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  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.

  “It has me stumped too, but we’ll take a sample back to our lab,” Swartzman said.

  “Yeah, I tried that,” Trainer said. “Still working on the results. I’ll tell you though. This is what happens when you dump sewage and lawn pesticides and motor fuel into the lagoon. And then there’s all the sulfuric and phosphorus run-off from the farms. They’re turning a national treasure into toxic soup. This is what happens!”

  He waved his hand at the sick turtle. It flinched.

  After encountering the Lagoon Watcher on missions with other professors, they told Aaron that Ocean Village had fired him after he “went off the deep end” and started publicly criticizing the theme park’s management for holding dolphins and orcas in captivity. He compared their crowd-pleasing shows to slavery and their marine mammal plush toys to the old derogatory depictions of blacks in cartoons. Then he called for the closure of every farm in Central Florida until they built water purification systems along the canals leading to the lagoon. Bringing too much controversial pub to the tourist attraction, Trainer got the boot. His former bosses didn’t exactly write him any glowing endorsement letters that he could leverage into a new job.

  Aaron couldn’t tell whether Swartzman still respected Trainer for his groundbreaking research or whether he admired him for doing something the docile professor couldn’t: showing he had a pair and sticking up for what he believed in.

  “There’s no doubt that conditions in the lagoon are worsening,” Swartzman said. “Just the other day, I read a report from the Water Management District saying the pH level in the lagoon has dipped a little low—hedging dangerously towards acidic. But it occurred in isolated spots only.”

  “Maybe that’s why this tumor is purple,” Aaron said. “The changing water conditions are causing new diseases and mutations.”

  While Swartzman ignored him, Trainer eagerly nodded. “You see what I’m talking about, don’t you? We must sound the alarm. We must put strict measures in place to protect this lagoon before it spirals out of control.”

  Swartzman shrugged and scooted away from the Lagoon Watcher. All of a sudden, he couldn’t lock eyes with his old pal. “I don’t know, Harry… I need to understand this better before I declare a full-blown emergency. It’s one purple bump on one turtle.”

  “It’s more than that and you know it!” The Lagoon Watcher stepped up and shook his finger in the professor’s face. “Don’t make this like the NASA incident where you crawled under a rock when it was time to go to war.”

  Swartzman rubbed his palm across his sweaty forehead. Aaron had never heard about Swartzman and NASA. As much as it piqued his curiosity, he figured his professor had suffered enough degradation for one day. Turning his back on the turtle, Aaron nudged between Swartzman and the Lagoon Watcher.

  “All right, hombres, no need to dig up all your battle stories from the Civil War,” Aaron said. “We’ll slice up this purple tumor like a sushi roll and then we’ll ring you up, Watcher man.”

  The Lagoon Watcher chortled as he clutched his dried-out sea star pendent. “I’ll be waiting for that call.” He turned and bounded back aboard his boat.

  As delighted as Swartzman had looked when Trainer had arrived, he looked twice as relieved when he left his skiff. Those two old men had a real love-hate bromance, Aaron thought.

  While they watched the Lagoon Watcher ride off, they heard a big splash behind them. Aaron whirled around so fast that he nearly fell overboard. He saw the restraints that had held the sea turtle stretched out and torn. The sickly shelled one had gotten away. He didn’t think it possessed the strength to wiggle out of those restraints, much less have its flippers hoist it over the side of the skiff.

  “Oh crap! Now look what you’ve done!” Swartzman shouted. “I told you to keep your eye on the thing.”

  “Come on. I had to save your ass from that guy.”

  “Who said I needed saving? Harry is not a violent person.”

  Aaron didn’t have any evidence that suggested otherwise, but he had a hunch that the passion Trainer had for defending the lagoon could turn ugly if the guy got worked up. Yet, he should have known that Trainer didn’t pose a physical threat. Otherwise, there’s no way Swartzman would have let him on board.

  Aaron’s paranoia had cost Swartzman his most important discovery in years.

  “I’m sorry, doc.” Aaron hung his head and took a seat. “I should have let you handle it while I watched the turtle.” He gazed out over the water, where the beads of sunlight bounced off the gently-sloping waves. “I swear I’ll get him back.”

  “There’s no need for that.” Swartzman turned a dismissive shoulder to his student and took the skiff’s wheel. “I stuck a GPS tracking device on the sea turtle. He won’t get far, but he needs time to calm down after this traumatic day. Next time he’s in our area, we’ll pick him up.”

  Even though Aaron hadn’t completely blown it for them, Swartzman still carried a hefty dose of disappointment in his voice. That was a tone Aaron recognized all too well from his father. If this relationship deteriorated that severely, he’d never get his degree.

  Luckily for Aaron, he’d have no shortage of opportunities at discovering freakish phenomenon in the lagoon.

