Mute (20 page)

“I thought you were all buddy-buddy with the
Watcher,” the detective said. “What, he didn’t have you over for a couple beers
or
 
playing around with your
microscopes?”

Swartzman folded his trembling hands. “Harry wanted
me to review his research. I know he did most of it here after he got fired. He
asked me to co-author papers with him, since no legitimate journal would accept
an article from an unemployed scientist. But the subjects were too…” The
professor winced. “Political. Most of my institute’s funding comes from the
state, and the folks in Tallahassee wouldn’t appreciate us pointing out that
they need to spend billions cleaning up the lagoon.”

“Well, you’ll get to see your pal’s research after
all, and you can help me write up a police report to boot,” Sneed said. “It
looks like your Watcher skipped out on us.”

He pointed out the empty driveway as they pulled
in. The other patrol car, driven by Nina Skillings, parked on the curve. The
policewoman emerged and circled around back.

“No sign of the boat,” Skillings shouted.

“And no sign of the suspect, I reckon. Give your
buddy a warning call?” As Sneed killed the engine, he glared over his seat at
Swartzman like a bulldog sticking its growling mug out of its doghouse at a
trespasser in its yard. Aaron tugged at the door handle. It didn’t open. Of
course, the backdoors of a police car wouldn’t open from the inside. Suddenly,
Aaron felt like something other than a passenger.

“I’m not an idiot,” Swartzman said. “I haven’t told
Harry anything since you called this morning.”

“So you have talked to him?” Sneed asked.

“I called him yesterday and asked him how he was doing,
you know, after the incident where he picked up that boater after the gator
attack.”

“You mean the same boater who got chewed up by
rats?” the detective asked as he eyed Skillings.

“I saw it myself,” Skillings said. “Nasty shit.
They didn’t take his head this time—maybe because he wasn’t near the water. But
there was that purple stuff and the acid burns.”

“So we have two dead witnesses and both of them had
a run-in with the Lagoon Watcher not far from the crime scenes on the day of
the murders,” Sneed said.

Swartzman ran a heavy hand over his forehead, and
the little hair he had left on his scalp. Aaron recognized the sign of
disappointment from the many times he had botched his assignments for the
professor.

“It is a compelling motive,” Aaron admitted. His
professor shot him a stern stare. Aaron felt his GPA slipping and changed
course. “But if the Watcher wanted to make everybody freak out and clean up the
lagoon, wouldn’t he need witnesses to tell people about the creature attacks?
It doesn’t help his cause if there’s no one left to blab for the cameras.”

“And I don’t see any way Trainer could order a
manatee attack and then a rat attack,” Swartzman said. “There must be a
biological explanation. Maybe the bacteria-infected animals seek out people
who’ve been in the lagoon because they have a certain chemical signature to
them.”

“Whoa, that would suck for me,” said Aaron, who
remembered his dive only days ago.
“And for ten-thousand other people who’ve dipped more than a toe in the lagoon
in the past few weeks,” Sneed said. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s have a look
inside this place and then you can tell me what the Lagoon Watcher is capable
of.”

They didn’t have a hard time getting inside. He had
left his front door unlocked—perhaps expecting they’d stop by and break in so
he might as well spare his locks and hinges. When Aaron followed the officers
inside, his nose got overrun by a salty fish stench. It smelled like a
commercial fishing vessel with the catch jammed into a festering tank that held
more fish than it did water. He didn’t see the marine specimens amid the
clutter of papers and boxes stacked waist high, but they were somewhere in that
house no doubt.

Aaron thought of Trainer’s home like an ex super
model who became a junkie. He caught glimpses of its former luxury peeking out
from the mess. The marble countertops and the mahogany dining table hardly had
any breathing room. They were smothered underneath a flood of paperwork. Aaron
skimmed through a few boxes. Some of them dated back 25 years. The ousted
scientist had brought his work home with him—every scrap of it.

