Mute Read online

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  By

  Brian Bandell

  SILVER LEAF BOOKS

  Holliston, Massachusetts

  MUTE

  Copyright © 2012 by Brian Bandell

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed and bound in the United States. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or on the Web—without the express written consent of Silver Leaf Books, LLC.

  The Silver Leaf Books logo is a registered trademarks of Silver Leaf Books, LLC.

  All Silver Leaf Books characters, character names, and the distinctive likeness thereof are trademarks of Silver Leaf Books, LLC

  Cover Photograph by El Cesana

  First printing July 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN # 1-60975-059-4

  ISBN-13 # 978-1-60975-059-6

  Silver Leaf Books, LLC

  P.O. Box 6460

  Holliston, MA 01746

  +1-888-823-6450

  Visit our web site at www.SilverLeafBooks.com

  Thanks to family, friends and God.

  Special appreciation for assistance from Scott Lunsford, Delray Beach Police, Jim Masterson, Harbor Brach Oceanographic Institute; Troy Rice, St. Johns River Water Management District, attorney Kenneth Wiesen.

  Inspiration from the music of Tori Amos.

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  Prologue

  Matt Kane held an ice-cold beer in one hand, and leaned on the throttle with the other. The salty waters of the Indian River Lagoon parted before his twelve-foot skiff as sure as a herd of deer scattered from a shotgun blast, but he wouldn’t go hunting deer while his wife and kids attended Sunday church. No, Kane had a fix’n this fine morning for some fish; say a nice juicy sheepshead or a mangrove snapper. Good eats.

  The blue-green waters of the estuary contained a wealth of tasty critters, especially in the stretch between north Melbourne and Satellite Beach. Kane steered his skiff along a forest of mangroves on the mainland side. The fish often hid between the roots of those waterlogged plants, but they’d pop their scaly heads out for a morsel of frozen shrimp. As he sped past a “Slow Zone” sign with a picture of a lumbering manatee, Kane tossed his empty beer can at it. He missed.

  “Hey! Stop that!” an all-too-familiar voice shouted over a megaphone.

  Most boaters called him the Lagoon Watcher, but Kane called him a huge pain in the ass. Kane slowed down and tipped his NASCAR hat to the kook in the center console boat with the goofy, smiling dolphins, sea turtles and manatees painted on the side. He guarded the animals in the lagoon like a stubborn toddler hoarding candy bars.

  “Didn’t you see that sign?” asked the Watcher, who had the shock of puffy faded blond hair of a past-his-prime eighties rock star. He wore a custom tropical shirt and nut-hugging khaki shorts. The Lagoon Watcher had been a scientist once, or so Kane had heard, but he ambled about like a deadbeat now.

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Kane said. “And I’m sorry… Sorry my aim wasn’t better.”

  The flustered old man shook his head in short spurts. Kane thought for a second that it might have been a seizure. No such luck. “This lagoon is nature’s treasure and you’re not only polluting it, you’re putting its gentle citizens in danger with your reckless boating.” The Watcher scooped the beer can out of the water with a net.

  “As far as I see it, I live here and pay my taxes, so I don’t need nobody tell’n me I can’t have my day fer fish’n,” Kane said. “So git on out my way.”

  Kane swerved his skiff around the Lagoon Watcher’s floating fruit cup of a boat, and continued along the mangroves. He knew the wimpy Watcher, even after being punked out, wouldn’t give chase, but he got behind his megaphone for one last whine.

  “The lagoon doesn’t belong to you, or any of us,” the Lagoon Watcher shouted. “Nature has a way of pushing us back.”

  Kane chuckled as he thought of that screw job’s cartoonish view of the world, where fish would jump out of the water and turn their hooks on him and drunken manatees would drive pickup trucks through petrified neighborhoods. In reality, he wouldn’t bet on nature doing shit.

  And sure enough, Kane struck first. Not fifteen minutes after sinking the first line in, something gave it a nice firm tug. It must have been a big one, because he couldn’t reel it in. The gill head was strong, he thought. Worried about the line snapping, Kane figured he’d wear the bastard out. He let the engine sputter along at low speed and he followed the fish as it swam parallel to the mangroves. He couldn’t see his catch through the murky waters so Kane kept one eye out ahead in case any rocks cropped up in his path. As he passed a county park with a small pier, he glanced over toward it hoping he’d have an audience that could witness him landing a fat one.

  He had an audience all right. They were on their bellies with their bodies splayed out on the rocky shore and their heads and shoulders submerged underwater. The man and woman weren’t coming up for air. Their hands were as stiff and pale as a mannequin’s. Kane felt a chill in his heart as he realized living limbs didn’t look like that.

  “Holy Lord,” Kane said as he cut the line and turned his boat ashore. As much as he hated letting his prized catch free with only a lip piercing, he figured he deserved as much for fishing on a Sunday morning. He wondered how those two sorry fellas had crossed God and made the good Lord come down on them so harshly.

