The Dirty Secrets Club (9 page)

She knew he wasn't coming back to fix them, but they were knocks she liked living with.

She glanced at her satchel lying on the passenger seat.
Dirty Little Secret.
She'd left a message for Lieutenant Amy Tang about Geli Meyer's note.
Can anybody play
? She didn't know what to make of it. But she felt a disturbing certainty that Callie Harding had seen the note, understood Meyer's message, and acted on it.

Play
implied a game. It implied a certain innocence, an expectation that the game might be dirty but fun. But secrets weren't always innocent. Dirty could mean dangerous.

She didn't think the note was a coincidence. She feared that Geli Meyer had badly miscalculated something. And had gone from draw-i
ⁿ
g smiley faces to fighting for her life inside Callie's speeding car.

She signaled and pulled off the freeway.

Palo Alto was thirty miles south of San Francisco. Green and qui-etly swanky, the town buzzed with intellectual energy. It was next door to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In boom times, that meant careworn ranch homes sold for a million dollars. When markets went bust, it meant tow trucks prowled high-tech parking lots looking for Ferraris to repossess.

She cruised along University Avenue. Under the October sun, the street was bustling. College-town vigor was overlaid with a geek-chic vibe. Old-fashioned beauty salons sat comfortably near the Apple store, that cathedral of the new millennium. She saw the downtown branch of the Stanford bookstore. She'd parsed out her meager funds there during medical school.

The coffee place was set back from the street in a shady Spanish-style arcade. She walked up at 10:20, propping her sunglasses on top of her head. A man with Nordic-blue eyes looked at her, down at his watch, and at her again. He tossed his
Wall Street Journal
on the table and followed her approach.

She held out her hand. "Jo Beckett. Thank you for meeting me."

"I thought you were going to be late." His handshake was as brusque as his tone. Accusatory, though she was early.

Gregory Harding looked as pale and sharp as a shot of vodka. His hair was so blond, it was nearly polar. His eyes were the chill blue of his dress shirt. The watch was a Rolex. Lean and tall, he bore himself like a birch switch. He had the confident detachment of the very wealthy. But his expression was ragged.

"You have a badge to show me?" he said.

She sat down. "I'm not a police officer."

She handed him her card. He read it, dropped it on his
WSJ,
and
looked her up and down. She had dressed up. She was wearing a navy blue wraparound blouse and brown wool slacks over low
-heeled
boots. Silver hoop earrings. Her hair was pulled back with a barrette, wrangling her curls into submission. Harding's eyes, however, were drawn to the silver chain around her neck, with the cross and white-gold ring.

He g
^ave
h
^er
same look Lieutenant Tang had given her the night
before:
What are you?

It
wasn't the dusky light in the arcade. People had a hard time pinning her down. A hint of Asia here, maybe a cherry blossom. Echo of a desert wind there, swords and sand and wailing music in a dusty ruin.

"Can we talk about your ex-wife?" she said.

"Why do the cops want a shrink to pry open Callie's head? What's the rush to judgment?"

"I'm not judging. And I'm sorry if this is painful."

"Sure you're judging. You presume she killed herself. What if she had an aneurysm? How do you know her brakes didn't fail?"

"I don't. That's why it's important to gather all the information we can. I take it you don't think she committed suicide."

"Not for a single second. Not Callie."

There was a softness at the edge of his voice, and the slightest crack. And she sensed, in one burst, that he wasn't hostile. He was exhausted and jagged, barely holding it together.

He stood up. "She lived around the corner. I'll show you her place."

They headed out of the arcade. His stride was quick, and he walked with his hands jammed into the pockets of his chinos.

"How long were you married?" Jo said.

"Five years. Divorced seven." He pointed a thumb toward Stanford. "She was in law school, I was getting a J.D./M.B.A." He glanced at her. "That's a four-year program, law and business school

combined."

"I know the J.D./M.B.A. program. I went to Stanford med school."

He nodded, as if acknowledging her as part of some tribal fellowship. "She went into law, I became a venture capitalist. We married,
^We
broke up. No kids, no pets, no rock and roll. It was a grad school
^r
ing that wasn't built to last." He jammed his hands deeper into his pockets. "In the long run we managed to be decent friends."

He glanced at her, seemingly seeking confirmation that he didn't sound weird. "You married?"

"No."

"Ever been?"

"Yes."

"So you understand how things get complicated afterward."

She looked at the trees. "What was she like?"

"Sharp." The edge came back to his voice. "I mean that in a good way. Brilliant, calculating, driven. It made her a successful lawyer."

"I understand she was on her way up in the U.S. Attorney's Office."

"Like a rocket. She thrived on her job. And every bad guy she put away, she regarded as a W in her own personal win column." This time his voice discernibly fractured. "So killing herself would only prevent her from running up the score. No way she'd do that."

"When did you last speak to her?"

"Two days ago. She sounded fine."

They turned the corner and headed into a residential neighborhood overhung with oaks and sycamores. Harding nodded at a row of elegant town houses and took a key from his pocket.

"Here."

They crossed a manicured lawn to a red lacquered front door. He stuck the key in the lock.

"For a divorced couple, you two maintained close ties," Jo said.

"I watered her plants when she was gone."

"She listed you as her next of kin."

"Neither of us have family. It seemed . . . efficient. I never thought I'd have to . . ."

He deflated. His hand went to his eyes. "Sorry."

