Mute (23 page)

Skillings paused the video and pointed out the
crack in the concrete pier. “That’s where the fuel leak started. The kids must
have smelt it, and the geniuses still jumped into the water.”

“They wanted to save the girl,” Aaron said. “Hey,
I’ve done worse to impress the ladies and I’ve got the scars from sea rocks to
prove it.”

“Yeah, but these kids got more than just scars,”
Moni told Aaron. She already saw that Aaron would stand up to her ex-boyfriend
to catch her eye. She hoped he didn’t have to put his life on the line for her
again.

The kid with the long hair caught the girl before
Ricks did, but then the dolphins surrounded the two of them. The girl reached
out to the marine mammals, expecting some friendly fairy tale dolphins. She got
a slap across the face from its tail that spun her head around. A pair of hands
emerged from the water underneath the dolphin’s belly, grabbed the girl and
dragged her under. Before the long-haired teen knew what had happened, another
dolphin seized him in its hands and pulled him down.

The task force watched the abductions over and over
again. Each time they looked for another explanation, such as an opening where
a diver could have hidden underneath the dolphins. But with the angle that the
arms had thrust out of the water, that couldn’t have worked unless the diver
had his head inside a dolphin. As nonsensical as it seemed, no one could avoid
the conclusion: Those dolphins had arms on their bellies.

“If you can’t help me solve these murders, at least
you can say you found a new species, right professor,” Sneed said.

“That’s not the byproduct of evolution,” Swartzman
said with his face drained of all color as he stared at the freakish creatures.

“But it might be the byproduct of your buddy’s little
laboratory,” Sneed said.

“You’re giving him way too much credit,” Swartzman
said. “Tell me, do you think Trainer could cause what happens next?”

Seeing his friends disappear underwater, the Ricks
kid dove beneath the surface. With all the gasoline in the water, it must have
been a toxic hell down there, Moni thought. Almost a minute later Ricks came up
gasping for air and frantically wiping his face. He kept plucking at his eyes
like they were full of bees. Whatever he had found down there, it made him abandon
his rescue effort and swim for the pier. The mutant dolphins didn’t bother him.
They must have cleared out of the way because then another projectile sprayed
underneath the water. It bashed into the pier and cracked a pair of yachts into
each other. Ricks climbed the ladder onto the pier as the fuel spill worsened.
Instead of running to safety ashore, the teen stumbled into his father’s yacht.
He staggered out a minute later with his father’s shotgun. From another camera,
they saw the harbormaster shouting at Ricks. Even without sound, they knew from
his hospital bed testimony that he had told the teen to get off the pier and,
when he saw the gun, he warned him about starting a fire. Ricks didn’t pay the
shouting man any heed. He cast a long gaze into the fuel-filled water, where
the mutant dolphins where spinning in a tight circle like an underwater
carousel. He aimed at them for a long time, like he knew the consequences but
just couldn’t help himself. Ricks fired. The fuel in the water ignited. The pier
soon followed. When the fire crept toward him, the boy didn’t run. He stood
there like that burning figure those ravers light during that festival in the
desert. Sneed turned off the video before it got too gruesome.

“That ain’t what you call a healthy, well-adjusted
young man,” Sneed said.

“Something sick got into his head,” Skillings said.
“How else could he go from trying to rescue his friend to lighting up the whole
pier in his suicide? Once he went underwater, he changed. Did you see his
eyes?”

Skillings went back to the part right before Ricks
fired the gun. As he aimed into the water, she froze the frame and zoomed in on
his eyes. The footage was grainy and the color not well defined, but his pupils
had clearly disappeared. The boy’s eyes went solid purple for a split second
before he fired.

“You should do a more technical video analysis,”
General Colon said. “It was probably glare.”

“You can analyze it all you want, but I know what I
saw,” Skillings said. “Purple—just like the infected gator and the infected
bird that Cooper described before he became rat food.”

