Erased, page 11
There were a lot more questions than answers in this case. A lot of mysteries. All of that was something for the police to puzzle through, she reminded herself. Things were different for her. What had happened to Genepac didn’t concern her. She was here only to get a lead on Darius. His reasons for blowing up this particular place didn’t matter. What mattered was that he would do it again and develop a real taste for it. He wanted to punish people for polluting the planet. He would become a fanatical maniac who would cause the deaths of millions and somehow elude law enforcement for decades. Unless she could find and stop him in the short time she had here. “Stop him,” she thought, acknowledging the euphemism. Kill him.
Chapter Ten
Dani was more than happy to get out of the hazmat suit when lunchtime came around. If you want to sweat off a few pounds, she thought, wrap yourself in plastic for a couple of hours. Stanecek asked if she wanted to join his crew for lunch, but she begged off. She wasn’t planning on spending the rest of the day here working. She wasn’t getting paid, after all, and she was getting no closer to Darius by sorting through this debris.
As she pulled her arm out of the Tyvek sleeve, a flash of green caught her eye. She stared at the device on her wrist. There were two dots, a blue one and a green one. Though this was what she had been waiting for, actually seeing it momentarily stunned her. Darius was here! She grabbed her jacket, belt and cap, then ran downstairs where a couple of detectives were working. She looked at her Darius detector again. No change. If he’s closer than fifty feet, she’d been told, the green dot would be blinking. It wasn’t.
Outside, she scanned the grounds, seeing a group of officers piling into a black-and-white. What if Darius were posing as a cop? That would make it easy for him to move around the target zone. Just like it did for her. Dr. Ruben stood beside a BMW at the curb across the street. He’d taken off his white coat and replaced it with a brown sports jacket. He was talking to somebody who was mostly blocked from view by the car. Dani walked out to the street to get a better look. Standing beside Ruben was a trimly built man in brown pants and a pale green, short-sleeved shirt. His brown hair was unruly, blown by the wind, and his shoulders were slightly stooped. As Dani reached the curb, he glanced her way, revealing a mustache and close-set eyes. He looked unconcerned, then turned back toward Ruben. In that brief glance, Dani recognized him from the many images she’d been shown. And if she had any doubt about his identity, the green dot on her device was now blinking.
Darius reached out to shake Dr. Ruben’s hand, then broke off the handshake and seemed preoccupied with his wristwatch, staring at it as if he had just realized he was late for an important appointment. He looked up and swung his head toward Dani, who was already walking rapidly in his direction. He took off in the other direction, running toward the numerous commercial buildings. She pulled her weapon and broke into a run after him.
“It’s him!” she called to a bewildered-looking Dr. Ruben as she passed him. The other cops were gone already, and the detectives inside the building couldn’t hear her from this distance. Her instinct was to radio for backup, but then she remembered that she was alone on this assignment. She wasn’t a cop today. She was a hired killer. It was better that there were no other cops around.
Darius ran as if he wasn’t used to it, awkwardly and inefficiently. Dani knew she could catch him. He dashed toward a side street, clearly intending to round the corner and disappear from view. “Shoot and ask questions later,” she’d been told. She had to ignore her training. She would kill him, then activate her beacon and disappear before she could be apprehended. In the future, she would be a celebrated hero. That’s what they had told her. She would have taken out one of the worst monsters of all time. She regretted that she would have no chance to see Gemma again and say a proper good-bye. That was probably best for Gemma though.
She sprinted toward the corner, arriving a split second after Darius had rounded it. She spotted him just ahead. He turned to catch her eye, looking alarmed, then broke for a passage between two buildings. She planted her feet and fired just as he ducked out of sight. Then she resumed pursuit, following his trail around the building into a small side street. He’d disappeared. He must have gone inside one of the buildings. She stood still and listened, her heart thumping insistently in her chest. She knew the gunshot would alert the officers still in the Genepac building. She had to get Darius before they arrived.
She flattened herself against the wall of a building, realizing she was an easy target from any of a dozen windows on the opposite side of the street. She eyed one window after another, watching for movement and primed to shoot.
She moved with caution past doorways, hoping to catch him hiding in one. Just one bullet, she thought, and the world would be rid of this menace for all time.
“Darius!” she called as loudly as she could. “Make this easy on yourself and give yourself up!” No response.
Just then two detectives rounded the corner, guns drawn. They saw Dani and joined her in a doorway alcove.
“He came into this street, then disappeared,” she said.
“It’s Darius?” one of them asked. “Are you sure?”
She nodded.
“How’d you ID him?” asked the other.
Uh, yeah, that was a tough one, she thought, thinking of the device on her wrist. “He matched the description and ran when he saw me. Let’s search these buildings. He’s got to be here somewhere. Brown pants, green shirt, brown mustache. Medium height, thin build.”
“I’ll take this building,” she said, jerking her head toward the door behind them.
When they had moved on, each of them disappearing into apartment houses, Dani consulted her watch. The green dot had gone out. Darius was no longer here. He wasn’t hiding in one of these buildings after all. He must have kept running. He had escaped again.
