kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (16 page)

“It’s got a keyhole, so it could have been locked from the outside,” Dave observed. “But the key could be anywhere in this huge ship, assuming it’s still on board,” he finished.

“Do most yacht cabins have locking doors?” Kristen asked.

“Well, it’s been a while since I was in the market for one myself,” Dave said as Kristen smiled at his humor, “but I think they might, because a lot of them end up getting used for charters or other multi-party situations, so they’d want potential clients to have the option of locking up.”

“So how do we get in?”

“Other than possibly squeezing in through a window from the outside, we’d have to bust down this door.”

“Allow me,” Tara said. From the plastic casing that held her badge she extracted a lock pick. After ten seconds of fiddling, they heard a sharp
click
. “Got it,” Tara said, turning the handle. She pushed the door slowly open.

All of them noticed the rancid smell. Tara identified it as the weaker odor from when they had first stepped aboard. Now it offended.

The stench of decay.

The room lay at a crazy angle, but using the king-size bed as a reference point, Tara was able to put it into perspective. It wasn’t as large as the flooded lab, which must have been the master suite before it was converted for scientific use, Tara conjectured, again thinking back to the ship’s schematic drawing from the case file.

The room’s two windows were completely filled in by vegetation. A series of cabinets made of tropical hardwood lined the moss-stained walls just under the ceiling. A large closet occupied one wall.

Tara crossed the threshold first. After ascertaining that the floor retained sufficient structural integrity to support their weight, she signaled for Kristen and Dave to join her. Kristen brought a hand to her nose. “Horrid smell.”

“Let’s hurry up and check it out,” Tara replied, crouching down on one knee to pull open a drawer at the foot of the bed frame. It contained a few sailing and scuba magazines, a seashell identification guide, some paperback novels, a deck of cards, and a portable DVD player. Typical at-sea entertainment. Wondering if it might contain something interesting, Tara picked up the DVD player and ejected its disc: the movie
JAWS
. She put the player back in the drawer.

Kristen, meanwhile, had moved to the overhead wall-mounted cabinets. She opened them to reveal an assortment of T-shirts, shorts, swim trunks, towels and extra bedding.

Dave watched her close the last cabinet. He moved to the closet. Its double doors were closed.

“Fancy furniture for a boat,” Dave said, running his hands over the smooth wood. Kristen and Tara moved to join him.

“Koa wood,” Dave said, continuing his assessment. “A hardwood native to Hawaii. Rare these days, and expensive. I got a little jewelry box made of the stuff for an ex-girlfriend once, cost three hundred bucks.”

“Open it,” Kristen said, not wanting to hear anymore about Dave’s past romances. Dave gripped the handle on the left door. He pulled it open.

They all screamed as the bodies tumbled out.

Dave, whose footing was already unsteady on the inclined floor, was knocked to the ground by the weight of three dead men careening into him. Kristen was struck in the temple by the closet’s right-side door as two more corpses bashed it open, but she was able to back away before they came into contact with her. Tara also managed to step aside, swinging a foot over the head of a tumbling corpse.

“Oh, Christ!” Dave trilled, pinned to the floor by the revolting figures. “Get ‘em off me!” he shouted, flailing his limbs.

Kristen was too mortified to act. She merely stood there, one hand covering her mouth as her mind struggled to process the nauseating spectacle, but Tara reached down and grabbed Dave under the armpits, dragging him free from the decaying bodies.

In all there were five dead men left to decompose in the tropical humidity.

The crew of the Tropic Sequence
.

Tara knew it to be true even without being able to discern all of their faces, three of which had long since succumbed to the accelerated putrefaction fostered by a hot, humid environment. No longer identifiable. But one of them still wore the same striped T-shirt and yellow shorts he’d been photographed wearing for an Alacra promotional shot.

Even as Dave stood and distanced himself from the dogpile of dead bodies on the floor, one question pierced Kristen’s brain: is one of these bodies that of my father?

But gradually the fog of panic began to recede into the recesses of her brain, and some semblance of the reasoning which had led her to early professional acclaim began to take hold. William Archer was a large, bearish man. His hulking frame was not among the deceased here, even accounting for weight loss by decomposition.

Tara began photographing the corpses and the closet from whence they came.

Still flustered, Dave’s hands slapped at his stomach and chest as if he were brushing away a swarm of ravenous insects. He was more than a little upset at his up close and personal confrontation with death, but Kristen couldn’t stop her mind’s wheels from turning now that they’d crested a hill and had begun to roll down the other side.

She counted the bodies again.
One...two...Is that arm part of a separate body? Yes, okay so three...four...five...

The
Tropic Sequence
had sailed with a crew of six men, including Dr. Archer himself.

“Check the closet for one more body,” Kristen said.

Tara prayed there was not for Kristen’s sake as she stepped past Dave, tip-toeing through the huddle of wasted men on the floor to peer into the rare furniture item. Inside, the closet was stained and spattered with blood and sloughed body parts, but it contained no more corpses.

While Dave and Kristen cowered together in the doorway, Tara knelt down close to the dead men. She pulled out a pair of white latex gloves from her back pocket and put them on. Next, she turned one of the bodies over. Only then did she register the cause of the crew’s death.

Their throats had been slashed.

Like Johnson’s.

