The Dirty Secrets Club (28 page)

Tang said, "Hang around a few minutes. We may have more questions."

"I couldn't drive right now if I tried," he said.

He headed to the bar and asked for a glass of water. Tang nodded Jo farther away from the crowd. If she crossed her arms any tighter, she'd wrestle herself to the floor.

"Skunk threw a Molotov cocktail into the elevator. He would have killed that older couple, too, except they got out at the last second." She pinched the bridge of her nose. "This is one vicious fuck."

"I know."

"And you thought they got people to kill themselves."

"They did. Today they switched from one form of torture to murder."

"Why?"

"Two possibilities. One, this was the culmination of their terror campaign."

"How so?"

"Xochi Zapata was the leak."

"What?" Tang said.

"I got into the files on Callie Harding's iPod. She kept records of people's qualifications for the Dirty Secrets Club."

"They bragged about their dirt, on paper?"

"In detail, with proof. And Xochi Zapata was the key."

"What happened?"

"The club ripped off a new applicant. Somebody in the DSC set him up. They stole five hundred thousand dollars from him."

Tang ran a hand over her hair. "Half a million—just flat-out robbery?"

"The deal was a double-cross. The wannabe showed up, thinking he was buying his way into the club by setting up a high-stakes poker game. Big-time, illegal."

"An executive game," Tang said.

" A-list high rollers. He was going to be their casino and their banker. He showed up with cash to fund some extravagant lines of credit."

"But they took the money."

"Worse. He put up a fight, and they attacked him."

"Killed him?" Tang said.

"No. Tortured him, seemingly for sport." Jo felt dirty even thinking about it. "Beat him to a pulp with a crowbar. Zapata said the guy begged for his life, but they ignored him. It was like that egged them on."

Tang seemed to shrink into herself. "Jesus Christ, this was somebody's idea of Truth or Dare? Strong-arm robbery?"

"Not everybody in the club is like Scott Southern, seeking forgiveness for their sins. That's obvious."

"That's psychopathic. What does this have to do with Zapata's death? It's retribution?"

"Definitely." Jo reached into her satchel and took out Harding's iPod. She found the file. "Zapata doesn't say what his name was. She didn't know."

Jo scrolled through the files. "Here." She set it to Play.

Tang frowned. "It's a music file?"

"Video." Jo tried not to look at the elevator. "One thing you have to know first. I talked to her this morning. I promised her I'd keep our conversation off the record, unless she told me she was going to commit murder."

"Beckett—"

Jo put up a hand. "She told me she'd had a career in porn, but I thought she was holding something back. When I got into her file on the iPod, I found out what it was. During filming, the sadomasochism got out of hand. An actor was accidentally strangled on-set."

"Aw, shit." Tang looked toward the elevator. "A snuff film. Goddammit."

Jo worked the controls of the iPod. "Just keep that in mind when you see what happened during the strong-arm robbery." She scrolled down. "Xochi was a lot of things, a bunch of them extremely troubling. But aside from anything else, she was a reporter. I found her application to join the club's highest level. Black diamond."

She plugged in her headphones, gave one bud to Tang and stuck the other in her ear. She pushed Play.

They saw Xochi sitting under warm light in her apartment. Her makeup was perfect, her hair spilling over her shoulders. She was leaning forward, her dark eyes shadowed, speaking directly to the camera. Her voice was sultry, as though describing an act of base violence had excited her.

"Every time the guy begged for it to stop, he only got beaten harder. First with boots and then the crowbar." She exhaled. "The guy was down on his back on the floor of this empty warehouse, just a bloody mess, and he'd stopped fighting, was just trying to crawl away."

She took a drink from a shot glass. "I don't know who set me this dare. But it's the last one I'll ever do. You wanted me to distract this wannabe so he'd let down his guard, and I did. He wasn't really a fan, but it still worked."

She poured another shot. Cuervo, it looked like. "I never should have told you about the rosary thing." She drank. "Okay. Fade in."

Jo paused the video. "Xochi told me a dare had gone wrong. She didn't tell me she was there when it did."

She pushed Play again. Xochi faded out and a new video began. It was a static shot of a warehouse. Crates were stacked ten feet high. The view was poor. The camera was placed in a corner, under a jacket. Clearly the filming was clandestine. The wannabe was standing in the shadows beyond the crates. He was unidentifiable.

A woman moved into the frame.

Tang leaned toward the screen, mouth open. "You're shitting me."

"It's Xochi," Jo said.

She was wearing a black rubber mask, Jimmy Choos, and little else. Sister Mary Erotica. Beside her a weedy man was gesticulating. He looked like a Gatsby character with cocaine nerves.

"Who's that?" Tang said.

"Can't tell."

They watched, and Tang's face went sallow.

The beating came like an explosion. The weedy man attacked. The wannabe fought back furiously. A briefcase skidded across the floor. Poker chips spilled everywhere. Xochi ran back and forth along the edge of the scene like a caged dog.

The beating intensified. The wannabe battled, but took a blow to the head and went down. And once you go down, you're done. Jo forced herself not to look away, but her eyes were aching. Here came the moment she knew she'd never forget.

The Weed was beating the wannabe with a crowbar but couldn't finish him. The wannabe reached out and grabbed his ankle.

Xochi pointed. "The chain. Get the chain."

The Weed grabbed it. He whipped it down across the wannabe's shoulders.

"No," Xochi screamed. "He's going to kill you. Will you—around his neck; throw it around his neck."

"Oh, shit," Tang said.

They garroted him.

Jo and Tang stood immobile, watching the scene on the small screen. The chain, the wannabe being dragged across the floor, legs flailing. Xochi storming back and forth, moaning like a coyote.

