Erased (8 page)

It was on the roof. It had to be on that roof. But what had happened? When he figured it out, heads were going to roll.

Chapter 14

The dense Friday afternoon traffic had thwarted Sara’s efforts to lose her tail, but she’d managed to gain some distance on the Suburban as she entered the Golden Gate Bridge. At the north end of the bridge, the road narrowed into the climb towards the Waldo Tunnel. Traffic always clogged up there, even when it was light. She hoped to use the congestion up ahead to make her escape. Sara figured that she could get through quicker than the cumbersome SUV. If she could do that, she knew they’d never catch her.

She gave the Roadrunner some gas as she spotted an opening. She pulled ahead and gained a few more yards. Then, something strange happened.

Sara was in the center lane. There was a white delivery van to her right. To the left, a luxury sedan, and behind that, a convertible. Sara had her eye on all three vehicles because she wanted to stay ahead of them. The more traffic she put in her rear view mirror, the more her pursuers would have to muddle through when the road narrowed on the incline.

Then, mysteriously, the cars around her all suddenly died. The van decelerated and came drifting towards her. The driver gave no warning. No turn signal, no lights, and no horn. The van simply began moving into her lane. Sara punched the accelerator and skipped into the next lane, ahead of the sedan. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the van careening across the lanes behind her, towards the inside barrier. It narrowly missed the sedan, but hit the convertible in the rear quarter. The convertible spun out and slammed into the inside barrier. The sedan rolled to a stop, parked at an odd angle across two lanes.

All along the north end of the Golden Gate, cars began piling up. Sara swerved to miss another car that was rolling to a stop ahead of her, and then had to cut through two more as they wobbled back and forth across the lanes.

She flew through them and sped off the bridge, flying up the hill towards the tunnel. As she headed up the slope, she glanced back at the eerie scene and saw the Suburban sitting at a dead stop near the south end of the bridge. A hundred stalled cars and several accidents lay between them. Sara frowned at the strangeness of it all. She had no rational explanation for what had happened. But she was smart enough to take advantage. She hit the gas and disappeared into the tunnel.

*

A sense of dread overcame Sara as she parked in front of her house. The paint on the garage was faded and peeling from neglect, and the lawn was brown and dead. Scott would never have allowed that to happen.

The living room curtains were gone. An old blanket hung over the window. One of the window screens was torn and hanging from the frame. Sara had the eerie sensation that she’d parked at the wrong house. She even glanced up at the address just to make sure.

Sara went inside. She called Scott’s name and got no response. The smell instantly overwhelmed her, and she almost retched. It was revolting, like a trip to the city dump on a windy day. She winced. As her eyes adjusted to the dark interior, things only got worse.

Old, stained bed sheets and blankets had replaced all of the curtains in the house. The leather sofa in the living room was gone, in its place a disheveled orange pullout that the Salvation Army would have rejected. The flat-screen TV was gone as well. The living room walls were plastered with newspaper clippings of Fortress and his band, and Nazi propaganda. Sara staggered forward, unable to believe what she was seeing. She had the urge to start pulling everything down, but she didn’t even know where to start.

She wandered through the house in a daze. Her home -her quaint Marin county cottage- looked like the lair of a serial killer. It was impossible to wrap her head around what she was seeing. How could someone have done this to her home? She’d just been there a few hours ago. No one could have totally emptied her house and destroyed it in that amount of time. It didn’t seem possible.

And the furniture… why would they change the furniture? The senselessness of it was terrifying.

Tears blinded her as Sara stumbled through rest of the house and found it to be the same. The furnishings were either gone or destroyed. The master bedroom was in chaos and the only bed was an old mattress lying on the floor. The closet doors were missing, but Sara found them lying on the ground in the backyard next to Bree’s playhouse, which was turned on its side.