And not just slashed, either, Tara noted with rising discomfort. These were vulgar gashes, nearly beheading the men. Whoever had done this was taking no chances they might live, or else had some deep-seated hatred of these people, or both.

…CGCC
29
TTGG...

“What are you doing?” Dave asked Tara from just outside the cabin in the hallway.

Ignoring him, Tara unfolded the paper she’d taken from the dead man’s pocket. It was a piece of lined paper like those used in school, but unlike those seen in school, it was speckled with blood. The handwriting on the top half of the page was orderly and neat, but the second half of the message was scrawled across the paper with total disregard for its lines. “Hold on, I’ve got something here, Tara said, before reading to herself:

Crewmember Roger Afferson, May 30: Kaulakahi Channel, between Kauai and Niihau—relatively calm, clear sky, 3-4 foot seas, 10 knot SW wind.

5:15 A.M.: Took water samples. Sighted same nameless ship we saw yesterday. Following us?

6:00 A.M: Ship is definitely following us. Does not respond to radio.

6:30 A.M.: Attacked by pirates! Writing in darkness as I hide in supply closet 3. Heard gunshots & screams. Seems like we are outnumbered but it could just be their weapons. Men in black ski masks. Asian/Pacific skin. Speak English. Roland was pistol whipped going for the radio. Last I saw before hiding. Wanted to fight but suicidal. Still hear screams & running footste—

“The date of the message encoded into the bacterial DNA was June 1.
After
the killings here. Which means that—”

“My father must still be alive,” Kristen finished for her.

“Exactly! His body is not somewhere down in this ship.”

“Oh, thank God!” Kristen said. “I was so worried we still might find him in here...like the others,” she finished, starting to cry.

Dave walked over to Kristen and put an arm around her. “C’mon, we need to get out of here and let people know about this,” he said.

Tara took a last look at the heap of broken bodies on the floor. Then she nodded, exiting the stateroom of death to join Dave and Kristen in the hallway.

They retraced their steps through the shipwreck, walking down the hall to the main salon, making only one detour. When they reached the alcove where Tara knew the radio room to be, she took the ladder that led up from the table where the chess set was.

“I should check out the electronics,” Tara said. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

While Kristen, with Dave by her side, allowed the fallen chess pieces to trigger memories which were much more pleasant than what she had just witnessed, Tara ascended the ladder to the radio room. She didn’t know what she expected to find there, but somehow the array of shattered electronics that greeted her eyes was less than surprising. Every piece of equipment, from GPS to VHF radio to Single Side Band radiotelephone was smashed to bits. Tara’s gaze followed the trail of electronic litter to the floor. Radar. Sonar. The remains of a chart plotter. The ship’s loud hailer. Even the mp3 player had been pulverized.

Tara took another picture and then descended the ladder.

“They destroyed all the electronics—communications, navigation, everything,” she stated, before adding, “Let’s go.”

Kristen and Dave were only too happy to comply. They trooped through the salon and up the stairs leading to the upper deck. They ducked the low-hanging foliage until they once again leaned on the deck rail.

Kristen felt disoriented. Something was amiss. “What’s going on, are we at the right end of the boat?”

“Yeah, this is it,” Dave said. He pointed to one of the muddy shoe prints he’d left on the brightwork when he had first climbed onto the scuttled yacht.

…TTGC
30
CGGA…

12:31 PM

“Laaaaaaaaaance!” Kristen cupped her hands around her mouth and called for her brother. Her voice echoed loudly throughout the still backwater.

Dave and Tara began to walk the length of the boat, calling Lance’s name out over the water as they went. Kristen scrambled up to the starboard rail to have a look over the edge. Lance might have drifted into the plants against the bank. But after scanning the area for signs of her brother or their inflatable raft, she gave up and went back to the port rail.

“Maybe we should try his cell-phone, just in case,” Dave said, returning from his walk toward the ship’s bow. But even as he said it, he frowned as he pulled his own phone from a pocket and glanced at its display. “I’ve got no service.”

Suddenly they heard a rustling of leaves coming from the farther bank across the stream. The noise intensified, but still they could see no one. Then a loud snorting was heard, and they watched in amazement as a herd of wild boar paraded into the shallow stream water and began to drink.

The animals’ coarse, dark hair had made them difficult to spot in the thick vegetation. The largest individuals, about three feet tall, guarded several young.

“Well, if Lance doesn’t come back for us and we’re stuck up here, we can always eat one of those,” Dave said.

“Dave!” Kristen's sharp response alerted the pigs to their presence. Heads frozen in mid-drink, the herd assessed the potential threat. Then they began to move away from the stream, trundling off through the high grasses at water’s edge.

“I scared them,” Kristen said.

“They’re skittish because the locals hunt them. They’re on the other islands too, left over from when sailors in the 1700s dropped some off so that they’d have meat if they stopped back again.” They watched the last of the peccaries retreat from view, and then they were alone again.

“We've got to find Lance,” Tara reminded them.

“I’m worried,” Kristen admitted. “What could have happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Dave said. “I’m sure we would have heard it if he started the motor. Maybe he dragged the Avon up on shore and went walking around?”

“Over where the boars just went?” Tara asked.

“Nowhere else to really go,” Dave said, craning his neck to look at the steep jungle-covered hill behind the yacht. “I’ll go over there and check it out.”