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  Chapter 7

  The terrified girl wouldn’t release Moni’s free hand so she could answer her phone as she drove Mariella home. She had a notion that the person on the line would tell her something that would punch a hole in her gut. Moni wished she could just whisk Mariella back to her house, barricade the door and bar the windows.

  I’m not hiding in the closet like a scared child anymore.

  She wiggled free of the girl’s hand and answered her phone. DCF agent Tanya Roberts told her they better meet at the child psychologist’s office—now.

  Mariella’s pleading eyes begged her no, but Moni had little choice. If she didn’t take the girl back for another mental probing, the DCF would surely revoke her temporary custody. She could imagine the young one kicking the air as two burly officers dragged her into an interrogation room, where Sneed would sit with drool dripping from his bulldog choppers. The door swings shut. Bang! She’s gone.

  “Just act like you’re sorry—even though that brat deserved it,” Moni told the girl as they waited in the elevator to Dr. McKinley’s office. Afraid he might have a camera in there, she put in a little something extra for show. “But just because he was mean, doesn’t mean you should hurt him.”

  She had trouble saying that convincingly. Moni had endured endless teasing in elementary school. The white girls called her “dummy darky” and asked each other whether somebody smelled a monkey when she came around. Some of the darker-skinned black children labeled her “Oreo baby” and scorned her when they saw her playing with white boys. She dressed herself in Martin Luther King shirts, but they called her a “poser” and only half a King. The other half of her had shot King dead, they told her.

  Moni’s parents hadn’t helped her much with the bullies because they were locked in a feud with each other. If her father had given a damn about her, he would have found her another school.

  As she entered the psychologist’s waiting room with Mariella in hand, Moni realized what the girl needed. She didn’t belong in school in such a fragile state. Moni should care for her at home. She must protect the girl above all else. The blood vessels in Moni’s head pulsed so hard that it felt like pistons pounding inside her skull. Mariella quickly released her hand as Moni rubbed her temples. That eased the pressure.

  “Are you okay, there?” Dr. Ike McKinley asked from the doorway of his office. “Can I get you some Aspirin?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Moni said as she shook her head. The recesses of her brain rattled into working order. As quickly as it had come, the headache vanished. “I haven’t had one like that before. Must be a sign that I need more sleep.”

  “Between the investigation and the girl, I’m sure a lot’s on your mind. I hope it’s not overwhelming,” the psychologist said as he ushered Moni and Mariella into his office.

  Obviously, he implied that a first-time parent and novice at investigating homicides couldn’t juggle so many responsibilities, Moni thought. So much for the shrink bolstering her confidence.

  Tanya Roberts scooted her plump booty over so they had room on the couch. She welcomed them with a warm smile that didn’t do squat to reassure Moni that she didn’t have terrible news waiting for them on the tip of her tongue. With her feet digging in as heavy as cement, the girl clung to Moni’s leg. Moni patted her on the head. Mariella loosened up and found a spot beside her on the couch.

  “Don’t be afraid, little one,” Tanya said. Mariella hugged her knees against her chest. “You’re not in trouble. What you did was wrong, but I think you know that. We’re not here to punish you.”

  The DCF agent probably wouldn’t consider it a punishment if she took the girl from the home she’s grown so comfortable in, Moni thought. Tanya had always made sound judgments in their past child abuse cases together, but for some reason, this time her intentions seemed more ominous.

  “So what are we here for?” Moni asked.

  “You are a successful career woman, Officer Williams, but parenting is quite a different challenge,” McKinley said. “Even people who have experience raising children can find themselves overwhelmed by a child who presents… certain special challenges.” He extended his palms as if he were balancing eggs on them.

  “This girl needs me.” Moni draped her arm around Mariella, who nestled her head on her shoulder. “I’m the only person in the world she trusts right now.”

  “That’s great, but if a wounded dolphin that washed up on the beach falls in love with me, does that give me the power to heal it?” the psychologist asked. “Should I not call a dolphin expert?”

