kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) Read Free Page A

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