“That’s nothing but a drunken tale,” Swartzman
said. “There are no confirmed reports of animals with purple eyes.”

 
Moni had
fought an infected snake and its eyes didn’t glow, but maybe they never got the
chance. The survivor of the gator attack had seemed so sure of every detail
about the creature, especially the piercing purple eyes.

“I’ll tell you one thing; it would sure help if
another witness stepped forward,” Sneed said with his gaze firmly affixed on
Moni. “I bet that girl of yours got a good look at the killer’s eyes and whole
lot more. Too bad she’s not more cooperative.”

He always threw the blame back in the same place,
Moni thought. He put it all at the feet of the only black woman in the room. It
reminded her of junior high when anytime something went missing, the black girl
took it, and when half the class carried on, the teacher told only Moni that
she better quiet down or face detention.

No matter how many criminals she busted and how
many children she rescued from abusive homes, Moni couldn’t change the way
people perceived her.

“I’m doing wonders for that child. You have no
idea,” Moni told Sneed. “I should be asking, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ This
case has you stumped so bad that you need an eight-year-old girl’s help to
solve it.”

“Put me in a room with that girl for five minutes
and I guarantee you she’ll start squawking!” Sneed slammed both fists down on
the table so hard that his coffee leapt out of its cup. Moni flinched at the
thought of him getting those meat mallets on Mariella. “We have a video showing
people getting taken underwater, but we don’t know what happens from there.
That girl of yours saw it. She must have. I don’t know if it’s the Lagoon
Watcher or one of his accomplices that’s doing it, but somebody’s lopping off
heads up and down the lagoon. If we can stop that, I bet we’ll stop
catastrophes like this.”

“I’m telling you, the Lagoon Watcher couldn’t…”
Swartzman started until Sneed cut him off with a “Shut up!” The flustered
scientist recoiled from the table and hid his nose behind his mobile phone.

“I’m getting sick of this shit,” Sneed rumbled on.
“Every day there’s another attack and, before we can finish sorting through all
the evidence, there’s another one. It’s like gangs waging a turf war. And the
thing that always pissed me off about busting up a gang is that people would
witness a shooting and not say a word. They stayed silent and others died—sometimes
their own brothers or sisters. And here again, we have our best witness keeping
her mouth shut.”

“I told you…” Moni started.

“Cut the bullshit! How many more good people do I
need to bury? How many more times do I have to call a firefighter’s fiancé and
tell her that her groom won’t make the wedding because he’s dead? If there’s
anything you can do to help me put an end to this madness, Moni, you better
step up with it.”

A raging retort bubbled up in her throat. She cut
it off. Moni knew Sneed was right. She had protected Mariella above all else—above
even the investigation into a murderer who had taken eleven lives so far. So
many people died so that one girl didn’t get forced into dwelling on her
demons. Moni had lied when she told herself she couldn’t do more to encourage
Mariella’s cooperation. She had barely done anything.

If she didn’t get something out of Mariella and
catch the killer soon, his next strike might hit too close.

 
Moni didn’t
say a word for the rest of the task force meeting. Aaron said a few nice things
to her afterwards about how she had done so well with Mariella, but she
couldn’t honestly look him in the eyes and accept those compliments.

She found the girl asleep on the couch in her
office. A drawing of a horse lay on the coffee table across from her. Moni
scooped the girl into her arms and cradled her head against her shoulder so she
didn’t awaken. As she carried her out into the parking lot, it surprised Moni
how dark it was. She didn’t realize the meeting had run so late. No wonder
Sneed’s rants felt like they had gone on forever.

Moni slipped past the bushes and approached her car
on the outskirts of the sheriff station parking lot. She reached into her
pocket for the keys when she heard someone jump behind her. A paper got shoved
in her face. Moni saw a drawing of a burning figure—just like the boy who had
roasted in the marina.

Chapter 24

“Your girl’s quite the little artist,” Officer Nina
Skillings said as she stood behind Moni holding the drawing of the burning
teenager in her face. Even though she stood four inches shorter than Moni, it
felt like Skillings towered over her like a bear.

