The Memory Collector Part 9

"Who knows? His brain is being cored like an apple."

"What do you think is going on?"

Jo took a breath. "I hesitate to speculate without more evidence."

"SWAG, Beckett."

Scientific Wild-a.s.s Guess. Jo leaned back, tapping her fingers on the wooden tabletop. "Okay. Here's a working hypothesis."

"You mean a hypothesis we should work from. Playing defense."

"You got it. Kanan went to southern Africa, supposedly on a business trip. While he was there he was contaminated with a highly dangerous substance that is causing irreparable damage to his short-term memory. He may have been engaged in illegal activity."

"Such as?"

"Stealing something."

"Because, if he knows what caused his brain injury, why else would he hold back?"

"Exactly," Jo said.

"You think he was involved in a heist?"

"Working hypothesis."

"So, he stole something dangerous. But it went wrong, and he got contaminated."

"Which might be why he asked me if I 'have it' and swore he was still on the job."

"A falling-out among thieves? Is he after his co-conspirators?" Tang said.

"Revenge is a plausible motive." Jo leaned forward. "Something's tormenting him. Beyond the head injury, I mean. Pain and fear are driving him."

"You sound sympathetic."

"Empathic. I am. I can sense his pain, and it's awful." She picked up her mug. "Doesn't mean I'm a sucker. If we don't find Kanan, people are going to die."

Tang took a notebook from her coat pocket. "Did you see any of the names on his. .h.i.t parade?"

"One. Alec."

"No last name?"

"Sorry."

"This anterograde amnesia. It won't gradually improve?"

"Unfortunately, no. It's rare but devastating," Jo said.

"Why does he remember things for five minutes and then forget it all?"

"Memory formation doesn't happen instantaneously. It's a process, not an event. And it occurs in several parts of the brain. When new information comes in, it's held in working memory for a few minutes. Then the medial temporal lobes encode the information and send it to the parts of the brain where it's stored permanently as long-term memory."

"But Kanan's encoding equipment is damaged. And it won't recover?" Tang said.

"Not given the way his brain looks on the MRI. That brain matter's been eaten away from the inside. It's gone."

"What caused it?"

"Kanan first told me he'd been poisoned. Then he said 'contaminated.'"

"With what?"

"No idea. And I don't know whether it's accidental or deliberate. He was either confused or being cagey. Did somebody try to kill him? Did he try to kill himself? He wouldn't clarify."

"What do you want to do?"

"Attack it the same way I do a psychological autopsy."

"He isn't dead."

"But the cause and manner of his injury are equivocal."

Jo performed psychological autopsies in cases of equivocal death, when neither police nor the medical examiner could determine whether a victim's death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. She consulted on the sneaky cases, the ones lying in the tall gra.s.s so they couldn't be clearly seen. The cases the people who liked confessions and hard evidence couldn't unravel.

"Branching out?" Tang said.

"Yeah, expanding my resume beyond Lifestyles of the Dead and Infamous." She gave Tang a tart smile. "I can dig into Kanan's history and try to find out how he got this..." infestation, she almost said. "Contamination, or whatever it is. Then maybe I can find out what the h.e.l.l it is. And figure out who he's after."

Tang cupped her hands around her mug. "The department called you in, correct?"

"For a possible fifty-one fifty. So I'm not on board as a consultant, just as a member of the mobile crisis team. However, your general works detail has a psych liaison."

"Social workers charge a lot less per hour than a shrink."

"Great. Get yourself one. I'll head to Maui until the social worker brings Kanan in and convinces him not to hunt me down."

Tang put up her hands. "I'm just ragging you, on behalf of the taxpayers. Listen. Kanan battered pa.s.sengers on the jet, a.s.saulted a police officer, and grabbed you at knifepoint. That's kidnapping, false imprisonment, and a.s.sault with a deadly weapon. I want you to consult as psych liaison on this case. Evaluate Kanan and help us find him."

"Good. Thanks."

"Get to it," Tang said. "Find out who he's after."

Before he finds me, Jo thought. "You've got it."

Tang downed the rest of her coffee and got to her feet.

"There's something else," Jo said.

"I hate hearing 'else.' It sounds like 'worse.'"

