kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (2 page)

Was old Johnson playing some kind of practical joke on him, dropping something for him to see? Was it something that would help him with the ring, extra equipment, maybe?

Dave's eyes followed the object’s path to the bottom, taking a bit to readjust to the dimmer ambient light at depth. The thing was going to land closer to him than he had thought. Maybe ten feet away.

And then he recognized it. The goofy aloha shirt Johnson had been wearing. His mind even identified the necklace his boss always wore, the classic Hawaiian bone fishing hook.

Johnson
!

With a spreading rash of panic, Dave realized that his boss now lay unmoving on the bottom.

He ditched his detecting gear and began a slow-as-molasses run toward the immobile figure.

From five feet away Dave could see that Johnson’s throat had been savagely cut. Blood drifted from his open neck. His eyes were vacant and lifeless. His curly mop of gray hair stood on end in the current. He wore a belt strewn with lead weights, meant for divers.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Dave registered that the boat had begun to accelerate, its engine increasing in cadence and pitch.

Suddenly he was knocked off his feet as the craft sped away, severing his air hose.

He struggled to his feet in great heaps of sand clouds and a gush of bubbles that poured from his disconnected hose. The exertion of getting to an upright position left him wanting for breath.

But he knew that none was available.

He considered yanking off his boots and bolting for the surface. He fought the impulse.

The boots were not designed for quick removal. It would take at least a minute to get them both off. And then he would face an eighty foot swim to the surface, without the propulsion of fins.

Eyes fixed on Johnson’s inert form, Dave took the few remaining steps toward his dead boss.

… TTGT
2
TTCG…

Waikiki, island of O'ahu, Hawaii

9:45 A.M.

Special Agent Tara Shores steeled herself for the climate shock as she stepped out of her air conditioned Crown Vic into all 88 humid degrees of the finest tropical heat Hawaii had to offer. A year after being transferred from the Los Angeles field office, she still hadn't acclimated. It wasn't so much the heat, she liked to tell friends back on the mainland, but the constant sameness of the weather—the near
lack
of weather. Excepting the occasional storm, almost every day looked the same as the next.

And not just the weather, either, Tara fumed as she sidestepped past an awestruck tourist marveling from behind his camera about the “quality of light at this latitude.” Her Hawaii cases thus far had been boringly straightforward. Lots of drug cases—crystal meth in particular, a few ordinary bank robberies, a couple of auto theft rings (Tara had been surprised to find such a prevalence of car theft on a small island where vehicles couldn’t be driven very far, but learned that they were disassembled and shipped internationally), and a few fugitive arrests. Even without the nationally publicized murder case which was the catalyst for her transfer, she felt like her L.A. casework had been much more interesting and varied.

It hadn't been Tara's idea to come to Hawaii.
Barely recovered from a long-time case of hydrophobia, she now found herself living on the most physically remote island on the planet, thousands of miles from the nearest continents
.
After solving a high profile L.A. murder, she had been told by Bureau higher-ups that she was being considered for Assistant Special Agent In Charge of the L.A. Field Office once the long-time ASAIC retired that year. A slightly more junior agent—a man, Shores noted with disgust—had been picked for the job, and she had been given the ASAIC position at Honolulu. Transfers were commonplace in the FBI, and it didn’t bother Tara to relocate, but to her mind it seemed like the Bureau was trying to lower her visibility after receiving so much attention. Honolulu was but a mere FBI outpost compared to the urban command center maintained in L.A.

As Tara emerged from the pack of visitors and stared up at the skyscraper set back from the sidewalk, she focused on the task ahead while she made for the building's lobby. It was a
condotel
, a building containing both hotel rooms and condominiums. Unlike the tourists and the residents around her, she was here to work.

This particular job was the result of months of research into a suspected real estate scam. An unknown former—perhaps even current—employee of the building was suspected of using key copies to gain access to vacant units in order to pose as a real estate agent to “rent” them out to unsuspecting clients. After dispensing bogus information to collect application fees and sometimes a deposit, they simply disappeared, leaving the legitimate owner to deal with the aftermath of ripped-off would-be renters and buyers. An almost identical scam had been reported in Las Vegas—Hawaii's “ninth island” as it was sometimes called due to its popularity with the locals—and Tara had spearheaded a cooperative project with the Vegas field office to take action and compare notes.

