Mute

mute

By

Brian Bandell

Holliston, Massachusetts

MUTE

Copyright
©
2012 by Brian Bandell

This book
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
events, locations or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

Printed
and bound in the United States. All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and
retrieval system
—
except by a reviewer who
may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or
on the Web
—
without the express written
consent of Silver Leaf Books, LLC.

The
Silver Leaf Books logo is a registered trademarks of Silver Leaf Books, LLC.

All
Silver Leaf Books characters, character names, and the distinctive likeness
thereof are trademarks of Silver Leaf Books, LLC

Cover
Photograph by El Cesana

First printing July 2012

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ISBN
# 1-60975-059-4

ISBN-13
# 978-1-60975-059-6

Silver
Leaf Books, LLC

P.O.
Box 6460

Holliston,
MA 01746

+1-888-823-6450

Visit
our web site at www.SilverLeafBooks.com

Thanks to
family, friends and God.

Special
appreciation for assistance from Scott Lunsford, Delray Beach Police, Jim
Masterson, Harbor Brach Oceanographic Institute; Troy Rice, St. Johns River
Water Management District, attorney Kenneth Wiesen.

Inspiration
from the music of Tori Amos.

Prologue

Matt
Kane held an ice-cold beer in one hand, and leaned on the throttle with the
other. The salty waters of the Indian River Lagoon parted before his
twelve-foot skiff as sure as a herd of deer scattered from a shotgun blast, but
he wouldn’t go hunting deer while his wife and kids attended Sunday church. No,
Kane had a fix’n this fine morning for some fish; say a nice juicy sheepshead
or a mangrove snapper. Good eats.

The
blue-green waters of the estuary contained a wealth of tasty critters,
especially in the stretch between north Melbourne and Satellite Beach. Kane
steered his skiff along a forest of mangroves on the mainland side. The fish
often hid between the roots of those waterlogged plants, but they’d pop their
scaly heads out for a morsel of frozen shrimp. As he sped past a “Slow Zone”
sign with a picture of a lumbering manatee, Kane tossed his empty beer can at
it. He missed.

“Hey!
Stop that!” an all-too-familiar voice shouted over a megaphone.

Most
boaters called him the Lagoon Watcher, but Kane called him a huge pain in the
ass. Kane slowed down and tipped his NASCAR hat to the kook in the center
console boat with the goofy, smiling dolphins, sea turtles and manatees painted
on the side. He guarded the animals in the lagoon like a stubborn toddler
hoarding candy bars.

“Didn’t
you see that sign?” asked the Watcher, who had the shock of puffy faded blond
hair of a past-his-prime eighties rock star. He wore a custom tropical shirt
and nut-hugging khaki shorts. The Lagoon Watcher had been a scientist once, or
so Kane had heard, but he ambled about like a deadbeat now.

“Yeah,
I saw it,” Kane said. “And I’m sorry… Sorry my aim wasn’t better.”

The
flustered old man shook his head in short spurts. Kane thought for a second
that it might have been a seizure. No such luck. “This lagoon is nature’s
treasure and you’re not only polluting it, you’re putting its gentle citizens
in danger with your reckless boating.” The Watcher scooped the beer can out of
the water with a net.

“As
far as I see it, I live here and pay my taxes, so I don’t need nobody tell’n me
I can’t have my day fer fish’n,” Kane said. “So git on out my way.”

Kane
swerved his skiff around the Lagoon Watcher’s floating fruit cup of a boat, and
continued along the mangroves. He knew the wimpy Watcher, even after being
punked out, wouldn’t give chase, but he got behind his megaphone for one last
whine.

“The
lagoon doesn’t belong to you, or any of us,” the Lagoon Watcher shouted.
“Nature has a way of pushing us back.”

Kane
chuckled as he thought of that screw job’s cartoonish view of the world, where
fish would jump out of the water and turn their hooks on him and drunken
manatees would drive pickup trucks through petrified neighborhoods. In reality,
he wouldn’t bet on nature doing shit.

And
sure enough, Kane struck first. Not fifteen minutes after sinking the first
line in, something gave it a nice firm tug. It must have been a big one,
because he couldn’t reel it in. The gill head was strong, he thought. Worried
about the line snapping, Kane figured he’d wear the bastard out. He let the
engine sputter along at low speed and he followed the fish as it swam parallel
to the mangroves. He couldn’t see his catch through the murky waters so Kane
kept one eye out ahead in case any rocks cropped up in his path. As he passed a
county park with a small pier, he glanced over toward it hoping he’d have an
audience that could witness him landing a fat one.

He
had an audience all right. They were on their bellies with their bodies splayed
out on the rocky shore and their heads and shoulders submerged underwater. The
man and woman weren’t coming up for air. Their hands were as stiff and pale as
a mannequin’s. Kane felt a chill in his heart as he realized living limbs didn’t
look like that.

“Holy
Lord,” Kane said as he cut the line and turned his boat ashore. As much as he
hated letting his prized catch free with only a lip piercing, he figured he
deserved as much for fishing on a Sunday morning. He wondered how those two sorry
fellas had crossed God and made the good Lord come down on them so harshly.

