Mute (3 page)

Moni
felt a small hand on her shoulder. Opening her eyes, she saw the little
dark-haired girl before her at eye level as she knelt down. Without a word
exchanged between them, Moni absorbed the empathy in the girl’s touch. This
child, who had watched her parents brutally beheaded hours ago, grasped Moni’s
pain. Their mutual suffering had drawn them together like two alley cats riding
out a hurricane under a single palm frond. Moni wrapped her arms around the
girl’s dirt laden body and squeezed its cold dampness against her chest.
Hugging her back, the girl buried her head into Moni’s shoulder.

As
Moni scooped the girl up and carried her like a backpack strapped across her
chest, she sent a smirk Skillings’ way.

“Mm-hm.
You were saying?” Moni asked.

“Try
pulling that crying junk on a crack fiend,” Skillings said. “I’ll stick to a
hard knee to the jaw and a pair of handcuffs.”

Moni
decided against asking her how many kindergarteners she had brutalized. She
didn’t need this girl finding another person she should fear. Skillings trailed
her as Moni carried the girl toward Sneed in the center of the boardwalk.

“I’m
Monique. But everyone calls me Moni for short. What’s your name, baby?”

She
didn’t answer. Moni repeated the question in Spanish. She still didn’t respond.
Must be the post-traumatic stress, she figured. Give it time.

When
Sneed saw her coming with the child, he rushed toward her as if she had bought
him a new Hummer. She marveled that a board didn’t snap under his rumbling
girth.

“Well
done, Williams,” said Sneed, who allowed her that moment of satisfaction. “Now
what’d she say? What’s our suspect look like? Was it more than one?”

“Uhhh…”
Moni stared at the girl. Nestled against her breasts like an infant, she gazed up
at Moni. She could barely stand much less describe her parents’ murders. If
they tried extracting the terrifying memories out of her too quickly and
forcefully, she might never recover. Moni felt as if she were walking across
slick tile carrying a porcelain vase atop her head.

But,
at the same time, the person who had killed four people still lurked out there.
The murderer would strike again—maybe soon. Those future victims needed Moni’s
help too.

“Did
you see what happened here?” Moni asked her. “Did you see what happened to…”

The
girl’s face contorted in agony. Her brown eyes cringed like plump grapes drying
into scrawny raisins. She curled back her lips and clenched her teeth. She
didn’t say a word or even whine. She couldn’t, because her breathing accelerated
into near hyperventilation.

Moni
couldn’t put her through this. No one should be forced to re-live their darkest
memories, especially one so young.

“I…
I can’t,” Moni told Sneed. “She’s not ready now.”

“Yer
shitting me,” said the red-faced detective. “We’ve got zero forensic evidence
on a suspect, zero motive and we don’t have the faintest idea how they’re
getting killed. If we have any prayer of catching this guy before he traces
another chalk line for us, she’s it. So sweet talk her, buy her a fucking pony,
whatever the hell you’ve gotta do, I want me some leads.”

Turning
around, Moni shielded the girl from his rage. Sneed didn’t fret over his
blatant discrimination against Moni, so he wouldn’t mind tossing a little girl
into the flames to cook a suspect. The officers standing behind him must have
understood his intentions for the child. Not one of them rose to the girl’s
defense. Moni was it.

Skillings
stepped alongside her boss and stuck her nose in Moni’s face as if she were a
hypnotized snake coiled around Sneed’s arm.

“This
isn’t a pre-teen shoplifting case and it sure-as-hell isn’t domestic abuse,”
Skillings said. “The stakes are life and death. If you can’t handle being part
of our team, why don’t you step aside and hand over the girl to the
professionals?”

The
girl’s fingers dug into Moni’s back so hard it would have taken a crowbar to
pry them off. She definitely understood English, Moni thought.

“According
to protocol, this girl is under custody of the DCF until a judge can weigh in,”
Moni said. She scooted around Sneed and Skillings and headed for the parking
lot. Sneed tagged along with her. She should have told him to back off, but
he’d never let her on his investigation team if she stepped that far out of
line.

