Mute (21 page)

The bashful girl shrugged and offered the horse the
carrot. Not minding sloppy seconds, the big guy munched it down. Mariella’s
face lit up when the horse licked her fingers.

“He sure is a hungry fella,” Aaron said as he
scratched the horse behind its ear. “Pay attention little one. I’ll show you
how it’s done.”

While Moni signed the release form, Aaron grabbed
the saddle of a tall, bulky black horse and stuck his skater sneaker into the
stirrup. The horse whinnied and buckled at his ham-handed touch. The ranch hand
told him to wait a minute, but Aaron persisted in climbing up its side. He
flung his leg over the saddle and reached for the reins. The horse wasn’t
having any of it. He galloped off before his flunky rider had a good grip.
Aaron flew off as if he’d been launched from a catapult.

“Oh crap!” Aaron shouted as he twisted through the
air. He stuck his arms and knees out as he hit the mud and rolled through the
impact. Before Moni reached him, Aaron hobbled up with horse turds all over his
pricy jeans and dirt-caked scrapes on his elbows. After gasping for air, he
grew a wide grin. “That was wicked awesome… I’m never doing it again.”

Moni chuckled when she saw he didn’t get hurt. “You
better not teach my Mariella to ride that way. For real.”

She saw the girl climbing onto the white and black
horse with the help of a ranch hand. Mariella actually let a stranger near her.
Even after seeing Aaron fall, the horse didn’t scare her one bit. With her shy
grin transforming into a boisterous smile, it looked like Mariella didn’t want
anything more in life than riding that horse. She had no problem settling into
the saddle. This horse didn’t object. It pranced around the field with the
ranch hand leading it by the reins. Her face practically beaming, Mariella
waved to Moni and Aaron.

Moni had never seen the girl so happy. For the
first time since she met her, Mariella looked like a normal child.

Then her cell phone rang with a reminder that
Mariella’s life would never be normal. Mrs. Mint rambled on so frantically that
Moni couldn’t understand the teacher.

“Whoa, what the hell are you talking about, lady?”
Moni asked.

“The dog was killed. The Buckley dog. Someone cut
its head off in their backyard and dragged it into a canal.”

“I’m sorry. That’s a real tragedy. But it has
nothing to do with me. Call 911 and they’ll assign someone.”

“Nothing? It has everything to do with that girl of
yours. Mariella cut the head off the Buckleys’ dog in a picture today and,
look, it happened. It happened just like she drew it!”

Moni cast her eyes on Mariella, whose smile
immediately disappeared into a grave pair of clasped lips. The girl’s horse
halted its gallop. Even the ranch hand couldn’t get it going again. The horse
waited while Mariella started getting off without any assistance.

The girl loves animals, Moni thought. She’d never
hurt a dog. The frail girl couldn’t even if she wanted to. Besides, she had
picked Mariella up straight from school. They had been together every second
since.

“So Mariella drew a disturbing picture. That’s to
be expected from a child dealing with post-traumatic stress,” Moni said. “I’m
telling you, there’s another explanation. Has anyone else seen her drawing?”

“I faxed Detective Sneed the picture. He’s already
on his way to the Buckley house.”

Moni held her hand over the phone and groaned. That
fat pit bull would chew this bone until Mariella popped out a confession—never
mind that she couldn’t talk or possibly overpower a full-sized dog.

“If he finds that Mariella had anything to do with
this, I better not see that girl in my classroom again,” the teacher said.

“I’m going over there myself, but I can already
promise you that she didn’t go near their house,” Moni said. “You teachers
never change. It’s time that you thought more about helping this victimized
girl instead of passing her off on someone else.”

After Moni hung up, she saw Mariella timidly
sulking up to her. The girl must have seen from her expression that she had
done something wrong. She must think she got in trouble for the nasty picture,
Moni thought. She couldn’t know about the bloodshed that followed. Moni knelt
down and met her with a hug.

“What happened?” Aaron asked as he watched them
with his hands in his pockets. “Is she over horses already? That was quick.”