  Chapter 3

  They finally called her by her name: Mariella Gomez. The girl didn’t bat an eyelash. Her thin lips didn’t come unglued. They might as well have called her, “Paper Bag.”

  Moni couldn’t believe how deep the girl had fallen down the well of debilitating post-traumatic stress. She had comforted children who had lost their parents, but never right before their eyes. Sometimes the children were in school or asleep when it happened. A few times, Moni had spoken to kids after they awoke in the hospital from an accident that claimed their parents. Usually, the first task was helping them accept that their parents were actually gone. That wasn’t a problem for Mariella. Seeing a mad man hack off the heads of her mother and father and do unspeakable acts to their corpses would make an even deeper imprint on the psyche of the young mind.

  Moni discovered the names of Mariella’s deceased parents from the identification cards on the bodies. The killer hadn’t touched the Mexican immigrants’ cash. The DCF officer and the child psycholog
ist that joined Mariella and Moni in the counseling room knew of Pedro and Rosa Gomez as well, yet none of them would dare mention their names in front of Mariella - not on the same day the girl had lost them. They feared it would spook her deeper into her hole like a burrowing mouse.

  The eight-year-old girl had shown mild improvement in the hours since her rescue. She had wet her pants twice, including once on Moni’s lap, and sat in the filth without saying a word. After following Moni into the bathroom and watching her do her business—since Mariella stuck by her everywhere—the girl had used the toilet once by herself. The child had become so cautious she could hardly take a step without making sure Moni walked beside her.

  Moni tried setting the girl down on one side of the psychologist’s couch and letting Tanya from the DCF sit between them. Mariella immediately jumped down, scooted in between the two women and rested her head on Moni’s knee.

  “She’s become quite attached to you, I see. That might be to replace someone who’s no longer here right now,” said Dr. Ike McKinley, the blue-eyed psychologist with thin gray hair. Despite the sweltering weather outside, he kept his office sub-zero and wore a green sweater over his lanky frame like a Mr. Rogers wannabe. Although, he specialized in children, his office didn’t have anything more fun to play with than ink flash cards and wooden blocks. McKinley’s bookshelf had cheery decorations like posters of the human brain and its various regions and a row of stress relieving squeeze toys. Moni grew frustrated by the sight of them because she could never grasp one hard enough for it to pop open.

  “It’s good that she has someone for the moment,” Tanya said. “We can’t track down any relatives in the states. The public school system has her down as a second grader at Challenger 7 Elementary. Her teacher said the girl speaks English slowly and is very shy about it, but she chatters on and on in Spanish with her Mexican classmates.”

  “But she hasn’t responded to any Spanish with us,” Moni said.

  She gazed at the silky black hair of the child leaning against her. Mariella flipped through flash cards—some with ink blots and others with pictures of staple items like cats and milk. She studied them thoroughly, but didn’t respond when Moni or the psychologist asked her what she saw. The girl wasn’t stupid. Her teacher had told Tanya that she was a B student.

  “It’s called selective mutism,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s when children who can speak choose not to and become extremely withdrawn. A traumatic event is a common trigger for this behavior, but the damage can be undone.”

  “You can help her?” Moni asked.

  “I believe so, if we place her into a facility with specialized care,” the psychologist said.

  As soon as the words left his mouth, Mariella dropped the cards and held fast to Moni’s waist. Without saying a word, the girl let everybody know who she felt comfortable with.

  Moni had seen the deplorable conditions in state foster homes—the rooms crowded with bunk beds and the understaffed counselors chasing after kids with severe behavioral problems. Some kids had gotten raped or beaten in state care, if it could even be called care. A lucky match with the right counselor in a home that didn’t house a future sociopath would really help Mariella, but Moni couldn’t toss the girl’s life on the craps table. Life had dealt her a crappy roll of the dice already.

  “I don’t know about that. My girl here might crack under the stress of a foster home,” Moni said. “I’ve seen some kids that previously gave good testimony crumble into jelly after spending a few months in a home.”

  “Yeah, it ain’t the Ritz, but it’s what we got,” Tanya said. “I don’t see another place for her right now. If you can think of a better option, then I’ll tell the judge at the hearing tomorrow.”

  Moni knew she had another option, but it seemed out of the question. She couldn’t possibly investigate these murders while caring for a recovering child, especially the one at the center of the investigation. At 32 years old, she was ripe for having children but her choice of men had proven disastrous. Moni hadn’t so much as changed a diaper because she had spent too much time polishing the rims of her man-child’s ride. Until she could chase her ex-boyfriend Darren away for good, no child would be safe with her, Moni thought.

  The girl stared into Moni’s eyes. She looked as terrified as she did in the mangroves. Her hands quivered around Moni’s waist. With the girl’s body pressed up against hers, Moni felt her heart beating as rapidly as a fax machine spitting out data.