"It is. Kanan can't be called off," she said. "If he's determined to kill, he will not stop. Because even if I convince him to back down, within five minutes he'll forget. Then he'll be gone again," she said. "We have to get him in custody before somebody dies."

Tang looked pensive. "Let me know when you get hold of Kanan's wife. We'll pay her a visit."

Jo dropped her keys on her hallway table and headed for the kitchen. The house was cold. She kept her jean jacket on, turned up the heat, and turned on some lights. Her hardwood floors gleamed. Her reflection followed her from the hallway mirror.

The morning's events felt almost viscerally fresh. Kanan's scent lingered in her sweater. She wanted to rid herself of it but forced herself to sit down at the kitchen table while her memories were vivid and write her initial notes on Kanan's case, starting with everything he had said to her.

The Reaper's here to collect, while I'm still walking.

It was an awful thought. Living, but without memory, without the ability to learn and remember. To have life flicker into brightness only to pa.s.s from sight, forever out of reach, like a scene glimpsed from a car window at high speed-it was a nightmare.

She touched the Coptic cross that hung from a chain around her neck. It encouraged her to believe that death might not mean dissolution, but instead radical change.

For a brief second she saw her husband, Daniel, alive, then dead. The memory clawed at her around the throat. Daniel was gone, their life together erased. But mental erasure-having one's experiences collected, swept away-that idea frightened her in a different way. The mind was intelligence and humor and soul. Without memory, what was left?

She put down her pen and went upstairs to shower.

In a frame on the dresser in the bedroom she kept Daniel's photo. It was a snapshot from one of their last climbing trips to Yosemite. Daniel was standing behind her, arms around her shoulders, an amused look on his face. Jo was laughing. Behind them, Half Dome glowed with the golden light of sunset.

Miss you, dawg, she thought.

Daniel had been a trauma doc, driven and talented and curious about the world. In the E.R. he had been like a Buddha at the eye of a storm. But though he was outwardly calm, he had burned with fires that he locked inside and only let her glimpse at moments of tension. When he got in those moods and wouldn't talk, but would go for a ten-K run or sit on the front porch watching neighborhood kids playing basketball in the park across the street, she finally learned to knock him back to the present.

"Don't make me get the skillet," she would tell him. "It rings like a gong when I hit it against your thick skull, but I want to cook with it later."

And nine times out of ten, he'd smile and swing her around to sit beside him on the steps. When he smiled, he looked transformed.

And when he woke her before dawn, because he'd been paged, or had battled the covers to a draw, sometimes she just said, "Skillet," and he would ignore her objections and laugh and ruin the rest of her night's sleep.

These days she woke alone. At first it had been with a shock, every time-moments of confusion before the memories and reality rolled back in like slag, like the shipwrecked remains of their journey together. Like the ruined medical supplies that had sloshed through the wrecked medevac chopper in which Daniel had died. On those first mornings, merely opening her eyes, seeing the morning light, had lit a fuse that made her relive the event.

Time had softened that pain. When she woke, the thick rope of grief no longer tightened around her throat as she looked out at the endless horizon of the day and a world where Daniel wasn't. Where he would never be, where she could not conjure him. The vast, busy, roiling world, which demanded that she fight her way through it, where she had felt lost, wanting to share, to question, to lean on him and prod and laugh and wrap her arms around him and fall into his embrace, to hear him once, just once more, even for a snap of time that was like a door blowing shut, just to hear him say, "Johanna," and know she was his anchor, and he the star in the night sky she hung her hopes on, everything she aimed for and chased after and watched with diamond-bright love.

Memory. She had learned, over the previous two and a half years, how to remember her husband without being hooked and yanked into the realm of tears. She'd learned to recall him, and even his death, without reliving the experience; to avoid becoming transfixed by the image, to prevent adrenaline from jacking through her veins until she wanted to scream. She'd learned that in the bereavement group at UCSF, which she now ran. She'd learned how to step back, to empathize without breaking down, to throw a rope across the chasm of grief and be there for others crossing the gulf.

She could look at the photo on the dresser now with fondness. Most of the time. She could wake eager to face the day. Most of the time.