Moni tried standing up but Mariella wouldn’t
release her from their embrace. So she scooped the girl up and stood with her
in her arms.

“There was another incident,” Moni said. “I’ll drop
her off with the DCF agent for a few hours. I want you to come with me to
investigate.”

“Okay. So that makes us partners or something?”

“Or something… Just do what you usually do and find
that some tiny bug with a long name did it. Please…”

* * * *

The Buckley dog had been beheaded alright. It had
been rendered off as cleanly as all the others.

The front leg of Butch the Labrador had also been
cut off, but that hadn’t been done smoothly at all. By the rough bite marks and
the matching tracks leading to the canal, the investigators were convinced that
a gator had pried off the dog’s leg. Coincidently, that matched the red blotch on
the leg that Mariella had drawn on the picture.

Moni kept switching her eyes between the mutilated
dog and the photocopy of Mariella’s drawing. She couldn’t deny it—this had been
violence imitating art.

Mariella
couldn’t have done this. It’s impossible. The dog weighed more than she does.

She grabbed Sneed by his beef slab of an arm and
spun him around.

“You said the teacher hung this in her window,
right? Anyone passing by could have seen it. The stalker must have. The Lagoon
Watcher has been following Mariella, hunting her, so he made it happen.”

“If Trainer wanted your girl dead, why would he
bother killing this dog?” Sneed pointed toward the furry carcass splayed out
alongside the canal.

“He’s playing mind games,” Moni said. “He wants us
to point the finger at Mariella. We can’t fall for that trap.”

“Maybe… I could see him doing that,” Sneed said.

From behind his back, Officer Skillings shook her
head. She usually agreed wholeheartedly with the lead detective, but not when
it came to giving Moni an ounce of credit.

Moni headed for Skillings with a few choice words
on her mind, but a yellow-bearded chubby guy in a Florida Gators jersey cut her
off. She instantly spotted his resemblance to his kids, the Buckley twins.

“If you don’t find who did this, I’ll kick that
punk’s ass myself,” Mr. Buckley said.

Moni found it funny that it didn’t occur to him
that four officers and one scientist was a big crew for a dead dog
investigation. Should they have brought in the National Guard?

“I bought that shed four months ago. And I
installed the fence myself.” Mr. Buckley pointed at the empty slab of concrete
his shed once stood on and the remains of fence posts along the canal, which
led into the Indian River Lagoon. “They dumped it into the canal like a bunch of
junk.”

“Wait a minute,” Aaron asked as he turned his back
on the dog and approached Mr. Buckley. “What were your fence and shed made of?”

Mr. Buckley took a gander at the young man and held
his nose. “Whoo-ee! What’s that smell? Is that shit on your pants?”

“Horse shit, if you gotta know,” Aaron said. “Now
what about your stolen fence and shed? What were they made of?”

“Metal. Mostly iron, I reckon,” he replied.

“Now it makes sense,” Aaron said. “The dog wasn’t
the target. It was the shed and fence. The bacteria wanted iron to feed on.
Your dog just got in the way.”

“You’re saying that bacteria stole my stuff and
beheaded my dog?” Mr. Buckley asked. Aaron nodded. “You really are a fucking
moron.”

His face flushing red, Aaron clenched his teeth as
the guy treaded back inside his house with zero confidence in the police.
Someone should have told him that Aaron didn’t work for them.

Sneed patted the back of the young man. “Your
theory’s not a bad one, kid. In the past week, we’ve had nine reports of boat
thefts. They were taken right out of the water with nobody looking. And this
isn’t the only report we’ve gotten of a stolen or damaged fence along a canal.”

“Remember when Kane’s boat turned up? It had been
stripped of all the metal,” Aaron said. “Besides the iron in animal blood,
there aren’t a lot of natural sources of iron in the lagoon. Somebody’s feeding
the bacteria.”

“And the infected animals are helping them.” Moni
pointed out the gator tracks near where the shed had been pushed into the
water.

