Mute (11 page)

 
If her ex
Darren had a polar opposite, this might be it, Moni thought.

“Mm, hey there,” Moni said across the table at the
gawking young man. His eyes went wide. “You look like you’re here on a field
trip.”

His golden curls flopped over his ears as he
laughed. “It’s something like that. But this one wasn’t in the lesson plan.”

Moni raised an eyebrow. He was a college student,
an upper classman at least. Since she went straight into police training from
high school, she never got the chance to go to college. It left her with regret—regret
that she had stuck with Darren and didn’t sample a college guy.

“I’m Detective Monique Williams, but you can call
me Moni.” She flashed a flirty smile.

“I’m Professor Herbert Swartzman, and this is my
grad student Aaron Hughes,” said the middle-aged man beside the young stud. He
gave Moni a gerbil-like grin in return for the fawning smile she had meant for
Aaron. The professor had all the charisma and charm of a pair of bowling shoes.
Apparently, he regarded himself more like fine Italian leather footwear. “I’m
here from the Atlantic Marine Research Institute to steer this case in the
right direction.”

“Oh, because us dumb-ass cops can’t solve this
riddle, huh?” Moni asked facetiously.

Aaron nodded. “We got tired of solving crimes like
manatee seagrass snatching and dolphin flipper abuse, so we’re taking a step up
in class, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m sure those marine mammals are tougher than
they look,” Moni said as she folded her arms. “I heard those manatees have one
mean bite.”

She started laughing, but cut it out when she saw
that Aaron and his professor didn’t join in. They actually believed that
whopper about the rabid manatee.

“This crazy shit in the lagoon might sound like something
dreamt up by a couple of tripped out dudes,” Aaron said. “But, believe me, it’s
damn real.”

Professor Swartzman grumbled deep in his throat and
fixed the tie that peeked out from his lab coat. Moni guessed that he didn’t
appreciate anyone dubbing him a “tripped out dude.”

“What my ever-so-modest student was trying to say
is that we’ll unveil something that will completely alter the DNA of this
case,” Swartzman said.

“You better,” Detective Sneed huffed as he moseyed
his cast-iron gut into the room and set it down in one of the two leather
chairs. Nina Skillings trailed him like one of those pilot fish shadowing a
great white shark. “I didn’t invite you up here to hear about your science fair
project.”

“I assure you, sir, that…” the professor started.

“We’re here to make sense of the evidence and stop
a killing spree,” said Sneed, who always made a point of putting the new guy in
his place in front of everybody—just like he did on Moni’s first day as a
detective. “If you’ve got some good evidence, let me hear it. If not, shut up
and stay out of the way.”

Aaron shot Sneed a surly glare. His professor
elbowed him in the arm and Aaron wiped his face clean. It’s good he did,
otherwise Sneed would have driven his boot into Aaron’s pretty dimpled cheek.

Looking around the room, Moni recognized a few
outsiders in addition to the homicide team. She saw a
freckle-faced
blond woman wearing a Water Management District polo shirt and county medical
examiner Paul Rudy. She also noticed one empty chair—the big leather one right
besides Sneed.
The lead detective
didn’t start the meeting until the intended occupant for that chair arrived. He
was the only person here who could pull rank on Sneed: a tall, trim Hispanic
man in a black Air Force uniform.

Everyone rose and saluted him, although Aaron got
his butt out of his seat last. Like most young men, he had issues with
authority, Moni thought. She might enjoy correcting that.

“I’d like to introduce you to Brigadier General
Alonso Colon, of Patrick Air Force Base and the 45
^th
Space Wing,”
Sneed announced. The police officers appeared impressed, but professor
Swartzman flinched when he heard the title. “He’ll be sitting in on this one.”

“Thank you officer,” Colon said in smooth Puerto
Rican accent. “I’m here only to observe. The lagoon is our neighbor too and we
are sworn to protect it.” He raised his palms in that assuring gesture
politicians like to throw up when spewing lies behind a smile.