In
the parking lot, Moni ran into the DCF agent, a chunky dark-skinned black woman
with a curly weave. She wore a black pants suit with a purple undershirt that
could barely contain her double-Ds. She reached out for the girl with her beefy
arms. Moni didn’t even try handing her over before the girl tightened her grip
on her to make it nearly impossible.

“That’s
a lovely coat you’ve got there. Does it ever come off?” the agent asked.

“For
now, I think it’s better that I leave it on,” Moni said.

“Oh,
that’s great!” Sneed exclaimed. “Treat my only witness like a coat. Why don’t
you just make a scrap book out of the crime scene photos?”

“Excuse
me.” The agent got right in the detective’s face like nobody’s business. “I’m
DCF Agent Tanya Roberts and you’re on my case now. My first priority is the
well-being of that child. She is more than a witness in my eyes.”

The
grumbling detective crossed his arms and glared at Moni something fierce. She
had led him into a realm where his words weren’t the final say. He couldn’t
compel a child to testify unless a juvenile judge signed off on it.

When
Moni finally had the girl safe with her in the back seat of the DCF agent’s
car, she sat down beside her. The child immediately leaned her head against her
shoulder. Keeping her eyes down, she didn’t look out the window for a second as
they left the place where her parents had died.

“No day will ever be worse for
you than this,” Moni told the girl softly. “That means there will be better
days. I promise that I won’t let anybody hurt you, ever. I promise, baby.”

Chapter 2

Aaron
Hughes shook his head of golden locks as he watched the sea turtle row its
flippers through the air in vain. The poor guy was so sick he didn’t realize
they had plucked him out of the Indian River Lagoon for a ride in their skiff.
Or maybe he had devoted his last ounce of turtle strength towards escaping.

“Looks
like the dude’s freaking out,” Aaron told his professor.

“What
did you expect? He’s sick and he doesn’t know we’re helping him,” said Dr.
Herbert Swartzman, the head of marine biology at the Atlantic Marine Research
Institute. Although they were based out of Fort Pierce, the professor and his
grad student had taken the 12-foot skiff up the lagoon to a spot not far from
Kennedy Space Center.

Hiking
up his board shorts, Aaron leaned down and examined the white tumors covering
the green animal like mushrooms popping out of the grass after a rain. They
were painfully wedged between its flipper and its shell, stuck on the corner of
its mouth and atop its head. One especially cruel tumor covered half of its
left eye.

“That’s
nasty,” Aaron said. “The poor guy can barely swim.”

Aaron
combed through his memories for the name for the tumors, but couldn’t dig it
up. Swartzman didn’t need another reason he should consider his student a
beach-brained slacker. He already had plenty, like his penchant for surfing
during breaks between classes and then showing up with his wetsuit under his
t-shirt or how he signed up for every outdoor assignment and avoided the lab
coat as if it were a straight jacket. If he could help this sea turtle, instead
of just hoisting it from the water like a deck hand, Swartzman would have a
new-found respect for him. But he couldn’t remember that damn name.

“We
talked about these tumors before,” Aaron said. “You called them…” Pausing, he
waited for his professor to finish off his sentence before it became a
question.

“Just
in case you had your head in the sand that day, I’ll remind you that those
tumors are called fibropapillomas,” Swartzman said, as he programmed the
tracking beacon he had selected for their shelled subject. “As they spread,
they hinder the turtles’ ability to function and can get infected. I’ve seen a
lot of them in the lagoon over the past month, mostly from Cape Canaveral
through Melbourne. The turtles in the ocean are barely affected.”

“So
whatever caused this started in the lagoon and hasn’t spread across the
Sebastian Inlet,” Aaron said. About 20 miles south of Melbourne, the Sebastian
Inlet connects the lagoon to the Atlantic Ocean. It also spawns some gnarly
waves.

“What
do you mean something ‘caused’ this? It’s just a disease. It’s probably spread
turtle to turtle.”