  Getting a better look at the bodies when he stepped ashore, Kane saw that they were two brown-skinned people lying beside each other in a partial embrace. They had wrapped their nearest arms around their waists. The man, a chunky fellow with a carpet of back hair sticking out from underneath the tail of his shirt, had his other arm posted on the ground as if he had been trying desperately to pull his head out of the water at the moment of his death. The short woman wore low-cut jeans that framed an ass that must have been mighty sweet when it had blood pumping through it. She had her other arm outstretched across the ground. He saw a deep bruise on her palm.

  This didn’t look like a suicide pact. Someone had drowned them—maybe one of those Mexican cartels wasting their own people. That’s what they get for coming to his country illegally, Kane thought. Either way, he couldn’t let their heads stay underwater or they were likely to become gator chow.

  Kane started kneeling down. He abruptly stood back up. He took a few deep breaths. The knots in his stomach didn’t subside. He had seen plenty of dead game, from deer to boars. He had gutted them, roasted them and eaten them up. But the only time he had seen a dead person was when he stood before the open casket at his grandma’s funeral. She had looked peaceful, yet so artificial with the bright makeup smeared all over her wrinkly face. He had never seen the old gal color her lips with anything besides cigarette ashes. That had been a hollow shell of his grandmother, yet he couldn’t have let her go without seeing it. The sight had hammered home her absence.

  Wondering what kind of expression the woman’s lifeless face would show absent of any funeral parlor magic, Kane summoned up his gumption. He grabbed her around the shoulders and yanked her upper body out of the water. Kane stared into the empty crevice between her collarbones where her head should have been. Her skin had been sliced as precisely as a slab of pork on a cutting board. He peered into the hollow trachea where her breath once flowed. Fused between her shoulder blades, her exposed vertebra appeared
in perfect condition—minus the neck and head that should have been above it. Yet, the gaping wound bled only a trickle. The dirty ground had so few droplets of blood that it didn’t make a lick of sense. Kane had taken the noggin’ off more than a few deer and boars and he had never seen a beheading so clean. He coughed a cup of stomach acid into his mouth.

  Kane dropped the body back into the water and sprang away from it. His heart pounded so hard that he covered it with his hand so it wouldn’t leap out of his chest. Beheading never looked so… so damn surgical. Somebody had held that woman down and removed her head as delicately as a mechanic disassembling an antique engine. Kane didn’t dare touch the man’s corpse for fear of burdening his mind forever with another haunting image. Serial killers work in a pattern, he had been told.

  He played poker with Tom Sneed, the top detective for the county sheriff. He had told Kane about a couple of unsolved murders along the lagoon—bodies they had recently found without heads and missing some internal organs. Even after a few six packs, Sneed wouldn’t tell the poker club the grisly details, but he had said he didn’t want to create a media circus around it—not that the Orlando-dominated media gave a shit what happened in Brevard County when the space shuttle wasn’t blasting off.

  Those looked like murders three and four, by Kane’s count. Scanning the mangroves and the boardwalk paths as he grasped his fishing knife, Kane reckoned he’d rather not wind up as number five. As he backed toward his boat, which had his cell phone in a zip lock bag, Kane spotted something low in the mangroves. He stopped in his tracks. It was a shoe—a girl’s shoe with a unicorn on it. He should have known by the stretch marks on the dead woman’s lower back that she had a child. Kane hurried over and scooped up the empty shoe. By the looks of it, it hadn’t been out there for more than a day. He saw a pair of tracks, with one matching shoeprint and one sock print, leading deeper into the mangrove bushes.

  Chewing on his bottom lip, Kane thought about high-tailing it for his boat before the surgical butcher came back. He could call in Sneed’s boys to handle this one. But that would leave the girl as fresh meat for the killer, if he hadn’t already sliced and diced her like salami. As the father of a young girl, Kane simply couldn’t walk away. He followed the tracks with his knife in hand.

  Those tracks didn’t go far. Kane plodded through swampy ground with floating leaves sticking to his boots. The thin layer of water had washed away the girl’s footprints. As Kane weaved between the long branches of the mangroves with their club-shaped leaves, he saw a shadow pass by his right side. He gazed up. Against the blaze of the low-hanging morning sun, he saw a red shoulder hawk gliding past him. The bird circled around back over the mangroves. The predator had its eye on something. Kane hoped another predator didn’t have his eye on him. He rather liked his neck where it was, holding up his head and all.

  Hearing a rustling in the bushes behind him, Kane spun around so fast that he scraped his arm against a sharp broken branch. With blood dripping from his arm just below the tattoo of his daughter’s name, he redoubled his grip on the knife. Kane instantly lowered it when he spied the girl. Brown-skinned like her parents, the little illegal immigrant slumped on her knees in the muddy soil. Her straight black hair concealed much of her face besides her clamped mouth, her thin nose and her inquisitive brown eyes. After what had just happened to her parents, the girl should have been terrified of a strange man chasing her with a knife, Kane thought. The little one gazed at him as coolly as a panther. She didn’t even shiver in her soaking wet, mud caked pink dress. Brown and green leaves covered the girl’s arms. She didn’t brush them off. Remembering the rotten oil of despair that had upset his stomach after his grandmother had died, Kane understood why. Grief had shell-shocked the poor girl. By the looks of her, she was in her first years of elementary school and already she had witnessed the gory killing of her parents. Kane didn’t even know her parents, and the sight of their bodies still left a bitter stain on his mind.

