black leather boots. The coat flared in the breeze. Beneath it she had on an ivory-colored suit. Jo half turned away and tried to look inconspicuous. The woman's skirt was short. Her hair was caramel-streaked. Her shades were bigger than Jo's windshield. She looked like she'd stepped straight from Glamour magazine. She had a Jack Russell terrier on a leash, bouncing in fron
t of her like a lottery ball in the drum.

  She slowed and looked around. Checked her watch. Looked some more, impatient.

  Oh, brother.

  Jo knew she shouldn't have hijacked the parking spot. Hello, karma. Good to see you. Go ahead, kick me in the butt.

  She walked over. When the woman spotted her coming, her mouth puckered.

  "Do you have an issue? You already stole the parking spot. Why don't you leave it at that? Because I am not a person you want to pick a fight with," she said.

  "I think we're here for the same meeting," Jo said.

  "You're the third person?" The woman's expression shifted from annoyance to curiosity. She raised an eyebrow. "Well, you're certainly the eager beaver."

  "Jo Beckett, M.D."

  They shook, and Jo reached into her wallet for a business card. The woman waved her off, as if shooing a fly.

  "We don't do that," she said. "You're an M.D? Are you one of David's finds?"

  "David Yoshida?" Jo shook her head. Caution was jousting with curiosity. "I'm on staff at UCSF, but no. He was cardiothoracic surgery; I'm in psychiatry."

  Behind her sunglasses, the woman was elaborately made-up. She was a walking advertisement for the leather industry and the L'Oreal Group. She looked like a million bucks. She also looked familiar. Even more than that, she sounded familiar. And she acted like she expected people to notice.

  They did. Joggers gave her long glances as they passed. The Jack Russell vibrated around her feet.

  "A damned shame about David." She removed the shades. Her gaze was acute. "We don't have any psychiatrists. This could be interesting."

  She looked Jo up and down. The eagerness in her eyes was unsettling. Then she checked her watch again and glanced around the Aquatic Park.

  She was waiting for Callie, Jo was sure of it. She didn't know.

  She tugged on the dog's leash. "Let's stroll."

  Jo hesitated, ambivalent. This woman thought she was here to join the Dirty Secrets Club.

  One hard-and-fast rule Jo played by: Don't lie. She never misrepresented herself to worm information from people. But if she explained why she was here, the meeting would be over in nothing flat. The demons and cherubs of her conscience perched on her shoulder, pitchforks and angel wings fluttering.