Bree’s room looked like someone had emptied a trashcan on the floor. The only thing intact was the pink paint on the walls. Sara and Scott had done that when Bree was four. The room’s previous color had been a nice neutral tan, a color Sara knew would be appropriate for either a boy or girl. At the time, they hadn’t known what sex the baby was going to be. They wanted it to be a surprise.

Then Bree came along, and very soon began to assert her will. By the time she was four, Bree knew very well that she wanted a pink room. She more or less demanded it, and Sara was happy to oblige. She would have done anything to make Bree happy.

Sara felt nauseous as she glanced at the discarded refuse, at the hole knocked in the wall and the broken closet door. Who would have done such a thing? What sort of deranged mind would do that to someone’s home?

She called out to Scott in a quaking voice, though she knew he wouldn’t answer. Scott and Bree were both gone. Her family was gone. Sara leaned up against the wall. She dropped her head into her hands and wept. She felt her world crumbling, and along with it, her sanity. Bree was real. Scott was real. She told herself this. It had to be true. The house, the bedroom… these things proved that her past life had been real… but what had happened? What had become of it all?
Of her family?

Sara recalled the voice on the phone:
Your family is gone, Sara. You’ll never see them again unless you come to us.
She got a sickening feeling as she realized she might have made a terrible mistake. The man on the phone really had taken her family. What if she had put them in danger by running away?

Sara thought about going back, about begging them to let her family go. What would they do? The man on the phone had already framed her for murder. If she went back, he would probably kill her. Maybe he would even kill Scott and Bree, too. Her stomach lurched at the thought.

“No,” she murmured. She couldn’t give up like that. Sara couldn’t live without her family. She needed them, and they needed her. She couldn’t live without them. Sara would kill herself if she lost them. But even if she did go back to the city, how could she find them?

She wouldn’t have to, she realized. They would find her. They were looking for her. All she’d have to do was show herself. But what then? What if she turned herself over to the killers? Would that save her family?

Sara couldn’t even guess. But she knew one thing for certain. She had to go back to where it had all begun. She had to go back to the city. That was where she could find
them,
and that would be the first step in understanding what had happened to her and where her family had gone.

Sara wandered back to the car in a stupor. It was hard to make sense of things.
You’re a wanted terrorist.
You’ve been living in a dream.

In the back of her head, Sara heard the man on the phone, and she trembled as she realized he’d been telling the truth. His words twisted like a knife in her gut. It made her wonder if everything else the man had said was true. Was it possible? Could they really have taken her life like that? Could they have somehow erased the old Sara, and turned her into this other person? A terrorist? And what about her family? How did Scott and Bree play into it? Were the real killers going to use Sara’s family against her?

The thought made Sara angry. How could they? How dare they do something like that? It made her angry enough to want to kill, and that was an unfamiliar emotion for Sara. Her logical, rational mind knew that her fear was only fuel to the fire, but she couldn’t detach herself. She was feeling it. It was inside of her, this palette of emotion and rage and murder.

Sitting there in the Roadrunner, white knuckles gripping the wheel, Sara realized she could in fact kill. Not only that, part of her actually wanted to. She wanted to find the bastard on the phone and rip his head off. First, though, she had to find her family. Sara couldn’t do anything to endanger them.

Sara was sitting in the Roadrunner wrestling with this inner turmoil when a movement in the rear view mirror caught her attention. It was a police car. She froze, her entire being focused on the cruiser as it passed by and rolled towards the end of the block. Then she saw the brake lights come on, and the car started to turn around. Sara jammed the key into the ignition and slammed the Roadrunner into gear.

Chapter 15

It was one-thirty p.m. when Brandy arrived at Union Square. She had to park three blocks away. Traffic was locked up tight. The SFPD had pushed the protestors out of the square and they had flooded into the surrounding streets. As she neared the scene, Brandy heard the rallyers shouting and chanting political slogans, despite the fact that their leader was lying in a pool of blood a hundred yards away. The air was static with tension.