His calm tone couldn’t mask the obvious. The
military wouldn’t care about a serial killer unless it tied into something huge
happening on base. So, either they’re being tight-lipped about an incident at
Patrick, or this shit’s a lot more serious than they’re admitting, Moni
thought. The last time an officer from Patrick sat in on a county sheriff task
force meeting they were discussing security for the space program in the wake
of 9/11.

This
couldn’t be that serious. Could it?

Sneed, Skillings and the other officers pored over
the evidence from five murders. They still couldn’t pinpoint the initiate
causes of death and whether the beheadings took place before or after the
internal trauma to the bloodstream. The crime scenes and corpses didn’t offer
any fingerprints, hair or other traces of the killer. They couldn’t agree on
what the murder weapon might be. Surgical saw, Ginsu knife, laser cutter—they
all had whacked-out theories. They couldn’t find a common link between the
victims, other than they were near the lagoon when they were killed.

“It’s too bad we don’t have a cooperative witness
to settle this debate,” Sneed remarked with a berating eye on Moni.

“Our witness has shown as much cooperation as you
could expect from an eight-year-old who’s been traumatized by her parents’
murders,” Moni said. “She’s making good progress. If you can chill with that
attitude for a while and let her do her thing, Mariella will help us.”

The military man’s taciturn eyes shifted to Sneed,
who looked like he had a bunker-buster launched down his gullet.

“How many more good folks are gonna get their heads
cut off before that brat starts a’ squawking?” Sneed asked. “You forgot what
your job is ‘cause you’re off playing mommy. If you want a companion, get a
fucking puppy and get the hell off my case.”

Sneed pointed toward the door. Moni would have
followed his finger, but that would mean walking out on Mariella too. If she
gave him the slightest hint of a reason, Sneed would pull the psychologist’s
strings and get the girl shipped off to foster care.

Moni couldn’t let the gluttonous detective un-wrap
Mariella like a baked potato in tin foil and stick a fork in her fragile mind.
While she stewed in her sweat, Aaron leaned halfway across the table and stared
right at Sneed.

“I don’t know what that kid saw, but I bet she
doesn’t know the whole story,” the grad student told the seasoned detective,
who had sent plenty of kids his age away for life. Sneed’s gruff frown didn’t
deter Aaron from pressing it. “You need a microscope to see the best evidence
in this case.”

“Our forensic team has already combed the crime scenes,”
Skillings said. “We’ve got every little detail cataloged.”

“But that’s not much good without a conclusion,”
professor Swartzman said. “I took a close look at all five bodies this morning.
They have one thing in common, and it’s something they share with many animals
in the lagoon—the bacteria thiobacillus. We believe the lagoon is contaminated
with a mutated strain.”

The professor recited some complicated mumbo jumbo
about the bacteria eating sulfur, iron and oxygen and spitting out sulfuric
acid. He said the bacteria caused the thinning out of blood and the acid burns
on the victims. The byproducts of the bacteria—sulfuric acid and depleted
oxygen levels in the lagoon—spurred fish kills and damaged organisms along the
lagoon floor.

“If the bacteria keep spreading, the environment of
the Indian River Lagoon could be catastrophically changed,” Swartzman said.
“We’re talking about the death of substantially all marine life and the
extinction of many species.”

“The acidity levels in the lagoon are increasing
and we’ve noticed spurts in some places, which were followed by fish kills,”
said the scientist from the Water Management District, who earlier introduced
herself as
Laura
Heingartner. “Some of the fish corpses tested positive for the mutated strain of
thiobacillus.”

Sneed leaned his chubby chin on his palm in a
complacent pose. “I think you’ve got the wrong meeting. This is the county
sheriff’s office, not Green Peace. My only concern with your thio-whatever is
that it contaminates corpses and muddles the evidence.”

“It might be more than that,” medical examiner Rudy
said. “I can’t rule out the bacteria as the first cause of death. It’s possible
that they caught the infection before the decapitation. Someone might have
poisoned them with it.”