“You’re lucky I have a child in my arms, ‘cause
next time you jump out on me like that, I might have an involuntary reaction
with my trigger finger that you wouldn’t appreciate,” Moni said as she spun
around carefully so she wouldn’t wake Mariella. “Now where’d you get that
from?”

“I did a little searching in your girl’s backpack.
You left it in the car and I was about to return it to you.” Skillings flashed
the mischievous smile of a brat who could do whatever she wanted and get away
with it. It helps having the lead detective in her pocket. “So she drew a
decapitated dog and it happened. Then she drew a burning man and it happened.
What are the odds of that?”

Mariella rolled her head across Moni’s shoulder and
hung it stiffly off her side. She gently nudged the girl back into a more
comfortable position. Moni’s wrists began aching from hoisting her up for so
long. If only she could put her in the car and drive out of there, but that pest
Skillings wouldn’t get out of her way.

From the academy on, Skillings had always shot
straighter and fought harder than Moni. Top brass had put Skillings on the
biggest cases because she would knock a few heads to get results. Moni had
striven for years to win the confidence of her superiors so they’d trust her
with the big cases like they did with Skillings. Instead, Moni got the “kiddie”
beat.

The one time her skills with juvenile victims made
her a vital part of a key investigation, Skillings made sure Moni knew she
couldn’t play in her league.

“Kids draw a lot of funny things, but you wouldn’t
know, because you terrify them with that sunny personality of yours.” Moni
said. “Now, excuse me. I’m taking Mariella home.”

Moni tried slipping around her, but that stack of
muscles with a ponytail blocked her off from the car.

“You’re letting your feelings for that kid blind
you to the facts of this case. That girl is more than a victim. She’s part of
the problem.”

“The problem!” Moni recalled all the times her
teachers had saw her sulking and irresponsive in class as she recovered from
the beating her father gave her the night before. Those teachers had called her
a problem child. “This child just lost both her parents. Nothing could be more
devastating. I can’t believe you would dare accuse her of doing anything
wrong.”

“I’m not accusing her. I’m accusing what’s inside
her and what was inside him.” Skillings pointed to the burning teenager in the
drawing. “He was possessed by the bacteria from the lagoon. That’s why he blew
himself up with the pier. Why would the bacteria make only animals attack and
not people?”

“Possessed? That fool wasn’t possessed. He was a
teenager drunk off his ass and scared of the dolphins with human arms that took
his friends. Of course he wasn’t thinking straight when he fired that shot.”

“But how did Mariella know he would do that? How
did she know about the attack on her classmate’s dog?” Skillings asked. She
answered her own questions before Moni could reply. “The girl’s connected to
all of this. She spent a whole night on the shore of the lagoon. It must have
infected her. That’s why she’s so damn weird.”

“No,” Moni muttered, but the accusations found a
foothold in her brain.

She had never questioned Mariella’s behavior. She
accepted everything as grieving. From the moment Moni had pulled her from the
mangroves, the girl acted as if she had never set foot on this planet. Everyone
who knew Mariella before the incident said she emerged as an entirely different
person. When she couldn’t explain the girl’s keen reading of her emotions, or
her haunting drawings, she simply let it roll off her as smoothly as rainwater.
Before she knew it, she found herself standing in a deep puddle.

“You need to get the girl tested for bacteria—for
real this time,” Skillings said. “Let’s take her in now before something else
happens.”

Mariella’s once limp hand slid up and gripped Moni
hard around the back of her neck. The girl unconsciously pulled herself up
around Moni. Mariella depended on her, Moni thought. Skillings cared about her
career, not protecting the girl. Her rival sought to embarrass her in front of
Sneed and steal the most precious thing that had ever come into Moni’s life.
Mariella couldn’t be infected, Moni thought. She knows the girl. She loves her.
She doesn’t love some bacteria or an experiment by a deranged scientist.