Read Online The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner - Free Book Online Page A

through the double doors. If Kanan got outside, would he wander aimlessly? Did he know the neighborhood?
    She rounded a corner into another hallway. At the far end, near a bank of elevators, she saw him.
    He was walking away from her, his stride measured, his head turning as his gaze swept the hallway.
    Jo headed toward him. “Ian, wait.”
    He turned. His eyes locked onto her like targeting radar, without recognition.
    Where was Officer Paterson? She glanced over her shoulder. No sign of the cop. She approached Kanan slowly, hands out.
    “I’m Dr. Beckett. Please don’t leave. You have a severe brain injury.”
    His gaze ran across her, bit by bit, until he saw the tartan scarf in her hand. His expression tightened as though he’d stepped on a nail.
    “Misty left this in the E.R.,” Jo said. “I found it.”
    He lunged at her.
    She dodged but he was fast. He grabbed her and with shocking ease pulled her through the open door of an elevator. She inhaled to shout and he swung her off her feet, spun her around, and clapped a hand over her mouth.
    She squirmed and raised her knees and tried to kick him. She saw the doors sliding closed, the bright waxed floor and clinical walls and heartless fluorescent lighting in the hallway disappear into a slit, and then gone.
    With his knee, Kanan pressed the stop button.
    “What are you doing with Misty’s scarf?” he said.
    He was lithe and strong, his balance superb, his words clear. Jo raised her foot and tried to kick the alarm button. Kanan lifted her off her feet and carried her to the far corner of the elevator. Her claustrophobia screeched at her. Tight space, violent paranoid.
    “Who are you working for?” Kanan said.
    Writhing, she tried to kick him in the instep.
    “Who?” He pinned her flat against the wall. “If I take my hand off your mouth, will you scream?”
    Abso-frackin-lutely. She shook her head.
    “You’re right, you won’t.” His right hand came up. It held one of the ancient daggers. “You’ll answer me, very quietly.”
    The blade shone under the lights. Within its gleaming steel were weird patterns. Kinked lines, dark, not quite twisting—almost like a circuit board. As the angle of the blade altered, they shimmered like oil.
    It wasn’t a ceremonial seppuku knife. Not Japanese. But old—so old that it had almost certainly done the job before, and more than once.
    She wasn’t going to scream.
    Yet.
    He took his hand off her mouth. “What do you want? Do you have it?”
    “Misty came to see you in the emergency room not fifteen minutes ago. I spoke to her.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “You can’t remember. Come back to the E.R. and—”
    “Stop lying to me.”
    Convincing him she was telling the truth was out of the question. Misty hadn’t had to sign in when she came to the hospital. Maybe the cops could tell Kanan that his wife had been there, right after they cuffed him, and holy flaming crap, that blade looked sharp.
    “I’m a psychiatrist. I brought you here in an ambulance from your London flight. You told me you’d been poisoned on your business trip to Africa. You said, ‘They’ll say it was self-inflicted.’”
    Instead of confusion, disbelief and anger rolled across Kanan’s face. “Self-inflicted? You don’t get so lucky. And not poisoned. Contaminated.”
    That was something different altogether. Despite her fear, she said, “What with?”
    He put his ear close to hers. “Listen to me.”
    He was breathing hard, thrumming with tension. Jo sensed that he was close to breaking down. If she hadn’t been terrified, she would have felt sorry for him. But she felt like she’d fallen into a pit with a wounded animal.
    “If you’re a shrink, you can be quiet and listen for one minute. Isn’t that what you’re trained to do?”
    The elevator felt like a tin can that could easily crush her. Don’t hyperventilate, she told herself. Just breathe .
    And don’t point that knife at me. She didn’t have a weapon, or a shield,