  Moni knew the answer, but she refused to let him hear it from her mouth.

  “I’ve taken courses about dealing with juveniles in traumatic situations,” Moni said. “I can handle it.”

  “You’ve taken classes on how to comfort kids for a few hours and interrogate them,” said McKinley, who couldn’t have known that unless Sneed had given him all the dirt on her. “And from what I understand, you still haven’t gotten her to communicate, so I don’t see how your training has been all that effective.”

  All her life, every white authority figure she had known doubted her ability. Even when she aced English in middle school, her teacher passed her over for the spelling B and the essay contest. It didn’t matter what she did, no one would show an ounce of faith in her.

  “Let’s not make this about her training,” Tanya said. Finally, a sister came to her rescue. “Moni, I can see you’re trying real hard. But you better understand that we can’t have another disaster like this. You’re the only person the girl will listen to right now. So you go tell her that she can’t go getting in any more fights.”

  Moni felt like telling Tanya those junior Klansmen twins stirred the shit up, but it wouldn’t make any difference. So she said what the agent wanted to hear.

  “I’ll have a long talk with her and make sure she understands how to walk away next time,” Moni said with a nod to Mariella. “But, until it sinks in, I think Mariella should stay home with me.”

  “Home with you?” McKinley half rose from his chair. “But don’t you have a mur…” He eyed the girl and swallowed that last word. “I mean, a bad man to catch?”

  “I’ll do what I can with her in my office, but, anyway, she’s the most solid lead we have in this case,” Moni said. “The best thing I can do is keep her safe and gradually work with her on recounting the event.”

  She felt Mariella shuddering against her arm. The girl had finally caught on to what the adults meant when they talked about “the event.” Mariella wouldn’t even make eye contact with Moni as she gently massaged the rocks out of her slender shoulders.

  “The teacher told me that Mariella did a great job writing today,” Tanya said. “If you want to hear her story, that’s probably the best way for now. I don’t think she’d resume writing in your house while you’re trying to work a case. Staring at the walls in your office isn’t productive either.”

  “School will make her open up faster, and that’s what we need here,” said the psychologist, who Moni now swore had been compromised by Sneed. “The more interactions she has, whether positive or negative, will encourage her to abandon selective mutism.”

  “Excuse me! She’s not a safe to be cracked open,” Moni said. “This is a child. She’s the victim here, not some piece of evidence. What about her needs? Who knows them better right now than I do?”

  Dr. McKinley whipped out some official form on a clipboard and started filling in the blanks. “This incident will be recorded. But I will let it slide only if you place her back in school. And I mean tomorrow.”

  Mariella’s heartbreaking brown eyes once again pleaded with Moni and once again she’d let the child down. Faced with losing her to a foster home or putting her back in school, Moni didn’t really have a choice besides the latter.

  Moni would regret that choice soon enough.

  Chapter 8

  Pinching the lobster leg with a pair of tongs, Aaron held it steady underneat
h the microscope as he guided a tiny pair of wire tweezers toward a miniscule purple growth. It resembled the large one they had extracted several hours ago from the severed leg, which he had salvaged from the acid-washed lobster trap earlier that day.

  He had the tweezers pinched firmly around the growth when his phone vibrated inside his pocket. The tweezers stabbed into the lobster leg and sprang away like a vaulting pole. Aaron whirled around. As he adjusted to seeing things in normal size, he realized that he could spend hours searching for the set of wire tweezers in the cluttered Atlantic Marine Research Institute lab. Luckily, this late at night, the other students and scientists had left unoccupied the rows of workstations, with all their gas tubes and priceless equipment. No one would notice that he had lost another tool.

  Scanning the lab until he felt certain Professor Swartzman hadn’t returned from his coffee run, Aaron answered his phone. Big whoops.

  “It’s a quarter after three in the morning. Why the hell aren’t you home?” Aaron’s father grumbled.

  The 23-year-old slept in the same room in his parents’ Beachside home that he’d called his digs since he was two. His father treated him as if he still wore Mickey Mouse PJs.

