Authors: Meg Gardiner

The Memory Collector (32 page)

BOOK: The Memory Collector

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“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 her 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.”

“
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 about 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.”