Identifying her body must have been horrifying. "I know this is difficult," Jo said.

Shaking his head, he pushed the door open and gestured for Jo to

go in. She walked through the entryway and stopped, gathering an initial impression.

The town house was airy, minimalist, with black leather furniture under a cathedral ceiling. An upstairs gallery overlooked the living room. Jo could picture Callie standing there, blond and glamorous, arms outstretched like Eva Peron. The place was elegant, simple, and
cold.
The carpet, white as a nun's wimple, was immaculate.

Dirty

"Have you been in here since the police notified you of her death?" she said.

"No." He stood motionless in the entryway.

"Let me explain what I need to do."

She led him through it. Got him to sit down in the living room and asked the questions on her list. Had Callie ever had psychiatric treatment or diagnosis? No. Any family history of suicide or mental disorder? None. Harding answered her queries with flat resignation. Callie had no history of serious illness. She wasn't seeing anybody romantically, so far as he knew. She wasn't religious.

"She just had a Puritan work ethic. She was abstemious and judgmental. A perfect prosecutor."

He hadn't observed any changes in her eating habits. Had seen no signs that she was cutting herself off from people. No signs that she was giving away her possessions.

"She wasn't preparing herself for death. She was working hard. Driving forward." He stopped, realizing what he'd just said, and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Give me a minute."

"Take your time. If you don't mind, I'm going to look around."

"Go ahead."

The kitchen was a chrome emporium full of heart-healthy cookbooks. One bottle of pinot grigio, half full, was in the fridge. The only drugs in the cabinet were Tylenol and Advil.

A bookcase in the living room held a smorgasbord of bestsellers. Callie's music collection stressed cheesy Nashville hits and musical

66
Meg Gardiner

theater. Jo didn't count the
Wicked
soundtrack as a red flag. Or as a serious indicator of erotic fantasies lurking under the surface.

Taking her digital camera, she went upstairs. The master bedroom was plush. The closet held expensive suits and expensive shoes. The dresser drawers held expensive underwear. Expensive, lacy, racy underwear. There were animal-print garter belts and fishnet stockings. Still, that wasn't outre. No sex toys, no whips or bridles. No seen

S and M dominatrix closet.

She searched the bathroom. No narcotics, no pills—except contraceptives. So maybe Gregory Harding didn't know everything about

Callie's love life.

She kept searching. Nothing else.

Harding watched her come back down the stairs. "Find a suicide

note?" "No."

That wasn't probative. Most suicides don't leave a note. She went to Callie's home office, sat down at the desk, and starti the computer. Harding stopped in the doorway.

"How can you do this work?" he said. i

She swiveled to face him. It was an important question. She gave

him her full attention.

"The dead can't speak for themselves. But sometimes I can speak

for them." L

"Don't you mean put words in their mouths? They're gone." "When somebody dies, they're not simply gone. They're an absence. And when the cause of death is unclear, it leaves a huge hole of uncertainty as well as grief. Uncovering the truth about someone's and death brings that person more fully present to those left behind

And it helps fill that hole." "The truth can hurt."

"It can put the ground back beneath survivors' feet," she said

"And it can help people say good-bye."

His hawk's gaze held her. "You lost somebody."

She didn't need to answer. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

The
DIRTY SECRETS CLUB 67

She
turned back to the desk. "I want to reconstruct Callie's final twenty-four hours. Did she keep a calendar, or a journal?"

"Beats
me. Take a look." In
the
bottom drawer Jo found notebooks and a pocket calendar.
She
flipped through it. The month ahead was busy with appointments Callie would never keep.

It was time to dig deeper. She gauged Harding's body language: exhausted and tense. She started at the periphery.

"What was Callie's personality? Was she calm? Excitable? Violent?" "Violent?" He laughed harshly. "Give me a break. She put violent offenders in prison."

"That can coarsen a person." As part of her forensic psychiatry training, Jo had worked at San Quentin. She'd seen plenty of callous, violent prison staff.

"It made her tough, not coarse," he said. "She hated violence. Hated criminals. Hated men who hurt women. She punished people like that."

She thought of Callie's final minutes, of her plea for help. "Did she express any fears to you? Any worries about people harassing her? Had anybody threatened her?"

He shook his head. "No. Besides, if anybody threatened her, she'd sic a SWAT team on them. She'd have their balls for breakfast." "Did she have premonitions?" "No."

"Dreams?"

In her dreams she was attorney general." A smile touched his hps. What Callie wanted, she went after. Relentlessly. Some people thought she held grudges. I called it tenacity."

His smile dimmed. He turned away from Jo's gaze and wandered
^to
a bookshelf.

Anything else? Fantasies?" she said.

He picked up a photograph in a silver frame. He blew dust from it
^an
brushed his fingers over the glass.

Mr. Harding? Did Callie have fantasies?"

He glanced up. His blue eyes were shining. "What kind of fantasies?"

"Any kind."

His voice turned wary. "Sexual, you mean?"

She kept her own voice level. "Any kind of fantasy."

His mouth tightened. "Her fantasies involved super-max sentencing for repeat offenders. She had no sexual imagination. And for your report, she liked it face-to-face, twice a week, with a shower afterward."

He stared, waiting to see if he'd shocked her.

"Did she think sex was dirty?" Jo said.

Harding's Nordic complexion turned even whiter. "No."