  “Chill, dad. I’m in the lab down at the AMRI.”

  “Right, and you’re not in Orlando getting wasted. Don’t you know this is a work night? I have to get my ass up at 6:30 in the morning.”

  The old man had pleaded with Aaron so many times about dropping this “birds, beetles and bullshit” science and becoming an aerospace engineer like him. He didn’t see value in science unless it involved selling outrageously inefficient and costly equipment to the government.

  “Does it sound like I’m in Orlando?” He held the phone up and swept it through the quiet lab. “It sounds like a crappy party, right? No thumping music and everyone’s asleep.”

  “And you’re not hopped up on something that makes your pulse race so fast that you can’t sleep? Come on, I pay all your expenses out of my damn pocket. The least you can do is put all your effort into getting your degree so you can, I don’t know, save Willie the Whale or some crap.”

  Squeezing the phone, Aaron felt like smashing it against the floor as if it were a surfboard nose-diving into the rocks.

  “As much as I love animals, I’m not just saving them here,” Aaron said. “There’s some serious shit going on. Like, you don’t know. The professor and I are working overtime to make sure the lagoon is safe. All you’re doing is interrupting me.”

  “Right, I’m interrupting you. I’m the one who needs to wake up in three hours.”

  “Then go to sleep! Stop worrying about me. I’m a grown man.”

  He heard a long silence on the other end of the line. “Goodnight, Aaron.” Click.

  Fanning off his sweltering forehead, Aaron felt as if he has surfed across a 400 mile-wide hurricane. He shuffled to the lab refrigerator, the one that said, “Lab Material Only” on it. Aaron yanked it open and let the cool air blow over his face before reaching inside between all the sealed Petri dishes and grabbing his half-finished soda. He chugged it down.

  Aaron heard footsteps and kicked the refrigerator door closed.

  With a steaming cup of black coffee in hand, Professor Swartzman spied him with a raised eyebrow.

  “Where’d you get that soda?” he asked. “I didn’t see you in the break room.”

  “Uh…” Aaron fingered the bottle cap between his slippery fingers. “I couldn’t finish it, so I left it in my bag. I hate warm soda, but I’m so freaking thirsty.”

  He tossed the bottle in the trash before his professor could mention the cold condensation on the plastic.

  “Right. Anyway, did you remove the last tumor from the lobster leg?” Swartzman asked.

  “I’m working on it. He’s a tricky little guy.”

  “Get to it. I need to make sure we have a match.”

  Aaron turned toward the lobster leg, and then doubled around with his head cocked on its side and his eyebrow raised. “A match with what?”

  “The first purple tumor we pulled off.” The professor held up his touch screen phone. “The computer e-mailed the test results to me. I know it’s never wrong, but I should run the test again just to be sure. It’s just… weird.”

  Aaron hadn’t heard the seasoned scientist bandy that word around much. Things were either common or rare. “Weird” carried no empirical weight—like a word Aaron might use.

  “It belongs to a family of bacteria—one that isn’t found in the Indian River Lagoon,” Swartzman said. “It’s part of the genus thiobacillus, but the computer couldn’t recognize the exact species.”

  “A theo-baci-what-us? You haven’t taught us about those.”

  “If we were studying pollutants from metal mines, we’d learn about this bacteria in week one, but not when the subject is a saltwater estuary. Thiobacillus thrives in acidic environments that are rich in sulfur and iron. It oxidizes those compounds and produces sulfuric acid. It lives in conditions few organisms could tolerate—an extremeophile.”

  “Sulfuric acid? The lobster trap and the shell I found were partially dissolved. The murder victims—they were burned by acid too, weren’t they?”

  “That’s what it looked like on the photos the medical examiner sent me,” Swartzman said. “I’ll have a closer look when I examine the body tomorrow. You should definitely come. The examiner said he found a few tiny purple pimples on the corpses.”