Getting
a better look at the bodies when he stepped ashore, Kane saw that they were two
brown-skinned people lying beside each other in a partial embrace. They had
wrapped their nearest arms around their waists. The man, a chunky fellow with a
carpet of back hair sticking out from underneath the tail of his shirt, had his
other arm posted on the ground as if he had been trying desperately to pull his
head out of the water at the moment of his death. The short woman wore low-cut
jeans that framed an ass that must have been mighty sweet when it had blood
pumping through it. She had her other arm outstretched across the ground. He
saw a deep bruise on her palm.

This
didn’t look like a suicide pact. Someone had drowned them—maybe one of those
Mexican cartels wasting their own people. That’s what they get for coming to
his country illegally, Kane thought. Either way, he couldn’t let their heads
stay underwater or they were likely to become gator chow.

Kane
started kneeling down. He abruptly stood back up. He took a few deep breaths.
The knots in his stomach didn’t subside. He had seen plenty of dead game, from
deer to boars. He had gutted them, roasted them and eaten them up. But the only
time he had seen a dead person was when he stood before the open casket at his
grandma’s funeral. She had looked peaceful, yet so artificial with the bright
makeup smeared all over her wrinkly face. He had never seen the old gal color
her lips with anything besides cigarette ashes. That had been a hollow shell of
his grandmother, yet he couldn’t have let her go without seeing it. The sight
had hammered home her absence.

Wondering
what kind of expression the woman’s lifeless face would show absent of any
funeral parlor magic, Kane summoned up his gumption. He grabbed her around the
shoulders and yanked her upper body out of the water. Kane stared into the
empty crevice between her collarbones where her head should have been. Her skin
had been sliced as precisely as a slab of pork on a cutting board. He peered
into the hollow trachea where her breath once flowed. Fused between her
shoulder blades, her exposed vertebra appeared in perfect condition—minus the
neck and head that should have been above it. Yet, the gaping wound bled only a
trickle. The dirty ground had so few droplets of blood that it didn’t make a
lick of sense. Kane had taken the noggin’ off more than a few deer and boars
and he had never seen a beheading so clean. He coughed a cup of stomach acid
into his mouth.

Kane
dropped the body back into the water and sprang away from it. His heart pounded
so hard that he covered it with his hand so it wouldn’t leap out of his chest.
Beheading never looked so… so damn surgical. Somebody had held that woman down
and removed her head as delicately as a mechanic disassembling an antique
engine. Kane didn’t dare touch the man’s corpse for fear of burdening his mind
forever with another haunting image. Serial killers work in a pattern, he had
been told.

He
played poker with Tom Sneed, the top detective for the county sheriff. He had
told Kane about a couple of unsolved murders along the lagoon—bodies they had
recently found without heads and missing some internal organs. Even after a few
six packs, Sneed wouldn’t tell the poker club the grisly details, but he had
said he didn’t want to create a media circus around it—not that the
Orlando-dominated media gave a shit what happened in Brevard County when the
space shuttle wasn’t blasting off.

Those
looked like murders three and four, by Kane’s count. Scanning the mangroves and
the boardwalk paths as he grasped his fishing knife, Kane reckoned he’d rather
not wind up as number five. As he backed toward his boat, which had his cell
phone in a zip lock bag, Kane spotted something low in the mangroves. He
stopped in his tracks. It was a shoe—a girl’s shoe with a unicorn on it. He
should have known by the stretch marks on the dead woman’s lower back that she
had a child. Kane hurried over and scooped up the empty shoe. By the looks of
it, it hadn’t been out there for more than a day. He saw a pair of tracks, with
one matching shoeprint and one sock print, leading deeper into the mangrove
bushes.

Chewing
on his bottom lip, Kane thought about high-tailing it for his boat before the
surgical butcher came back. He could call in Sneed’s boys to handle this one.
But that would leave the girl as fresh meat for the killer, if he hadn’t
already sliced and diced her like salami. As the father of a young girl, Kane
simply couldn’t walk away. He followed the tracks with his knife in hand.

Those
tracks didn’t go far. Kane plodded through swampy ground with floating leaves
sticking to his boots. The thin layer of water had washed away the girl’s
footprints. As Kane weaved between the long branches of the mangroves with
their club-shaped leaves, he saw a shadow pass by his right side. He gazed up.
Against the blaze of the low-hanging morning sun, he saw a red shoulder hawk
gliding past him. The bird circled around back over the mangroves. The predator
had its eye on something. Kane hoped another predator didn’t have his eye on
him. He rather liked his neck where it was, holding up his head and all.

Hearing
a rustling in the bushes behind him, Kane spun around so fast that he scraped
his arm against a sharp broken branch. With blood dripping from his arm just
below the tattoo of his daughter’s name, he redoubled his grip on the knife.
Kane instantly lowered it when he spied the girl. Brown-skinned like her
parents, the little illegal immigrant slumped on her knees in the muddy soil.
Her straight black hair concealed much of her face besides her clamped mouth,
her thin nose and her inquisitive brown eyes. After what had just happened to
her parents, the girl should have been terrified of a strange man chasing her
with a knife, Kane thought. The little one gazed at him as coolly as a panther.
She didn’t even shiver in her soaking wet, mud caked pink dress. Brown and
green leaves covered the girl’s arms. She didn’t brush them off. Remembering the
rotten oil of despair that had upset his stomach after his grandmother had
died, Kane understood why. Grief had shell-shocked the poor girl. By the looks
of her, she was in her first years of elementary school and already she had
witnessed the gory killing of her parents. Kane didn’t even know her parents,
and the sight of their bodies still left a bitter stain on his mind.