The Memory Collector

by Meg Gardiner

  Jo tried to pull free. The woman reached for the iron. Jo grabbed the electrical cord and cracked it like a whip. The iron battered its way along the floor. The woman slapped her free hand down to stop it but missed.

  Jo kicked loose and stumbled to her feet. Hanging on to the cord, she ran through the living room and into the kitchen. She heard a low growl behind her. With her free arm she swept dishes onto the floor. And a two-liter bottle of olive oil. It shattered and she heard a glug ging sound.

  The front door was straight ahead. She heard footsteps behind her. The electrical cord went taut as the woman grabbed the iron again.

  Then she heard the long gritty swoop of a shoe sliding across oil and shards of glass. With a thump, the woman went down. Jo glanced back.

  The woman was splayed on her back, grimacing. She fumbled for the cabinets and countertop, trying to sit up. She was woozy but not neutralized. And she was surrounded by cutlery.

  Jo figured she had thirty seconds. She ran for the door.

  24

  Jo crashed out the front door into fog the color of concrete. She ran toward the Ducati, struggling to pull the keys from her pocket.

  What was that?

  Goddamn it—the woman inside the house was not Misty Kanan. Jo jumped on the Ducati. With a shaking hand she jammed the key in the ignition. She looked back at the gaping front door.

  The woman stumbled into view. She bumped the doorframe and lurched outside. Jo kicked the bike into life. She didn’t have the helmet. She didn’t care. The woman staggered to the Tahoe and opened the door. She reached inside and came out fumbling with something.

  A gun. Shit. She was struggling with the safety.

  Like she was spurring a wild horse, Jo jammed her feet against the pedals and swung the bike toward the street and took off.

  She swiped at the controls until she found the headlight. It turned the air in front of her into a white fiberglass wall.

  She had to get to the corner. If she could turn onto Fulton, she’d be lost from the woman’s line of sight. Get to Fulton and she could stop, run around, strip naked, and scream, which she really felt like doing, at least the screaming part.

  The fog bit at her hands and face. It numbed the air, muffling other sounds. Her eyes streamed. Where was the corner? She had to call Amy Tang. Who the hell was that woman?

  A black shape swelled in front of her, low, sleek, big—car.

  She braked. The vehicle materialized, parking lights like yellow canines, engine muted by the fog. Her back tire locked. The car was rolling slowly but was right there . . .

  She hit it almost head-on and vaulted straight over the handlebars. Ball up, she told herself. She slammed against the hood with a metallic thud and slid into the windshield.

  The car shrieked to a stop. She rolled and lay still.

  The hood was warm. The engine thrummed. Adrenaline lit her up like an electrical storm. She was too shocked to feel pain yet. She raised her head and looked through the windshield at the horrified face of Alec Shepard.

  Shepard jumped out of the Mercedes. “Dr. Beckett?”

  She rolled over on the hood of the car, hearing a hum in her head, seeing him through the fog. His dress shirt and blue tie and salt-and-copper beard seemed to pulse.

  He rushed to her. “Christ, you came out of nowhere.”

  She slid off the hood. “We gotta move.”

  Her feet hit the ground. Her legs held. The Ducati lay revving near the curb. Its headlight glared blindly into the fog, illuminating their legs. The mist ate their shadows.

  He put a hand under her elbow. “Let me turn on the flashers.”

  “No, we have to get out of here.”

  “You’re in no condition to go anywhere. We need to stay here and call the police and file an accident report.”

  “Woman in Ian’s house has a gun. Come on.”

  His brow puckered. “Did you hit your head?”

  Her fight-or-flight reflex was zooming like the bike’s engine. She put her hands against his chest and shoved him toward the driver’s door.

  “She wants to kill me. Go.”

  He hesitated only a second longer. She lurched to the car and got in. He jumped back behind the wheel and put the car in gear.

  Jo could see nothing but fog. “Turn around and get off this street. Come on, get out of here so I can call the police.”

