Quivering like a tuning fork, Moni’s hand nearly dropped her phone.
“I’m on my way over.”
“But we’ve still got 80 minutes to go,” Mrs. Mint said. “You don’t have to pick her up earl…”
“I’m coming—now.”
Chapter 10
Moni woke up in her pitch black room to the ringing of her cell phone. The time flashed four-thirty in the morning. Before answering, she rolled underneath the blanket and peeked through the window shades with an aggravated moan. She didn’t see Darren waiting outside her window for his booty call or her father crouching there demanding money. As her eyes came into focus, Moni saw the empty road under the dim street lights.
She turned her sleep-blurred vision on her phone. Oh joy: Tom Sneed.
“Mm, hello?” she answered drearily.
“What do ya know? We’ve got another body,” Sneed said in a tone dripping with blame. “Found him floating in the lagoon. Same as the others, save a bite taken off his arm.”
Moni ran her fingers through her tousled braids. Grabbing a handful of them, she yanked so hard that she nearly ripped them out by the roots. She bit her lip so she wouldn’t scream, because that would have reached the other side of the house and jolted Mariella awake. The girl didn’t need any more drama today.
Moni realized that this attitude—protecting Mariella at every step—left the killer free so he could slice another person’s head off his body. Moni couldn’t manage a reply more intelligible than a whimper before Sneed hit her again.
“There’s a witness this time,” he said. “It’s the victim’s brother. I don’t think he saw the murder take place. His story, well, the Coast Guard relayed it to me. This ain’t the kinda case you learn about in the police academy, that’s for damn sure. Come on in the office and let’s grill him together. I wanna see how you handle a witness that can actually talk.”
Moni wasn’t sure whether he meant that as an offer to her for a permanent spot on his homicide team or a dig at Mariella’s silence. Either way, she couldn’t leave the girl home alone in the middle of the night, and Sneed knew it.
“I’ll drop Mariella off at school at seven-thirty and be there first thing,” Moni said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
He hung up.
Mariella acted more clingy than usual that morning. She insisted on sitting on Moni’s lap at breakfast and sharing the food on her plate. She hadn’t told Mariella about the potential stalker in the blue pickup or the sixth murder in the lagoon. Moni did a poor job masking the distressed look on her face and her hectic movements that nearly knocked the coffee mug right off the counter. The girl picked up on it rather easily. Moni couldn’t tell whether Mariella stayed close because the child needed comfort, or because the child detected that her foster parent needed a tiny shoulder to lean on.
When she dropped Mariella off at school, the girl followed her halfway back to her car before Moni realized it. She led her back to class.
“It’s okay, baby,” Moni told her. “I’ll speak to the security officer and make sure everything is safe here. If you need me, ask Mrs. Mint and she’ll give me a call.”
She kissed the girl on the forehead. Mariella shot her one more glance before she entered the classroom. Mariella looked remorseful—like she felt responsible for the bloodshed because she couldn’t stop that monster from killing her parents.
Moni propped the door open and took the girl’s hand.
“What’s happening isn’t your fault, Mariella. When I was a young girl, I used to blame myself for my father beating me and hurting my mother. I thought that if I was a better kid, he would stop and become like all the other fathers. He never did… you’re a victim like me. Don’t be ashamed.”
Sharing her deepest darkest secret with the eight-year-old girl untied the knot in Moni’s heartstrings. The child embraced her.
Moni needed all the love she could get. The rest of the day would drain just about every ounce of it out of her.
Chapter 11
Randy Cooper looked more like a criminal than a witness to Moni, but he sat in the witness chair without handcuffs just the same. He had yellow-brown eyes that seemed as hyped up as a cheetah’s before it springs in for the kill.
This was one wounded cat. Cooper’s neck glowed raw red with a matted pattern like someone had nearly strangled him with several pieces of wire. One of the red grooves cut through the cursive tattoo of “Don’t Treat on Me” on his neck. His arms were dotted with tats, including a drooling bulldog, a rabbit’s foot and a snake around his wrist. His right hand had a heavy white bandage wrapped around it.
He even smelled like a zoo, or more like a saltwater aquarium. His black t-shirt and camouflage pants stunk of the lagoon. They were stiff with salt after drying from the middle of the night until morning.
Sneed hadn’t let Randy Cooper change a thing, from his dirty-blond buzz cut to his hunting boots, since the Lagoon Watcher had fished him out of the water and handed him over to the Coast Guard. That much of the story, they knew. The rest, Randy would have to recount.
Even for a seasoned hunter who worked in an outdoor shop and blasted bucks’ heads off, telling this hunting tale didn’t come easy.
“Aw, Robbie. He was my brother, man. He was my brother.” Randy shook his head and bit his lip. He wouldn’t let himself cry, not in front of police, but Moni recognized the red circles around his eyes as evidence that he had let the tears flow in private.
Randy sucked the moisture out of his sinuses and wiped his nose.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he told Sneed. “I wanna help you. I really do. I’m afraid you won’t believe this shit.”
Sneed told Moni before the interview that they should take Randy’s words with a grain of salt. He had a couple of DUI’s and an illegal hunting fine on his record.
“You just tell me what happened,” Sneed said. “All we wanna do is catch the guy who deprived you of your brother.”
“I didn’t say it was a guy… I think it was a gator. That’s what started it, at least. But what finished it, hell… I couldn’t imagine.”
Moni and Sneed traded looks of disappointment. She felt it much worse. Mariella remained the only witness who had probably seen the murderer in action. She still had the biggest target on her.
Not to say that Randy hadn’t seen enough carnage to send an experienced hunter into a padded room.