“We’ve got a real pack rat here,” Sneed said as he
sifted through Polaroid photos of various seabirds. “I wonder what else he
collects. Heads and organs, maybe?”

He tossed Skillings a glance. She nodded, headed
for the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “Holy shit!”

“What? What is it?” Swartzman tripped over a box on
his way there and barely regained his balance.

“What man doesn’t own meat? He’s an organic food
nut. He must be a vegan too,” Skillings said as if that fit the profile of an
environmental activist serial killer. “By the look of these fresh vegetables,
he’s gone shopping in the past week.”

“So something happened recently that made him
abandon ship,” Sneed said. His roving eyes settled on Swartzman.

Aaron could think of a couple reasons why the
Lagoon Watcher would take off. The man he pulled from the lagoon had gotten
killed. That could mean Trainer did it, or thought he’d get wrongly accused of
it. Or maybe he feared his name had made it onto the killer’s hit list. Either
way, he had something to hide.

They cleared all but one room. The den had its
windows boarded up and a padlock on the door—the only place where Trainer
didn’t have an open door policy. When the officers pried off the lock and threw
that last door open, they found the source of that fishy smell. The bookcases
on the walls were stacked with jars full of marine life suspended in fluids—fish
heads, manatee flippers, dolphin lungs and all kinds of internal organs. Some
of them were large enough to be human, but Aaron couldn’t tell for sure without
examining them closely. As he drew near, Aaron found that some of the specimens
had purple bacteria tumors.

“The Lagoon Watcher has his eye on the thiobacillus
strain too,” Aaron said as he pointed out the samples to his professor. “Some
of these look months old. He knew before we did. He’s playing us, man.”

“Harry probably doesn’t understand what he’s
looking at here,” Swartzman said. “We’ll examine his notes on the subject and
then you’ll see.”

“That won’t happen today.” Skillings pointed out
the empty desk, which had a frame of dust on its surface in the outline of the
computer that had recently sat there. “Looks like he cleared his work station.”

“Oh, he sure didn’t have anything to hide,” Sneed
told the professor. “Your boy didn’t know what the hell he was looking at in
the lagoon, right?”

Swartzman stared at his feet, but an answer didn’t
crawl out of his socks. Turning his back on Sneed, he hunched over a microscope
with a sample of the bacteria in its sights.

“Harry would know enough to identify this as a type
of thiobacillus, but that’s it,” Swartzman said while shielding his eyes from
the detective behind the microscope. “He couldn’t do more without a DNA sequencer,
and I don’t see one around here.”

“Maybe he took that with him along with his
computer and the rest of his good equipment,” Sneed said. “If he knew we were
coming, he wouldn’t leave behind the smoking gun, like whatever he uses to make
that purple gook.”

Yet, the Lagoon Watcher hadn’t taken all the good
stuff.

While everybody gazed at the jarred animal parts,
Aaron headed for the industrial-sized freezer in the corner. He craved a beer,
but doubted he would score one there. When he swung the heavy door open a
clawed, scaly hand swooped out at him. Aaron leapt back. The decapitated gator
carcass fell at his feet. The Lagoon Watcher had stashed it in the fridge like
a scaly bloated turkey. The cut that severed its head had been done with more
precision than any butcher’s knife could render. Its stubby neck had been
separated along a line as smooth as the collar of a leather jacket.

A puffy purple tumor flourished in the cradle of
its armpit. Before Aaron could say a word, Sneed bulled him out of the way and
snapped a picture of it.

“I’ve got Exhibit A right here, your honor,” Sneed
said. “This is your killer taking a practice run.”

“If he could slice through a gator’s leather neck,
there’s no way a person would stand a chance,” Aaron said.

After examining it, Swartzman shook his head like a
little kid refusing to admit he stole something. “He must have found this
corpse after it had already been mutilated—just like how we found the human
corpses. This doesn’t explain how Trainer could have committed these murders.”

“I think this explains it pretty well.” Skillings
wrapped her arm around the professor’s head and shoved electric bone saw in his
face.