  She said police with the same vehemence she might have said rip your nuts off. It did the trick. He pulled a U-turn and gunned the car down the street toward Fulton.

  She fumbled for her seat belt. She was trembling. She could tell that her ribs had taken the brunt of the impact.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I got your message about the break-in at your house. I came to check on Misty and Seth. I called your cell phone.”

  “My phone’s at home.” She held out a tremulous hand. “Give me yours.”

  He took it from his jacket and handed it to her. She dialed Amy Tang’s cell. Shepard stopped at the corner, signaled, and turned onto Fulton. Jo glanced over her shoulder to see if the imposter was on their tail, but the night was a solid white wall.

  “Where have you been since Ian chased us this afternoon?” she said.

  “Staying out of sight.” He cut his eyes at her. “I wasn’t sure whether he found me by following you to the restaurant.”

  “Me neither.”

  Amy answered the phone, crisp and rushed. “Tang.”

  “It’s Jo. Send a unit back to Ian Kanan’s house.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The woman we thought was Misty Kanan is an imposter. She just tried to kill me.”

  “Beckett?”

  “Putting you on speaker.”

  Jo set the phone on the center console and, trying to compose herself, told Tang and Shepard the short form. The Mercedes rolled east on Fulton. Golden Gate Park scrolled past on their right. The trees were a depthless black that absorbed even the fog.

  “You in one piece?” Tang said.

  “Yeah, but never ask me to take part in an extreme ironing competition.”

  “You got it.” Tang’s voice was as sharp as a diamond. “Why is another woman impersonating Kanan’s wife?”

  Shepard looked at her. Behind the salt-and-cinnamon beard, his face was taut.

  “Is the fake working with Kanan?” Tang said.

  “Maybe. Maybe she’s working against him—for the people he’s hunting. And . . .” A thought rose in Jo’s head like clear air. “Kanan knows her.”

  Shepard looked at her sharply. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your brother knows the imposter. In the E.R. at San Francisco General, she walked right up to him.”

  Jo recalled it clearly—the woman’s attitude, her familiarity, her close familiarity. “He put his hand on her shoulder. He knows her well.”

  Tang said, “So she’s on his team.”

  “Maybe.” Jo swept her hair off her face, thinking about it. “But that feels wrong.”

  What had happened between Kanan and the imposter in the E.R.?

  She turned to Shepard. “Where’s Misty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  He raised his shoulders. “Maybe six weeks ago.”

  “How’s Ian and Misty’s marriage?” Jo said.

  “Solid. Totally.”

  “Does Misty wear a white jacket? Tartan skirt with chunky boots?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Drive a Chevy Tahoe?”

  Worry creased his face. “Yeah.”

  “The imposter has her car, her clothes, her keys, her house. So where’s Misty?” She raised her voice, making sure Tang heard. “The house has been shut. Nobody’s been there for days. Where’s the dog? Where’s Seth?”

  The Mercedes thrummed along the street, smothered in fog.

  “Jo?” Tang said.

  “God.”

  She remembered Kanan holding he
r against the wall in the elevator, telling her to listen to him. She remembered his every word, all his threats. But they weren’t threats.

  “Amy, something bad has happened to Kanan’s family. They’re gone.”

  25

  “The Kanan family is gone? Where?” Tang said.

  Shepard stared out the windshield at the fog. In the dim interior of the car, his face was etched with the frosty blue lights of the dashboard instruments. A red streak reflected in his eyes.

  “Something has happened to them,” Jo said. “Damn it, we’ve been looking at everything backward.”

  “Explain,” Tang said.

  “Before Kanan fled the hospital, when he cornered me in the elevator, he interrogated me. Said, ‘Who are you working for?’ and ‘Do you have it?’”

  Shepard glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

  “What set him off was seeing Misty’s scarf. He pinned me to the wall, demanding to know how I got it. I said she’d been in the E.R. He got angry and said, ‘Bullshit.’”

  “He has no memory. Why was that so strange?” Tang said.