  “Right now, my recommendation is highly specialized foster care,” the psychologist said. “You can see her every day under my supervision. Starting tomorrow, we’ll work with her about drawing for us what happened today. A sketch of the perpetrator would be a good start.”

  Mariella grabbed Moni’s hand and squeezed it until it turned white. Her mocha complexion did that under pressure. And that’s how Mariella must have felt—pressured to death. When Moni was a child, the last thing she needed after her father had left her battered in her closet was a reminder of his face with its buck teeth, shaggy brown hair and the scar across his chin. In the dining room, she ate sitting in the only chair where she could avoid seeing his photo every time she lifted her head.

  While poor Mariella struggled to forget the monster that had killed her parents, the psychologist wanted that beast branded front-and-center on her mind.

  Sneed must have influenced him, Moni thought. If the detective couldn’t buy the DCF or the judge, he’d pay off the psychologist that held sway with both of them. He didn’t give a damn what happened to Mariella as long as he had the murderer strapped on the gurney for lethal injection sure as Sneed had a deer head strapped to his office wall.

  Damn it, but there’s no other way to catch the killer. I’ve already let enough people get hurt.

  “There might be another option, but I’ll meet with my investigation team first and see how this case is going,” Moni said. “I’ll let you know before the hearing.”

  “Okay,” said Tanya, who gave Moni a look that reminded her of how her mother had eyeballed her when she pined over a puppy she couldn’t have in the pet store window. “Mariella can stay in protective custody with you—for now.”

  “Like she’d give me a choice?” Moni wrapped her arm around the girl. She saw a hint of a smile on Mariella’s lips for a second and basked in its flash of warmth. Someone wonderful had survived in there.

  * * * *

  It took nearly an hour until they found a setup in the police station that didn’t make Mariella freak out. Moni tried leaving the girl in her office with a guard outside the door, but the girl started banging on the door and window the moment she left. Sneed told Moni to ignore it and get her ass in their investigation unit meeting. Moni sped back to the office and scooped up the frantic girl. Even with all that protesting, she hadn’t voiced so much as a whimper.

  Since they couldn’t discuss the case with the only witness hearing the evidence, they compromised. Sneed begrudgingly moved the meeting to the maze of cubicles outside Moni’s office, which had a sound-proof window that gave Mariella a clear view of Moni, and vice versa.

  The girl stared at Moni nonstop for nearly five minutes before finally finding the crayons and paper on the table. As the officers huddled around the folding table and ran through the gruesome evidence, Moni turned an empathetic eye back toward the child at each detail.

  Like the other two murders by the lagoon before it, the heads had been severed smoothly, right down to the blood vessels. The vertebra had separated as easily as Legos unlocking and the nerves were cut, not yanked apart or twisted. Like the prior victims, the Gomez’ had their blood thinned out and stripped of all its iron. Yet they showed no signs of long-term exposure to iron deficiency anemia—the only medical explanation. Somebody had mined the iron from them quickly. They had taken many organs with it.

  The first victim had been left nearly hollow, with bones and muscle but no organs. The second victim was missing about half her organs. For the Gomez
couple, the killer had narrowed it down to their lungs, livers, kidneys and reproductive organs. Once again, they hadn’t been ripped out through the skin. The murderer extracted them through the gaping hole in his victims’ necks, much like orthopedic surgeons remove gallbladders through a small incision. Except these organs had been severed more precisely than even a surgeon’s scalpel could cleave them.

  “This is the work of someone who’s done thousands of dissections,” said Paul Rudy, the Brevard County medical examiner. He would know, as he’s diced apart and stitched back together thousands of corpses. “The killer is working with top-notch equipment.”

  “That should tell us something about the motive,” Sneed said. “The killer left their wallets and their car. They weren’t sexually assaulted. The freak wanted their organs and their heads. What a fucking prize.”

  Moni gazed at Mariella’s angelic little face as she colored in a notebook. If the killer had seen her… An image of that petite body without a head, with blood spouting from its neck, flashed into her mind. She shook it off and eyed Sneed.

  “Do we have any idea how the killer subdued the couple?” she asked.

  “The results of the toxicology reports aren’t back yet, but I suspect something very nasty got into their systems shortly before their decapitations,” Rudy said. “The iron in their blood dissolved rapidly. They had internal chemical burns, like someone had injected battery acid into their veins.”

  “Battery acid?” Moni covered her mouth. She remembered the time her father had burned her arm with a cigarette because she hadn’t cleaned up her toys. She still had a circular scar. “Were there injection marks on their bodies?”

  “No.” The medical examiner shook his head. “At least, not below the neck.”

  The heads of the prior two victims hadn’t turned up, so Moni didn’t expect they’d get any more evidence from these bodies. So far, they hadn’t found any signs in the rat trap of an apartment the Gomez family called home that indicated why they had gotten butchered. They were at a dead end, unless Moni coaxed something useful out of Mariella.