Tara passed through the lobby with its walls of volcanic stone, high ceiling fans and assortment of worn rattan furniture. A mixture of fake and real potted plants provided a modicum of ambience. A young security guard manned a desk in front of a discreet bank of closed circuit monitors. Tara had seen him here on previous visits. He winked at her as she crossed the room, not because he knew of her official capacity, but because he, like many other men, found her slim figure, stylishly cropped black hair and piercing green eyes to be attractive. The lobby was crowded enough that both the wink and the Asian man extinguishing a cigarette in a potted fern went unnoticed.

Tara strode to a bank of elevators. She entered one and pressed the button for floor 43, the highest except for the penthouse. After a ride up that was shorter than the wait for the elevator itself, she stepped into the hallway of 43. Playing the part of a prospective condo buyer from the mainland, Tara clutched an advertisement for the unit and slowly made her way down the hall. She found the unit without any trouble, door open with a few people walking out. She heard one mutter “Way overpriced,” as she passed. Tara continued down the hall until she reached the advertised condo. Her ad claimed it was for sale by a reputable agency, but Tara knew the con-artists often used fake ads to lure their victims. It wouldn't take long to figure out if this was a scam or not, Tara thought as she stepped through the doorway into the condominium.

Three prospective buyers milled about the place while a realtor, a Caucasian woman in her fifties, hovered behind the kitchen counter over a stack of brochures. Tara recognized the woman from an earlier canvassing and knew her to be legitimate, although the realtor had no idea Tara was FBI or that she was under investigation at all. Tara held her ad up to the realtor, doubting she would recognize her from previous visits, each of which was made wearing a different casual disguise—sometimes she wore a hat, sometimes not, sometimes oversize sunglasses, sometimes she was accompanied by a male agent posing as her husband. Tara disliked this type of role-playing since she herself was single in real life, but her dedication to the job led her to do whatever it took to solve a case.

“Still available?” Tara asked.

“Yes, unbelievably, it still is!”

“I'll just have a look around,” Tara said. She walked out toward the
lanai
, or balcony, to escape the hard-sell. The place was a small, partly furnished studio condo. Tara had seen all of it and was getting ready to leave when the Asian smoker from the lobby walked in. He ignored the real estate agent's attempt at pleasantries or information by breezing past her and walking directly out to the
lanai
. The man wore casual business attire, was well groomed, and, if not for his brusque attitude, wouldn't have attracted undue attention.

He went to the rail to take in the incredible view from the 43rd floor—the tallest building in Waikiki, the realtor was used to boasting. The distinctive outline of the Diamond Head extinct volcano lay before them as if one could walk right into it. To the right lay the glorious panorama of Waikiki Beach and the ocean beyond, transitioning in color from an aquamarine near shore to the deep, royal blue of the open ocean, various boats and watercraft dotting its surface. To the left lay a rain forested mountain range, its tops obscured by clouds. Overhanging everything was a brown haze that some visitors mistook for smog, although its source was a natural one: the sulfur dioxide gas emitted from the active Kilauea volcano on the Big Island, over a hundred miles away.

Tara saw the realtor give an irritated huff at being ignored, before pursuing the man out onto the
lanai
. On occasion the realtors of high-floor units had to deal with tourists who only wanted entry in order to take pictures of the breath-taking views.

The man on the balcony, however, possessed no camera. He had placed both hands on the rail and was now rocking back and forth.

“Excuse me, sir, did you have any questions about the unit?” the realtor asked. The man ignored her and continued his trance-like rocking.

Tara looked at the man's face and knew something was wrong. He was staring ahead but seeing nothing, eyes brimming with tears as he flexed his biceps against the waist-high rail. He wore what Tara judged to be a moderately expensive outfit—light suit jacket, silk shirt without a tie, slacks and brown leather loafers. A jeweled lapel pin was affixed to the jacket.