  “Because any other happy husband who ends up in the E.R. and hears that his wife’s around the corner says, ‘Which way did she go?’ and runs to find her. Kanan didn’t. Because he thought it was impossible that Misty could be there.”

  “What are you implying?”

  The cold, kept at bay inside the car, crept again along her skin. “Goddamn. He told me. He told me flat-out, and I didn’t understand. He said, ‘I will get them.’”

  “The people who poisoned him.”

  “No.” In her mind’s eye Jo saw the grief on Kanan’s face; the determination, his desperation. “‘I will get them.’ He didn’t mean get revenge against bad guys. He meant he was going to get his family. He meant he was going to get them back.”

  “Seth and Misty . . .”

  “They’ve been grabbed. Somebody’s holding them hostage.”

  Misty Kanan pressed her ear to the locked bedroom door. Through the cheap laminate she heard echoes from the rest of the house.

  The television. A loose screen on a window, clacking against the wall in the wind. She exhaled and focused everything into listening. For thirty seconds she held still, eyes closed, fighting her hopes and her dread.

  She didn’t hear the men.

  Usually Vance and Murdock clumped around the house and talked, flushed the toilet, threw bottles in the trash. But for the past hour the house had been quiet.

  They could come back at any minute. It was a risk. She took a breath: No guts, no glory.

  She pulled her sweater over her head.

  When the men grabbed her and dumped her here in this house, they had taken everything—from her cell phone to her dolphin necklace and wedding ring. They’d patted her down, run their hands all over her body. They’d locked her in a room that was stripped to four walls and a stained mattress.

  The thugs who’d grabbed her had taken almost everything. But they’d left her with her lingerie.

  She pulled out the underwiring from her brassiere. Over the past day she had bitten a hole in the bra’s stitching and worked the wire loose from the fabric. The metal was slim but tough. Tough enough, she hoped, to work as a screwdriver and a lock-picking tool.

  Misty thought of herself as a good mom and a good school nurse, a woman who enjoyed reading Dr. Seuss to feverish first graders while they waited for their parents to pick them up from school. But she was also the wife of an ex-Special Forces soldier. She listened when he talked and believed him when he said, “You never know when you might need to use this trick to get out of a tight situation.”

  She needed it now.

  She had been abducted because of Ian’s work. She was desperate to escape—for him, for Seth. And she knew that Seth would be worried to death, and Ian would be going out of his mind trying to find her. But she couldn’t wait for him to bust down the door and rescue her.

  Use what you have at hand, Ian would say. Turn whatever you can into a tool or a weapon.

  In the dim light, Misty set to work. Carefully she bent the wire in half. She slid the folded end into the slots in the flathead screws in the doorknob assembly. The door was old and cheap. If she could unscrew the assembly and gain access to its inner workings, she might be able to use the wiring as a probe and flip the lock.

  But she had to work fast. The kidnappers were getting ready to dump her again—and not in another room. Not anywhere above-ground. They’d stopped feeding her. They were getting ready to dump her wherever dead bodies were likely to be found.

  “Hostage?” Tang said. “Beckett, are you dropping acid?”

  “No, and I have no proof. But Jesus, Amy, I’d bet the farm on this.” She swallowed. “We can’t afford not to bet on this.”

  With Shepard’s Mercedes rolling along Fulton Street through the foggy night, Jo shut her eyes and brought up the memory. The hospital elevator. Kanan pressing her back to the wall. The blade of the dagger shimmering near her face.

  “He asked who I was working for. He said, ‘Do you have it?’”

  “‘It’?” Tang said.

  Beside her, Shepard drew in a breath.

  “Ian said, ‘I’m on the job. I’m doing it.’ And he said, ‘Where are they?’”

  “His wife and son.”

  “‘I’m going to get them.’ It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.” A hitch crept into her voice. “It was a vow.”

  “But why were they taken?” Tang said.

  Jo turned to Shepard. “Alec? What’s going on?”