She holstered her weapon and walked back to where Dr. Ruben still stood beside his Beemer.
“What happened?” he asked.
“He got away.”
“Who is he? Why did he run?”
“He’s Darius, the guy who blew up your lab.”
Dr. Ruben’s mouth fell open. “But I…he said…”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was a scientist. He wanted to know how bad…how much we lost.” Ruben was obviously disconcerted. He rubbed the top of his bald head.
“He wanted to know how successful his bomb was,” Dani surmised.
“He didn’t seem like…that wasn’t how it sounded. I thought he was genuinely sympathetic, actually, to hear how much irreplaceable…”
“Have you ever seen this man before?”
“No. I think I would remember him.” Ruben took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He asked particularly about the black beetle beans, if they had survived.”
“Black beetle beans?”
“It’s a kind of bean that’s native to China. They’re shiny black and resemble beetles. The species is believed to be extinct now, and it’s possible we have the only existing seeds in the world. I mean, we did have. I’m almost positive they were destroyed in the blast. That’s what I told him.”
“Why did he want to know about a bean?”
“He said he had hoped to get a sample from us. He wanted to propagate and study them.”
Dani shook her head. “Probably just a story he invented to go along with his cover. So you wouldn’t suspect him.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t suspect him at all!” Ruben’s eyes widened as he realized he’d been completely taken in and had been talking to a dangerous criminal.
“No. So why did he run? One minute he’s perfectly comfortable talking to you, then suddenly he takes off like he’s been found out. Why?”
“He saw you.”
She shrugged. “So what? A few minutes ago a half a dozen cops were out here on the street and it didn’t bother him.”
“I don’t know.” Ruben shook his head as if he were extremely weary.
The only difference between Dani and those other cops was that she had a device that could ID Darius. But he couldn’t know that. He couldn’t know about this device from the future. So it had to be something else. He’d never seen her before. Yesterday on the roof, when she arrived, he was moving away from her and never turned around. She only saw the back of his head. She couldn’t make any sense of it, why he had run, especially when running would have given him away automatically.
“Are you on your way to lunch?” she asked Ruben.
“No, I’m going home for the day. This has been very trying.”
“Where’s home?”
“Mountain View.”
“I’m going the other way. Could you give me a lift to BART?”
He nodded. Dani was anxious to get away before news of the Darius sighting hit the airwaves. She needed to keep a low profile.
Once they were in the car and moving, Ruben said, “It’s kind of odd about the beetle beans. That it was that particular thing he mentioned. If it was a random thing, I mean.”
“Why odd?”
“On Friday I mailed a package of those same seeds to a Berkeley professor who wanted them for an experiment.”
“You give them out like that, something that rare?”
“We’ll give them out up to a certain percentage, always with the condition that in return, we get some back, new ones. That way, we keep the supply robust and viable. After all, seeds don’t last forever.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. Did you tell Darius about those seeds?”
“No. I only just now remembered.”
“Do you know what kind of experiment this professor wanted to do?”
“Not exactly, but she’s worked with us before. She’s a cancer researcher, so I assume she’s looking for a new cancer treatment.”
“Is that likely?”
He shrugged. “From this bean? Who knows. But any plant can yield medicinal properties. Look at taxol, for instance. It comes from the Pacific yew tree. Very interesting things are being discovered on a daily basis by researchers looking at common plants.”
“But this isn’t a common plant.”
“Not anymore. Nevertheless, she must have some reason for thinking it could be useful.”
He turned off the road toward the parking lot at the train station. “Pharmaceuticals are not our business at Genepac, but obviously that’s one of the primary reasons for preserving plant biodiversity, so we work closely with people doing this sort of research.”
Dani asked for the name of the Berkeley professor. “I’d like to speak to her.”
“Gail Littleton. It’s ironic, but I put the seeds in the mail not an hour before we heard there was a bomb. She’ll probably get them today. If I hadn’t done that, we’d have lost them all. Considering what’s happened, I’m going to want them back. Professor Littleton will soon be in possession of the only ten black beetle beans in existence.” His eyes widened as he realized the significance of the package leisurely making its way through the Bay Area postal channels.
“I’ll let her know you want them back,” Dani said. “Thanks for the lift.”
She didn’t know what, if anything, bean seeds had to do with Darius and his plans, but at the moment, it was the only lead she had. As she settled into a seat on the train, listening unwillingly to an obnoxious woman on her cell phone talking about what she should make for dinner, she decided she really did need a car. Traveling this way was too slow. She needed to keep a step ahead of Darius, for one thing. That would be a lot easier if she knew where he was and what he was planning next. Just sitting around waiting for his next attack didn’t seem like much of a plan. It might be months. But at least now she knew he was still in the area and that the fancy doodad on her wrist actually worked.
Chapter Eleven
After buying a burner phone and a new ride, a rough-running 2006 Volkswagen Jetta with a dent in the rear fender, Dani headed toward Highway 101 to catch the Bay Bridge over to the East Bay. Gail Littleton was expecting her at her office. As soon as she’d bought her phone, Dani had called the university, gotten Littleton’s number and made an appointment for three thirty. The route brought her right through Potrero Hill where her parents lived. She found herself turning toward their street, almost subconsciously. She had a few extra minutes and couldn’t resist at least taking a look at the house, the place she’d grown up, her home.