The video faded back to Xochi with her perfect makeup and third tequila.

"It nearly killed him. He lay there clawing at his neck, gasping for breath. We left him there." She paused and drew herself up. "It just went wrong. He was not a person we should ever have let apply for membership. If we hadn't protected ourselves, he would have killed us."

She didn't look convinced.

"I don't know his name. But I know what we called him afterward. The applicant. The Object Lesson." She looked away, and back at the camera. "We called him Pray. Because that's what he did when he was attacked. He prayed."

26

T
ang leaned toward the display screen. "Pray?"

"It's not a directive; it's a person," Jo said. "It's the nickname of the man who's directing all this carnage. He's taking down the Dirty Secrets Club."

Tang stared at the screen. "And Zapata didn't give his name?"

"No. I've watched the entire video. She never knew it."

"But she supplied the club with this video of the attack." Tang ran her hand into her hair. "What happened? Did word leak out?"

"That's my guess," Jo said. "Somebody talked. Word got back to him."

"Pray. Now it makes sense. We never get a clear view of him in the video. Are we sure Pray isn't the guy we've been calling Skunk?"

"There's another segment of video, where Zapata describes him as tall and thin—almost ghoulish. Doesn't sound like Skunk to me."

"Thanks, Beckett. This is major."

Jo glanced at the elevator. Forensic techs were moving in. A photographer's flash caught her like a sick flashback to Callie's crash. Everything briefly looked crooked.

She blinked until the feeling passed. "As I said, it's possible Pray was after Xochi all along. Maybe he and Skunk have been pressuring other club members into giving up her identity, and today they found her."

"But?" Tang looked up sharply. "But then why lure her to a random public place?"

Jo felt a catch in her throat. "Maybe they wanted to send her down in flames."

"Or?" Tang said.

"I don't know. But I don't think we know the whole story. It feels like shifting sands underneath."

At the bar, Xochi's cameraman put down his water glass, picked up his portable shoulder-mounted television camera, and left. Jo excused herself and went after him.

Outside, the fresh air was bracing. She drew a clean breath. The cameraman had the same thought, different method. He lit a smoke. His hands were shaking as he cupped the lighter to the end of the cigarette.

Jo walked over. "Can I ask some questions about Xochi?"

"Susan," he said. "She was Susan."

"Did you see the man who called in the anonymous tip?"

"No. When we got here she went to the concierge desk—the tipster said he'd leave a message for her. All the note said was 'seventeen sixty-eight.' The room number. Nobody was there. I came down to look around the lobby for him, and she—" He squinted, and took a drag. "I figure he set it up to separate us, get her alone."

Jo agreed. Skunk was both a coward and a predator, and had wanted to hive her off from the able-bodied man who had accompanied her.

"You think he was here ahead of time, watching you?" she said.

"Obviously. He took his time. He maneuvered us right where he wanted us to be. I'm parked over here."

He stuck the cigarette between his lips and hiked the camera under his arm. They threaded their way between fire trucks to the back of the news van. Jo hung back to avoid the smoke, though she had given up being repulsed by cigarettes. Every male relative in her family over forty was a dedicated smoker, so she'd trained herself to deal with it. Her doctor friends—indeed most of San Francisco—would have regarded her tolerance as shocking. It was Halloween, and tonight the city was going to explode with vampires, werewolves, and drag queens, an extravagantly disrobed and preening crew that would cover the streets with good-natured decadence. But the rainbow tribe of the city would shake a finger, maybe organize a protest march, if people lit up a Winston in their midst.

"Susan was a serious reporter. Needy and obsessive, loved to see herself on camera, but she got the story. And she had a heart," the cameraman said.

He pulled open the back doors of the van. Jo was hit with a new smell. It was coming from inside the van. The cameraman didn't react.

"I smell gasoline," she said.

"Where?"

And she realized that he couldn't smell it. He probably couldn't smell anything—he was a smoker.

She backed up, waving him to follow. "Get away from there."

But it was too late. She heard a whooshing sound. A bright flare of orange light erupted from the back of the van.

The paramedics shut the doors of the ambulance. The cameraman was no longer screaming. Morphine had temporarily taken away the pain. But it couldn't undo his burns. They drove off, lights and siren wailing. Amy Tang leaned on the hood of Officer Cruz's patrol car and watched them go.

"Is he going to make it?" she said.

"Screaming's a better sign than feeling no pain. It means the fire didn't burn so deep that it destroyed his nerve endings. Maybe it's second degree rather than third."

The ambulance jostled its way down the street. Jo's limbs felt like they weighed half a ton each.

"It was a setup, wasn't it?" Tang said.

"Undeniably." Her voice was shaky.

"You're lucky, Beckett. Very lucky."

"I know." She glanced at the van. Its interior was a scorched shell. "Pray got burned, figuratively, by the Dirty Secrets Club. Now he's burning them, literally."

Tang was grim. "These guys, they're much more crafty than we gave them credit for."

"How did he set up the bomb?"

"It was low-tech and efficient. When Zapata and the cameraman went into the hotel, he jimmied the lock on the van. Inside he cracked open the cover over the dome light, unscrewed the light-bulb, and stuck an electrical wire in the socket. Stuck the other end of the wire in the gasoline bottle. Tied a string to the bottle and rigged it to fall over and shatter when somebody opened the back door. So the cameraman opens the door, the dome light goes on, the wire goes hot and ignites the gasoline . . . the bottle breaks and it's a portable inferno."

She looked as angry as a raw scrape. "He was covering all the bases. If he didn't get Zapata in the hotel, then when they got back in the truck—boom."