  For a few more seconds he held the wheel straight. A traffic light slowly bloomed from the mist, thick green. An intersection materialized. He spun the wheel and veered around the corner into Golden Gate Park. Jo lurched against her shoulder belt. The streetlights faded into the fog and the trees loomed spectrally around them. He pulled over.

  He dropped his hands from the wheel. “Christ.”

  “Ian isn’t trying to hunt you down because he thinks you cheated him or poisoned him, is he?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Ian isn’t on a vendetta or a killing spree. He’s being forced to do something. He’s been told he has to get something to save his family.” She turned to him. “He’s trying to raise the ransom.”

  Shepard stared at the fog. His lips pulled back, as though he was working to keep his emotions under wraps.

  Abruptly, in her mind’s eye, Jo saw the writing on Kanan’s forearm. And she understood why Kanan had seemed not just angry, not just confused, but frenzied with fear and urgency.

  “Saturday they die,” she said.

  “Jesus,” Tang said.

  “It’s not a hit list—it’s a deadline.”

  Shepard looked bereft. “If they’ve been taken, the kidnappers must have given Ian until then, or they’ll . . .”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Or they’ll kill Misty and Seth. What do the kidnappers want?” Jo said.

  He looked anxiously at the cell phone, and then at Jo, holding back.

  Her face heated. “When Ian grabbed me, he said he’d been poisoned in Africa. He asked if I wanted to know why. And he said, ‘Slick. Really. Slick.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  He said nothing. Outside, the fog enveloped the car.

  Tang broke the silence. “I need to get on this. I’ll get a patrol unit and forensics to the Kanans’ house. We know what the imposter looks like. And, Jo, you fought with her.”

  “Yeah. The house is full of forensic evidence. Fingerprints, face prints, DNA from blood and saliva—I did my bit for the investigation.”

  “She’s blown, sky-high. The house is a treasure trove of evidence. We’ll I.D. her, and then we’ll get after her.”

  Shepard leaned toward the cell phone. “Lieutenant, I don’t know if I can help, but . . .”

  “You have any idea who might have taken your sister-in-law and nephew?”

  “No. But I’ll think abou
t it.”

  The answer was weak, and Tang let an accusatory silence hang in the air for several seconds. “Do that. Think hard. Jo, you all right?”

  Shepard looked at her. “Shall I take you home? Or to the E.R.?”

  “I got my bell rung, but I’m okay.”

  She wasn’t, exactly, but didn’t want to say so. She was running on adrenaline—and it, like gasoline, would eventually run out.

  “We need to solve this. Get going. I’ll pass out later,” she said.

  “Where will you be?” Tang said.

  Jo had spent nearly two days trying to pin Alec Shepard down and get answers from him. He held the key to what was going on, and to locating Kanan. Now that she’d found Shepard, she wasn’t letting him out of her sight.

  “I’m with Mr. Shepard. On this number.” She caught his eye. “You and other people from Chira-Sayf know more about Ian than I ever will. You have the knowledge and resources to track him.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Tang spoke up. “Jo, if we’re right, and Kanan’s family has been taken to force him to do something for the bad guys . . . exposing the imposter has just upset their plans.”

  “You’re saying things have become more dangerous?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Jo ran her hands into her hair. The engine of the Mercedes thrummed with the numbing constancy of a drill.

  “Let me get things up and running. I’ll call you back,” Tang said.

  Shepard ended the call and put the phone in his pocket.

  Quietly, Jo said, “Now you can tell me what you weren’t willing to reveal to the police. What do the kidnappers want? And why is Ian the one they want it from?”

  Shepard stared blankly at the dashboard. Finally, his eyes closed and his head dropped. “Slick.”

  “It’s Chira-Sayf’s nanotech project, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And they can’t get it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I had it destroyed.”

  26

  In the heated cocoon of Alec Shepard’s Mercedes, Jo tried to keep cool. “You had Slick destroyed because it proved dangerous, didn’t you? It’s so dangerous, you didn’t just shelve the project—you closed your lab in Johannesburg.”