The last time she’d been here was almost two weeks ago. She and Gemma had come by for Sunday dinner as they frequently did when Dani had Sundays off. The topic of conversation had been all about her sister Rachel’s wedding. Rachel was marrying a great guy, Luke. Not Italian as their parents would have liked, but they’d gotten over that mild disappointment. After all, if they were cool with their firstborn daughter marrying a lesbian, how could they object to Luke? Since Rachel was pregnant, what choice did they have anyway? If he wasn’t marrying her willingly, they would have leaned on him hard to do it.
She drove uphill, noting the view in her side mirror of downtown San Francisco in the distance below. The skyscrapers of the Financial District dominated the picture, with the Transamerica Pyramid easily distinguishable. The bay itself beyond that was just a blue-gray haze.
The Jetta, black and ordinary, was at least inconspicuous. The young woman who had taken her money had seemed relieved to get the sale. She got a nice deal for a car with so many miles on it. It didn’t matter to Dani if she paid a little more than it was worth. She couldn’t see how she’d be able to use up that wad of cash in two weeks anyway.
She parked across the street and a few houses down from her parents’ townhouse, a pale yellow tri-level with bay windows facing the street on the first and second floors. On the third floor was a balcony hemmed in by a wrought iron railing. From that balcony, she had often leaned over the railing to look down the street toward downtown. It was a terrific, though indirect view that had left her precariously teetering on the top bar of the railing, her feet off the ground. Rachel had done the same often enough, not so much for the view as the sensation of balancing on that narrow support digging into her stomach. Sometimes Dani had held her by the feet so she could point her head down even farther, arms out at the sides, looking like she was about to take flight. Incredible that Rachel had trusted Dani so completely. She smiled to herself, thinking they’d been lucky neither of them had ever fallen over.
She stood on the sidewalk looking at the house with its familiar white front door, her mother’s Lincoln in the driveway. Her father would be at work. The drapes were open in all the windows. Her mother always wanted to bring as much light in as possible. As Dani stood watching, her mother came into view on the second floor. Dani bit her bottom lip as her heart leapt to her throat. Her mother wore one of her favorite outfits, a black and red print blouse and black pants. If she went out, she’d put on the white jacket that completed the outfit. She walked past the window and out of view. Dani bolted to the front door, craving her mother’s guaranteed love.
What now? she thought, holding her finger poised over the doorbell. What if she doesn’t know me? How devastating would that be? She couldn’t decide whether to ring the bell or turn and run. She didn’t know how long she stood there before she heard the dead bolt pulled back and her mother opened the door, her expression one of concern. She looked exactly as Dani had last seen her, her frothy black hair parted on the right and held in place on the left with a tiger’s eye barrette. Dani gazed into her brown eyes, searching for her mother. It’s so strange how much recognition is conveyed in the eyes and face and even the body posture of a person who knows you well. You can’t know that fully until it’s absent. Her heart sank, seeing her mother looking at her with the eyes of a stranger.
“Can I help you, Officer?” she asked.
“Mrs. Barsetti,” Dani said with difficulty.
She saw Dani’s name tag and her face brightened. “You’re a Barsetti too!”
Dani nodded, swallowing the emotion like a golf ball in her throat.
“Are you one of Marcello’s kids? My husband and I have all but lost track of Marcello. Oh, we still see your grandfather Tony all the time and his daughter Lucy. She would be your aunt, wouldn’t she? I haven’t seen Marcello for years now. My husband Teddy would probably know which one you were. But he’s at work.” She put her hand to her chest. “To think Marcello’s got a daughter your age…well, that’s something! And a police officer.” She smiled approvingly. “I’d be so proud if one of my children was a police officer.” She laughed. “But that wouldn’t happen, let me tell you. My daughter Rachel, she’s not interested in anything but her fiancé and future career as a mother. Which is fine with me, of course. I’ll be thrilled to be a grandmother, though how I suddenly got old enough to be a grandmother is beyond me! And my son Nick…” She stopped, her face clouding over, as if she had just remembered something sad.
“What about Nick?” Dani asked. “I heard he’s very smart. Always did well in school.”
She nodded, her fingers clutching helplessly at her throat. “Well, your parents must be very proud.” She so clearly did not want to talk about Nick, Dani wanted to know why, but she was a stranger to this woman and didn’t see how she could press for more information.
“Is Rachel your oldest?” Dani asked.
“Yes. She’s twenty-four. She’s getting married in less than two weeks and we’ve been pulling our hair out getting ready. She’s supposed to be here, actually. When I saw you out here, I thought it was her. Not that you look like her in that uniform.” She stood back and squinted her eyes at Dani. “Actually, you do look sort of like her. Same mouth.” She clapped her hands together. “Well, no surprise there, is it? You’re cousins. Do you have any idea what’s involved in planning a wedding?”