“Those decapitated bodies were in the water for
quite a while—long enough to pick up all kinds of stuff,” Sneed said.

“And why would a killer use some obscure strain of
bacteria to off someone?” Skillings asked the scientists. “There are much
easier ways if you wanna whack somebody—believe me.”

She slipped Moni a condescending glare. Skillings
had racked up near-perfect scores in the shooting range while Moni graded out
average. Moni seethed in frustration as Skillings aimed to upstage her once
again.

Aaron caught the exchange between the two women and
stuck his head into the line of fire.

“There’s no way the bacteria are acting alone,”
Aaron said. “We found a sea turtle with an infected tumor on it, but the
critter escaped. Now our GPS shows him cruising along at 40 miles per hour a
couple times a day. Either the turtle learned how to jet ski, or somebody’s
making him spread this bacteria all over the lagoon.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Swartzman told his student. “We
still haven’t caught that turtle and
you
couldn’t take that sample I
asked for. So we can’t say for sure that it’s infected.”

“The turtle had a fat purple tumor. What else could
it be?” Aaron asked.

Purple—the word triggered something in Moni’s
brain. It felt like a string from a repressed memory. Where had she seen a
strange purple lump before?

“Did you say the infection looks purple?” Moni
asked Aaron.

“Like little purple pimples, or big purple tumors,”
he replied.

“I have a picture of what they look like on a human
body,” the medical examiner said.

He turned his laptop toward Moni and she saw the
tiny purple goose pimples along the underarm of one of the corpses. It was
Mariella’s mother. Moni choked up. She had seen the body that day, but she had
barely known the girl then. Now it felt like she had lost a mother too. Moni
remembered her mother’s tranquil ebony face as she lay in her open casket. Moni
imagined a purple tumor growing out of the skin on her mother’s forehead until
it covered her face. She tried closing the eyelid, but the purple blob flung it
open.

No. That wasn’t where she had seen it.

The momentary fear stirred up the volatile mix of
memories in Moni’s mind. She found the buried coal without going back far at
all. The first day she found Mariella, she had brushed the despondent girl’s
teeth for her. Moni had seen a few purple bumps inside her mouth, just behind
her lips. She should have called the doctor. She couldn’t remember why she
didn’t. Moni didn’t understand how it had gotten overlooked during Mariella’s
check up. The doctor said the girl appeared perfectly healthy—physically, at
least.

Moni felt a chill run up her spine. Mariella had
been infected. The bacteria feasted on the iron and oxygen in her blood. It
churned out sulfuric acid inside her body. And yet, the girl showed no ill effects.
Moni couldn’t see how she could shake that off. Maybe Mariella beat the
infection.

“So you’re not sure if the bacteria kill people?”
Moni asked Aaron.

Aaron opened his mouth, but before he got a word
out, his professor answered for him. “They should feel sick, but I can’t say
for sure it would kill them by itself. Thiobacillus shouldn’t even survive
inside people or animals. It belongs in sulfur- and iron-rich water. The lagoon
doesn’t fit that bill and neither does the bloodstream, which has trace amounts
of iron. It’s possible that the bacteria may starve to death inside the host’s
body before it kills them. We really can’t say unless we find a living person
with an infection.”

They could test Mariella for the bacteria, Moni
thought. If she had the infection, they could finally learn how it acted inside
a human host. What would happen then? They would rip the girl from her hands
and zip her up in a quarantine tent. With Mariella’s fragile mind still scarred
from her parents’ deaths, they’d lock her away with nothing keeping her company
besides her torturous thoughts.

Moni couldn’t let that happen. So she kept her
mouth shut. It did no good.

“Wasn’t Mariella out in the mangroves all night?”
Skillings asked as she sent Moni a needling glare that was thinly-veiled as a
look of concern. “We should get her tested for the bacteria.”

“Good idea,” Sneed chimed in. “While we’re at it,
let’s give her vocal cords a good tune up.”