“Agh, stop that!” Swartzman ducked.

With a cackling laugh, Skillings placed the bone
saw on a metal tray with a collection of cutting tools, including a surgical
scalpel and a pair of sharp tongs. The Lagoon Watcher even had an endoscopic
tube that could probe deep into bodies with a camera and tiny surgical
utensils. In the right set of hands, they could extract an organ while making
only a small incision.

“Exhibit B, your honor,” Sneed said.

“No… These are standard tools for dissecting large
animals and performing operations,” the professor said with sweat drenching his
clammy forehead. “Trainer told me he did that here. He helped sick dolphins.”

“He didn’t tell you that he dissected people as
well?” Sneed asked.

“No, he didn’t tell me… I mean, no! He wouldn’t do
that,” Swartzman said. “A marine biologist has no need for human organs.”

“We’ll see. My boys will sweep this lab for any
sign of the victims, down to a single strand of their DNA. In the meantime, I’m
putting out a warrant for Harry Trainer’s arrest. Next time you talk to your
buddy, tell him to check in at my station pronto.”

Swartzman hung his head with a heavy sigh. Aaron
didn’t offer any comfort beyond patting his professor on the back. He couldn’t
maintain a straight face while saying that the Lagoon Watcher probably didn’t
do it.

At least he could tell Moni about the person she
should protect Mariella from. Recognizing the threatening animals wouldn’t be
as easy.

Chapter 20

Mariella’s eyes lit up like two full moons when she
saw the horses. A dozen of them were huddled together with flies buzzing around
their perky ears in the muddy stables on the West Melbourne ranch. The ranch
hands looked like they had stepped out of an old Western movie, save for the
cell phones on their belts.

Striding toward Moni’s car in artificially-faded
jeans, Aaron didn’t exactly fit in. His T-shirt was more hang ten than Brooks
& Dunn. Moni figured that he hadn’t ridden something with four hooves in a
long time, if ever. But he had delivered on his promise that he’d take Mariella
horseback riding.

“Fancy seeing you here, pard’ner,” Moni told Aaron
in a hillbilly voice as she helped the awestruck girl out of her car.

“Howdy, little lady,” Aaron said with a tip of his
imaginary hat. He ran his eyes over her tight slacks and spaghetti strap purple
top that put her smooth mocha shoulders on display. “You don’t look ready for a
‘round up.”

“Considering all that has gone down in the past two
days, I’ll take a pass on riding. I need to stay alert just in case.” She
patted the sidearm strapped to her hip and underneath her shirt.

“Your friends in blue are on that, right?”

“The sheriff is on it, but if I see a certain Mr.
Trainer pop up, he’ll be as dead as that gator you found in his fridge.”

They had the whole department looking for the
Lagoon Watcher, but Sneed didn’t throw one more resource toward protecting
Mariella. He hoped that the kid would help build their case against him and he
even gave Moni some photos of Trainer to show the girl and see her reaction.
Moni kept the photos of that creepy bastard in her bag. Mariella didn’t need
something that would trigger another flashback to that horrible night. She had
found the restless girl tossing and turning in her bed so many times. Mariella
never screamed or cried. She scratched her nails against the wall and window
until they were bruised purple.

As she strolled toward the horses with her hand
clasping Mariella tightly, Moni scanned the pine trees across the field and the
cars parked around the perimeter of the ranch. None of the pickup trucks
resembled what Trainer drove. She spotted a flock of birds perched on a high
wire like a conspiring gang. A watchful hawk circled the trees. As crazy as it
sounded, she couldn’t rule out anything with a pulse.

All the risks of leaving the house paid off when
Mariella reached the horses. Approaching a white horse with black spots, the
girl rubbed it behind its neck and stroked its black mane. A ranch hand gave
Mariella a carrot. After staring at it for a few seconds, the girl started
munching on it.

“No, no, no!” Moni giggled. “That’s for the horse,
baby.”