The Dirty Secrets Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

gouges in the asphalt. The BMW must have bottomed out when the angle of the road flattened. But scraping the roadway didn't look to have slowed it down much, if at all.
    And she'd seen enough crash scene photos, studied the accident statistics, hell, driven the Bayshore Freeway enough, to know that when a driver wants to avoid a crash he keeps his foot hard on the brake all the way to the point of impact.
    There was no evidence of that here, just a series of gashes in the road. Callie Harding: Until one a.m. she had been on her way to being a celebrity prosecutor. But now the trail of gouges marked her path to a noisy death.
    Jo turned back to Cruz. "What do you recall about the moments before the crash?"
    "Thinking, holy shit, she's aiming for it."
    "Did she have her lights on?"
    "Yes. Headlights, taillights, all in working order. You asking if she braked before she hit the bridge, if I saw the brake lights? I don't remember. But her brakes worked a minute earlier when she screeched up next to my patrol car. She stopped it like pulling up a horse. Sharp."
    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,