  Despite the disgusting deed at hand, Aaron was stoked. Until then, the professor hadn’t invited Aaron on a task with him without first calling every other number stored on his cell phone. This meant more than taking water or algae samples—this was murder. Or, at the very least, heinous new bacteria that chows down on corpses.

  Swartzman told him about how the bodies were found with thinned out, iron-depleted blood. A thiobacillus infection could have sucked the iron right out of the blood and caused those internal acid burns, the professor surmised. The big hole in that theory, he acknowledged, was that thiobacillus doesn’t infect people or marine mammals. It’s not invasive bacteria—not until now, perhaps. This thiobacillus must have mutated, since the computer didn’t recognize the exact species, the professor said.

  “There’s not enough sulfur or iron in the lagoon for these bacteria to thrive,” Swartzman said.

  “That’s why it’s latched onto hosts—survival instinct,” Aaron said with a snarl. He imagined the microscopic organisms as mini tigers hunting for giant prey and pouncing inside their bloodstreams. “We should track down that sea turtle with all the tumors. That’s the only living infection we’ve seen.”

  “Assuming he is infected, catching him won’t be easy.” Swartzman switched his phone to GPS tracking mode. He showed Aaron the timeline of its movements. In just two days, the sea turtle had coasted up to the Volusia County line, down to Sebastian and up again. That’s hundreds of miles. The professor shot Aaron a suspicious look.

  “Dude, I didn’t give it a speed ball. I swear!” Aaron said.

  “I know. I know.” Swartzman chuckled. “But someone helped this turtle travel in spurts as fast as 40 miles per hour.”

  “So unless someone stuck a propeller up its green ass…”

  “Somebody gave it a lift. But they didn’t remove it from the lagoon.”

  Aaron scratched his head. “Well, if it wasn’t one of our researchers and it wasn’t someone with the state, who else does that leave? Know anybody who’s obsessed with the lagoon?” His professor responded to the obvious hint with a blank look. “Hello? It leaves the Lagoon Watcher.”

  “No, no, no.” Swartzman waved his hand dismissively and turned his back on his student. He started toweling off a workstation—a task he usually left for the undergrads. “Harry would have told me if he picked up the turtle with the purple tumor.”

  “Oh yeah? Judging by how he didn’t blink when we showed him the freak show, I’m guessing he’s seen plenty of them before. And he didn’t tell yo
u squat, did he?”

  Swartzman froze in the middle of his menial labor. He stared at the filthy paper towel in his hand with the chemical residue dripping from it. He chucked it into the sink as if he just realized he had been cradling a snake. The last time Aaron had seen his professor so discombobulated was when the Lagoon Watcher had brought up something that happened between him and NASA.

  “Hey doc, I know the Watcher’s your bro and all…”

  “He’s an independent researcher—that’s all,” Swartzman said as he scooped up his bag and flung it over his shoulder. “I’ll talk to him about this, but don’t forget that many other scientists have an interest in the lagoon and they don’t all report to me.”

  “Right. I’m not saying that…”

  “Exactly, you’re not saying anything,” Swartzman snapped.

  Aaron bowed his head in silence. He had totally squandered that good vibe. Wipeout.

  “Get some sleep,” the professor said. “Tomorrow will be a rough day—and not just for us.”

  Chapter 9

  Staring at her cell phone in anticipation of the call preoccupied Moni so much that she could hardly get any work done at her desk. She chewed on the end of her pen. She couldn’t read more than a paragraph of the crime scene report before her thoughts drifted. Mrs. Mint had promised she would call her if anything happened with Mariella at school.

  The teacher had called her once, during lunch break, and told her Mariella seemed fine. The girl hadn’t even asked the teacher for her foster parent. Moni wondered whether the girl was handling their first prolonged separation better than she was. Mariella still hadn’t said a word, but she drew several pictures. Mrs. Mint said one was a gator, but it looked more cartoonish than threatening.

  Moni doubted the teacher had told her everything. The Buckley twins wouldn’t let one knock on the head stop them from berating the class misfit. But they were the least of Moni’s fears.