“Are you feeling alright, sir?” Tara addressed the man from the opposite end of the ten-foot wide
lanai
.

The man tossed his head back and uttered a guttural yell. He flexed his legs.

Tara knew she had to get him away from the edge. She lunged toward him, hands outstretched, grabbing his sport coat just as he jumped over the rail. She clutched the fabric with both hands, wincing as her own shoulders slammed against the rail while the realtor shrieked nonsensically behind her.

“Mrs. Garrish, get building security up here. Tell them to call 911.
Now
!”

If the realtor was surprised that Tara knew her name, she didn't have time to show it. The woman had her cell-phone out and was fumbling with the buttons while Tara gripped the man's jacket as he dangled over the side of the
lanai
, 43 floors above a busy sidewalk.

“I want to die!” the man said in accented English. He began kicking against the side of the balcony while working an arm free of the jacket. “You must let me die!”

Tara tightened her grip on the man's jacket—all that was holding him up. “No! You could hit someone else on the ground. Let me help you up.”

“They will kill my family if I do not kill myself. My death will allow good lives for my children.” The man started to worm his remaining arm free of the jacket. Tara looked into his eyes, where equal parts fear and determination stared back at her. She guessed his age to be in the neighborhood of forty, about ten years older than herself.

“Who will?” the investigator in Tara couldn't help but ask. She felt her grip on the man began to slip away. She called over her shoulder for help. Heard the trammel of approaching footsteps.

Then the man slid his arm from the jacket and fell away. Tara gasped, spellbound, as gravity did its work. His form seemed to shrink as it plummeted past floors. She was dimly aware of people screaming somewhere behind her—a small crowd had gathered in time to see the man plunge.

“Look out!” she called to the people milling about like ants on the sidewalk below, but her warning was lost in the breeze at this great height.

The man's body impacted an open patch of concrete with the force of a bomb, his bone and blood exploding up from the pavement like a human frag grenade. A woman looked over the
lanai
railing to witness the person’s fate and promptly slumped to the floor in a self-controlled faint.

An eerie silence ensued on the balcony during which Tara could hear oblivious vacationers partying on another unit's
lanai
. Then, “What happened? Why'd he jump?” people were asking. Tara realized she was still staring over the rail, holding the man's jacket. She stepped back from the rail and examined the dead man's clothing. Rifling through the pockets, she turned up an advertisement for this unit and one other, on the 29th floor of a different building in Waikiki, but with an open house date for the following Sunday.
He'd looked for a high-floor open house just so he could come up and jump. How bad could his problems have been?
Perhaps police would find his ID on what was left of the clothes he still wore, Tara thought.

Then she saw something on the jacket catch sunlight. The lapel pin: a gold form in the shape of some carp-like fish, its large scales depicted with encrusted rubies. Tara was no gemologist, but she was a woman, and she recognized a nice piece of jewelry when she saw one. This was not a costume piece.
He talked about providing for his family, yet left behind a valuable piece of jewelry. Stolen?

As she turned to go back inside, Tara neatly folded the dead man's jacket in preparation for handing it to the police. When she walked back into the condo, an elderly Asian woman who had been looking at the unit pointed at the lapel pin.

“That was his jacket, the man who jumped, right?”

“Yes, I'm holding it for police,” Tara said, thinking she was about to insinuate that Tara was attempting to walk off with the pin.

“It seems the dragonfish did not live up to its name.”

“Pardon?”

The woman pointed at the pin. “This fish— Chinese call it the dragonfish, because of their big shiny scales. They are a common art object in my country, China. Red ones, especially, are thought to bring good luck.”

“So much for that.”

The woman shrugged. “Perhaps this dragon's luck is meant for someone else.”

… CGGA
3
TTCA...

Clouds of sand mingled with tendrils of blood as Dave neared his boss’s corpse. The shock and revulsion of seeing the dead man up close almost made him forget that he still needed to make arrangements for his next breath of air. Only when the body became obscured in sand was Dave startled into action.