Brandy was apprehensive. She didn’t like crowds. People in crowds did not think like normal people. They were a collective, a sort of reactionary hive mind. She knew how quickly situations like this could escalate beyond control. It didn’t help that these were political fanatics. Politics always got people extra riled up.

Technically, Fortress wasn’t a politician. He was a mid-list rock star who used politics to stir up controversy and sell his records. Politically speaking, Fortress was inconsequential. That wasn’t Brandy’s assessment, it was Homeland Security’s. After a quick study, the federal government had determined that Fortress was not a political figure of consequence and therefore his murder was not a political assassination. It was more likely the act of a lone gunman with an emotional disorder.

That was how the case had become the property of the San Francisco PD and one rookie FBI agent. Without even looking at the case, the government had already relegated it to the back of the drawer. That seemed shortsighted to Brandy, especially in light of what had happened the previous day. She didn’t believe in coincidences, especially not when it came to murder. She was in total agreement with Ashcroft on that matter.

The trick was going to be in finding a link between the Bay Bridge murder and Fortress’s death. Ashcroft believed that a link was there. It was Brandy’s job to find it. And to do it fast.

As she got closer, Brandy saw fire trucks and squad cars lined up along Geary and Powell Streets. The parking garage beneath the square was blocked off to all traffic. There was an ambulance inside the square, parked next to the stage. It didn’t look like it was going anywhere soon.

Cops wearing shields and riot gear lined the sidewalks. The crowd pressed right up to the barriers and hurled insults at them, though it was obvious that the cops were just trying to maintain a safe perimeter around the crime scene. Brandy pushed her way up to the blockade and showed her ID. The cops stood aside to let her through.

The square was a mess. Brandy had seen three-day rock festivals with less garbage. On their way out, the protestors had not only dropped all their signs on the ground, they’d also knocked over all the trashcans. They’d even set some of the garbage on fire. It looked like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic war movie.

Brandy approached the stage at the south end of the square. Palm trees rose up out of concrete planters to either side, and the enormous Union Square Macy’s department store filled the backdrop. Halloween decorations filled most of the store windows, including those at the ticket booth located in the square. Brandy had almost forgotten what time of year it was. She didn’t have many friends in the bay area, and the minor holidays didn’t pop up on her radar like they used to.

She caught the scent of hot dogs and popcorn drifting from one of the vendor carts and was reminded of the carnivals that used to come through Salem when she was a child. “This is a carnival all right,” she muttered. It sure as hell wasn’t Salem, though.

A few yards behind the stage, someone had erected a temporary Plexiglas barrier, presumably to protect Fortress and the other speakers. She grimaced when she saw it. Fortress had probably felt perfectly safe right up until somebody blew his head off. At least he died fast.

Rally organizers stood at the front of the stage telling their stories to the police investigators. Two uniformed cops stood next to the body, which they had covered with a sheet. They were speaking to Chief Inspector Lee. He glanced in Brandy’s direction and waved.

“We were wondering when you’d get here,” he said as she climbed the stairs. He shook her hand. “Where’s your team?”

“It’s just me.”

“Really? Usually the Feds would be swarming over something like this.”

“Budget cuts,” Brandy said absently. She decided it was better not to get into the politics of the situation.

“Damn. I’ve got a golf tournament this weekend. I was hoping we could wrap this up as fast as possible.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Brandy said dryly. “I assume you and your department will give me full cooperation?”

“Of course. What do you need?”

“Let’s start with the facts. I’m familiar with the victim; I’ve heard his music on the radio. Were there any death threats? Do you have a suspect?”

“No threats. His manager says Fortress got along well with everyone. He didn’t have any enemies other than the standard wackos. Being a famous rock star, he had a few stalkers and such. We do have a suspect, though. She fled the scene, but she left the gun.”

“She?”

“Yeah. I’ve got thirty witnesses that all swear they saw a woman on the roof right after the shot. We checked it out and found the gun. Never heard of a woman doing anything like that.”