After waging snake and rat attacks inland, the
killer had now deployed gators far from the lagoon. Moni had barely saved
Mariella from a snake because it only took a single bullet. These infected
gators were much tougher and they could hide in the canal less than a dozen
feet from her back door.

Is
that why the Lagoon Watcher did this? Is he sending me a message that he can
strike us at any time?

Chapter 21

Mariella sat by her side on the child
psychologist’s couch, but Moni felt as if there were steel bars between them.
She had dropped the girl off with DCF Agent Tanya Roberts for babysitting, not
an interrogation. A few calls from Sneed and Mrs. Mint about a disturbing
drawing and a slaughtered dog had changed that.

Moni sat there for a good half hour hearing Roberts’
list of complaints. The girl hit a kid at school. She hasn’t uttered a single
word or done anything social with the other kids. When bullied, she responded
with violent imagery and apparently inspired real violence, Roberts said.

“Under normal circumstances, a child should be
making steady progress toward normalization at this point,” said
Ike
McKinley as the psychologist tapped his pen atop his notepad, on which Moni
figured he had already etched his conclusion on the girl. “That’s not happening
here. If anything, Mariella is regressing under your care. You seem to be
fostering her withdrawn behavior. And that absolutely baffles me, because
that’s not the best thing for this child’s future or for your investigation.”

My investigation
, Moni
thought. That book-sniffing desk dweller put the whole serial killer saga on
her neck. He didn’t know anything about murderers besides what he read in his
text books that segmented criminals into broad categories; like they were types
of pie. And then he dared say that he knew the best thing for Mariella—who he
had seen for less than an hour.

“Mariella
has come a long way since I found her in the mangroves. You have no idea,” Moni
said as she stroked her hand through Mariella’s silky black hair. The girl
didn’t pull away like she had a week ago. “Everyone recovers from tragedy at
their own rate. There’s no manual for mourning your parents, especially at her
age and the way it happened…” Mariella shrugged away from Moni’s hand and
hugged her backpack against her chest. “The monster that did this is still out
there and he’s not done. Can you think of anyone more dedicated to protecting
this girl?”

“Protect
her, fine, but what about protecting her classmates?” Roberts asked. “When I
send one of our foster kids into a classroom and she raises a ruckus, how do
you think that makes me look?”

“I
know the feeling,” Moni said. “My boss is a big honky asshole, too. He doesn’t
trust anything I do.”

The
white psychiatrist crossed his legs nervously and vigorously scribbled something
in his notepad. Moni loved making old white folk squirm.

The
black government employee rolled her eyes at the attempt at finding common
ground. “Let me tell you something, sista. I didn’t get this job by bitching
and blaming all my problems on the white man. And I’m twice as dark as you are.
Now I’m not saying some people didn’t try holding me back, but I worked hard
and got the job done. They didn’t have any choice but to promote me. You should
think about that.”

“Think
about what?” As she bobbed her head, Moni’s braids hurtled over her shoulders
like angry vipers. “You saying I don’t work hard enough? Girl, you have no idea
what I’ve been through over the past two days.” She shook her finger in
Roberts’ face. “No idea.”

“Well,
I have some idea,” McKinley said. “I heard you shot a snake in your house. What
kind of example is that to set for a young lady?”

“The
snake was…”

“Ever
hear of sweeping it out with a broom?” the psychiatrist asked. “That kind of
brash behavior is exactly why a child like this doesn’t belong under your
supervision. She needs intensive care in a clinical setting. There are people
who are more prepared to deal with her sensitive condition.”

Those
were the words Moni had feared the most. They choked her like a cord around her
throat. They were so right. She couldn’t care for this child, no matter how
much she loved her. All the love in her soul wouldn’t transform her into a good
parent for a severely damaged little girl. Moni buried her face into her hands.
It blocked the whole world out. She had fled into her closet, but she could
never hide. He would come and take her, just like they came now for Mariella.
This time Moni didn’t cower alone in that closet. The girl stood with her. They
trembled side by side as they heard the heavy work boots plopping down the
hallway. They saw his shadow piercing the straight line of light under the
closet door. He grabbed the door—nearly ripped it off its hinges.