“But
you don’t know how. You didn’t tell us what caused it, right? So nobody knows?”

“Nobody
knows for sure,” said Swartzman, who wouldn’t jump out on a limb if it were ten
feet wide. “But fibropapillomas wasn’t started by something in the lagoon. It’s
been found as far back as 1958 in the Pacific. The only thing new is how
rapidly it’s spreading here.”

“You
sure that’s the only thing new? What about this?” Aaron pointed to a tumor on
the underside of the turtle’s neck, near its jugular. While all the rest were
white and lumpy, this tumor was purple and smooth as a marble. It looked like a
purple bead had been half-way imbedded into the turtle.

Easing
off the throttle so the skiff slowed to a glide, Swartzman peeked underneath
the turtle’s head. His eyes widened. Aaron had never seen anything astonish his
teacher—anything scientific, at least. He had looked plenty perplexed when Aaron
showed up on the first day of class with a mask and flippers over his shoulder
like a masters course in marine biology was Scuba Diving 101.

“That’s
not normal, is it doc?”

“No,
it certainly isn’t normal.” Swartzman couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t
know how you missed it when you got it untangled from the mangroves.”

Like
the professor didn’t miss it too, Aaron thought.

“Think
it’s some kind of infection inside the tumor? Whoa. Maybe we discovered a
totally new disease!” His dreams of making scientific journal headlines were
dashed when he saw his professor’s sour expression. Keeping the animals in the
lagoon healthy had been the man’s life’s work. “I mean, it would totally suck
if it were a new disease hurting these turtles.”

“Yeah.”
Swartzman sighed and combed his fingers through the Brillo Pad of hair
remaining on the sides and back of his pointy skull. Out on the water in a polo
shirt and khaki shorts, he had clearly come expecting his student would tackle
the dirty work in the lagoon, and that chore looked like all he expected out of
Aaron.

I’m capable of so much more. These
guys have been spinning their wheels for decades trying to figure out what’s
wrong with these turtles. If I could crack this case…

“Hey!
Greetings there Herb!” shouted the only boater in the lagoon who used a
megaphone. Harry Trainer, the Lagoon Watcher, inched toward them in his boat,
which had been decorated with a paint-by-numbers marine life scene. He drove
that boat as slowly as an old lady on the Interstate. He wouldn’t chance
hitting one of his underwater buddies.

Taking
his focus off the unidentified tumor, Swartzman stood and waved at his former
research partner with a welcoming grin. “Come on over, Harry. I’ve got
something pretty weird. That makes it right up your alley.”

They
had worked together when Trainer was the chief biologist at the Ocean Village
theme park in Orlando about a decade ago. Aaron hadn’t exactly seen the two
lagoon-loving scientists chatting over beers, but he figured they kept in touch
even as Trainer took his research solo—not that he had any choice.

Aaron
linked the crafts together with a line and Trainer hopped aboard.

“That’s
a nasty case of fibropapillomas the fella has there,” Trainer said as he shook
hands with Swartzman.

“I’m
afraid it’s more than that,” the professor said.

Aaron
gently wedged his fingers beneath the sea turtle’s head. This time the
shell-brain bobbed its head up and down and snapped at him. He had seen sea
turtles act so aggressively only when fighting for mates. Aaron hoped he wasn’t
giving this sea turtle the wrong idea. Finally, he caught the turtle under the
jaw and lifted it so they could see the purple tumor.

Nodding
plainly, Trainer didn’t seem the least surprised. The Lagoon Watcher had just
about seen it all in this 156-mile estuary.

“I
take it you’ve seen this before,” Swartzman said.

“Sure
have,” Trainer said.

“What
the hell is it?” Aaron asked. His professor shot him a demeaning glare for
interrupting the conversation between the real scientists.

“Well,
shucks, I wish I knew,” the Lagoon Watcher said with a yellow-toothed grin that
gave Aaron the willies. It reminded him of a carnival worker’s assuring smile
as he welcomes people on a creaky ride where he knows they’ll puke their guts
out.