And these days, she could wake with a smile and a rush in her pulse and a silly, moony feeling that she hadn't known since she was a teenager. The feeling of a crush.

She threw her clothes in the hamper, pulled on a black and white kimono, and tiptoed fast across the cold wood floor to turn on the shower. She stood under the hot water and let it wash away the morning's anxieties and Ian Kanan's aggression. Then she dried her hair until the curls lay loose and confused down her back, pulled on an ivory fisherman's sweater and green combats and wool socks, and opened the shutters. The day outside had turned from gloomy to h.e.l.l, yeah.

Her house peered out across rooftops from the top of the hill, past the slick green of the magnolia in her back yard, over Victorian apartment buildings and houses painted Matchbox car colors. Beyond a neighbor's Monterey pine, past neighborhoods that rode the hills and valleys like homes on a rolling sea, past the dark forests of the Presidio, was the Golden Gate Bridge, pulsing red in the stormy afternoon light. She twisted her hair up into a swirl and captured it in a claw clip.

She was halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rang. Her heart gave a kick. Probably FedEx, or Wendell the mailman on an amphetamine bender, doing his rounds five times faster than his colleagues. And five times worse. Probably delivering the wrong mail to everybody on the hill again.

But if it wasn't Wired Wendell, the possibilities distilled to Oh, c.r.a.p and Should have put on lipstick. Jo crossed the front hall and opened the door.

Gabriel Quintana stood on the porch. He was holding a sack of doughnuts and two cups of coffee large enough to power a top fuel dragster.

"Can I corrupt your day?" he said.

She smiled.

Taking the doughnuts, she let him in. "Bring me sugar, b.u.t.ter, and caffeine, and you can take my soul." They walked down the hall to the kitchen. She looked in the sack. "Oh, yeah. What do you want me to do? Name it. Rob a bank? Toss one of those chocolate puppies on the counter and point me at a teller."

"That's not what I want."

He set the coffee cups on the counter. He wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her against him, and kissed her.

She didn't need lipstick after all.

She slid her arms over his shoulders. He was wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt over a black T-shirt and jeans. Old Caterpillar boots. He looked like he'd dressed out of the My Name Is Earl handbook.

"Happy Thursday," he said.

She felt like she was cresting the rise on a roller coaster, heart galloping before the plunge, arms tingling, brain stutter-stepping like it was about to trip. Golly. Hee. Hot s.h.i.t. Other thoughts came to her and she brushed them away. Transitional man. Chemical reaction. Careful, doctor.

She had circled away from Gabe Quintana for ages before finally giving herself permission to jump in, feet first. She looked at this like tackling a rock face for the first time. Just breathe. Go for it.

He released her and took the coffee, a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. "You free for dinner tomorrow?"

"I'll need more than doughnuts."

"Eight o'clock? I'll make a reservation at the North Beach Restaurant."

The North Beach Restaurant was San Francisco Italian honed to an edge that folks back in Tuscany could only aspire to. And it wasn't cheap.

"Any occasion?" she said.

"Do I need one, chica?"

"No," she said, thinking, Something's up. Something had been up for a while, but Gabe played his cards close to the vest.

Gabe was in his third year of a graduate program in theology at the University of San Francisco. It was a mystery she hadn't yet solved: Why had a former air force enlisted man and single father thrown himself into studying Catholic moral theology?

"Will Sophie be able to join us?" she said.

"She's going to her cousin's birthday party. It's a sleepover." He smiled and drank his coffee.

She smiled back. The house all at once felt overheated. "You on your way to Moffett?"

"Yeah."

He looked out the French patio doors at the mix of storm clouds and sunshine. Storms meant a greater chance that he'd spend the day rescuing crewmen from capsized ships, or drivers whose cars had spun off rain-slick roads into a mountain ravine. Gabe was a P.J., a pararescueman, with the 129th Rescue Wing of the California Air National Guard. He was a former tech sergeant who had spent years on active duty with the air force as a combat medic and now worked as a civilian reservist with the squadron out of its base at Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View. He was a search and rescue expert for the unit who had more expertise than nearly anybody in the world at pulling people out of horrible situations, anytime, night or day, on land, at sea, or underwater.