  Kane put the knife away and held out his hands. She backed deeper into the tangle of mangroves.

  “It’s okay darling. I ain’t gonna hurt cha,” Kane said. “That little knife was for my protection—and yours—in case the bad person comes back. You want me to help you outta here to some place dry?” She remained absolutely still. He figured she might not understand English. He could handle that. “What’s your name girl? Como te llamas?”

  His Spanish sounded, well, like a redneck speaking the only line of Spanish he knew. Maybe his horrible accent had deeply offended her because the girl didn’t respond. Kane hated when kids ignored him. The Bible says kids should respect their parents, but his daughter ordered him around like a damn farmhand. “Buy me that movie! Take me to Disney!” When he finally put his foot down, the girl went on a tantrum. That’s when Kane would scoop the stubborn kid up and stick her in her room. Since he didn’t feel like standing in the mangroves all morning with his fishing time wasting away, Kane figured he’d move the process along a bit.

  Kane lunged for the girl and reached for her shoulders. She slipped through what he thought had been an impenetrable thicket of mangrove branches and darted behind the plants. She didn’t scream or cry. She moved as nimbly and confidently as a squirrel scurrying up a tree as it evades a lumbering hound. This old dog wouldn’t lie down yet. Kane plowed through the branches after her.

  “Would you stop running? I’m trying to help you, kid,” Kane shouted. His wife always scolded him for scaring the kids when he shouted, but sometimes they needed a good scaring to set them straight. “You’re best off leaving here with… oh, shit!”

  A black water moccasin fell from a branch right onto his arm. Its wide, flat head aimed right at Kane’s nose. The snake eyed him with coal-black pupils while baring its poisonous fangs. Even without a single hiss from the snake, Kane got the point. He shook the snake off his arm and shuffled backward. The water moccasin landed on the ground and coiled up between him and the girl. She didn’t retreat from it one inch. If he had a dozen more beers in him, Kane would have sworn the girl was hiding behind the snake. Couldn’t be! After seeing somebody murder her parents and then having this knife-wielding redneck chasing her around, he reckoned that she rightly feared people more than she feared a water moccasin.

  “If that’s how you want it, see ya, senorita.” Kane didn’t feel like wrestling a snake for a girl who didn’t fancy being saved anyway. He backed his way out of the mangrove swamp toward his boat, where he could call in Sneed and his team. They’d have a hell of a time with this one.

  Chapter 1

  Monique Williams pulled into the parking lot of the lagoon-side park in her Ford Taurus, which brandished a Brevard County Sheriff’s Office logo on its side. Her finger on the door handle, she sat there watching the officers scouring through the old, beat-up Honda that belonged to the victims. It had a sticker on the back windshield of a man, woman and girl holding hands with smiles drawn across their faces. If only life could be so simple and families never shattered like a tray of glasses on the club floor.

  Monique, or Moni, as everybody called her, closed her eyes and shook her head. She had been a police officer for sixteen years and a detective for half that time. It never got easier, especially with murder scenes involving children.

  Moni sucked in a deep breath and finally got out of her car. She tugged at her hair band and made sure one of her thin braids hadn’t slipped out. As she headed down the boardwalk toward the murder scene, she noticed all the other officers were white and gave her the all-too-familiar “What the hell is she doing here?” look. Lead Detective Tom Sneed put his team on this case, she thought. She had never worked a case as part of his homicide investigation unit—and neither did any of the other black officers. Being half white didn’t earn Moni half of the assignments with him either. It was all or nothing with Sneed.

  He only takes the best qualified, he says. My ass.

  She should have expected Sneed here. He always got the big cases and there
were none bigger than the serial killings along the Indian River Lagoon. The first victim was a man in his 50s on a jogging trail. The second was a college girl who had gone kayaking by her lonesome. And now two at once. Neither of the first two murders had any leads or witnesses. They couldn’t even say how the murderer had snatched their heads off so smoothly. With this child as the only person who might have seen the killer in gruesome action, Moni and her special training dealing with juvenile victims served as the best hope Sneed had. She had coaxed children into telling her about relatives who abused them or their siblings. Lives had been saved because she helped remove children from horrendous parents. The lead detective better swallow his racial pride before asking for her help, she thought.

  She found Sneed huddled with a blue wall of officers on the edge of the boardwalk, where it gave way to the sandy path to the lagoon. Upon spotting her, he promptly steered his gaze on her as if she were a serpent on a branch. Sneed greeted her with his broad shoulders and his back, with a husk of fat hanging over his belt. He jawed at his officers in his gravel-grinding, Georgian accent. Now showing her an ass large enough to make an elephant blush, he hammered home how they better scour every inch of this crime scene for evidence. He made a good point, as he usually did. A detective doesn’t work for 26 years busting gangs and solving murders in Atlanta without knowing more than most cops on the street. That was why, as much as Moni couldn’t stand his attitude or his corny handlebar mustache, she’d rather work with Sneed than for any other detective on the force. Not that the feeling was mutual.