“I got home from a fishing trip and left my skiff in the canal behind my house,” said Randy, who lived in Palm Bay. “I went inside, grabbed a beer and when I went out back fix’n to lift it outta there, I saw a gator making off with my boat.”
“Hold up, son. Do you mean to tell me that a gator—a reptile dragging its belly—stole your boat?” Sneed asked.
“That’s what I fucking said, alright.” Randy wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. Sneed nodded him on. “I saw this beastly thing, must have been a nine-footer, chomp off the tether and drag my boat down the canal. I followed it on foot for miles all the way to the lagoon. That’s when I called Robbie.”
“Your older brother, Robert D. Cooper?” Moni asked.
“Yeah, Robbie. He has—he left behind a wife and a four-year-old boy.” With his lower lip quivering, he paused while those words resonated. Randy crossed his arms and stared at the floor. “He had a family. He had a damn good job as a computer tech. Robbie had it all. I shouldn’t have brought him into my troubles.”
“They aren’t just your troubles. It’s everybody’s beef now ‘cause we’ve got a killer running loose,” Sneed said. “So your brother had a boat? We didn’t find it in the water.”
“You won’t find it no more.” He bowed his head for a few seconds. “But, he had it. You can check on it, man. Robbie had a pontoon boat—an 18-foot booze cruiser. He kept it docked behind his home on the lagoon side of Indialantic. He used to take his wife and boy out on it. It wasn’t supposed to be for hunting. But I needed it to nab me that gator and get my boat
back. I knocked on Robbie’s window ‘round one in the morning. I tell ya, he nearly blew my head off with a shotgun.”
“Is that how you brothers usually greet each other?” asked Moni, who figured the gator story could be cover for a brotherly fight that ended badly for Robbie.
Randy looked at her as if she had break-danced straight out of the ghetto and met a white man for the first time. She had seen that self-righteous bullshit more times than she cared to remember.
“No. It was late and I scared him. What’d you think? My people ain’t thugs, lady.” He shook his head. “Anyways, my brother told me to hit the road. I told him I was taking his boat and going after the gator whether he came with or not. I know, I know. I played the little brother needs help from big bro card. Call me a selfish asshole.”
Moni couldn’t argue with that reasoning, especially considering how big brother had paid for it.
“Robbie, God love him, wouldn’t let me go alone. He snuck out. Didn’t even tell his wife and boy goodbye…” Randy paused and pinched the tear ducts at the corners of his eyes until he collected himself. “We suited up in hunting gear. Me being a dumb ass, I told him that life vests were for pussies. He took the shotgun and I took my crossbow. I had punched many a gator through the brain with that baby.
“We rode the pontoon boat out on the lagoon in the middle of the night. We didn’t see another soul on the water, just the lights from shore on either side. We found my skiff waiting for us in the mouth of Palm Bay, which feeds into the canal behind my house. We didn’t see the gator. Robbie thought I was drunk and imagined the whole thing like some little piss-ant. We shoulda known the gator had laid a trap for us.”
Sneed rolled his eyes. “The gator laid a trap? What is he, a Vietcong?”
“This ain’t a normal gator, boss,” Randy said as he eyed the lead detective with a grim stare.
Sneed never believed far-fetched stories. He poked holes through liars until they bled the truth. Moni had seen him turn the coldest of men into mounds of jelly. She doubted he bought half of what she told him. But this time, Sneed appeared convinced that Randy had encountered a gator. After all, Robert Cooper’s body had what resembled a gator bite on his right arm. A hungry gator wouldn’t usually let a meal go so its victim could get decapitated cleanly and then leave the body floating in the water. Even if the man had lost his head first, the gator wouldn’t taste a sample of the leftovers without lapping the whole thing up or storing it underwater for later.
“You’ve hunted plenty of gators before,” Moni said. “How’d this one trap you?”
“Oh, it didn’t do it alone,” Randy said. “We tied my skiff to the pontoon boat and Robbie started ribbing me about how he thought I had fallen off the boat like some dipshit and left it out there. It kinda set me off, so when a red-shouldered hawk landed on the railing of our boat, I took aim at it with my crossbow to let off some steam.”
“Is that what you call letting off some steam—killing defenseless animals?” Moni asked.
Sneed shot her a crossed look. No doubt, he had bagged plenty of birds in his day. In Moni’s eyes, killing animals for sport put them one step away from killing people. She remembered her father kicking her neighbor’s yapping poodle right in the mouth.
“I wish I would have shot that damn hawk, or whatever the devil it was.” Randy’s eyes narrowed angrily. “With my attention on the bird, I didn’t see the gator flop onto our deck. It scaled about four feet, from the water over the railing. Don’t ask me how it did that ‘cause I ain’t got any earthy idea. It must have been the hunger. The son-of-a-bitch sprang at me before I could turn my crossbow on it. Robbie was quick as a hiccup, though. He blasted the gator in the back with his shotgun. Saved my life.”
“That should have slowed the sucker down,” Sneed said. “Why couldn’t you finish it off?”
“That’s the thing. The shotgun blast didn’t slow it down one bit. It hardly bled from the wound.”
Moni remembered the decapitated bodies and how they hadn’t drenched the crime scenes with blood because they hardly had any left. The bacteria had thinned it out.
She hadn’t seen Mariella bleed. She hoped she never would.
“The gator didn’t flinch, man. It wanted one of us,” Randy said. “The gator spun around and snapped at my brother. I grabbed its tail and yanked it back. It missed him by a hair. Next thing I knew, the gator had its tail wrapped around my neck. That’s all what you see here.”
He pointed out the red grooves in his neck. Moni saw that they did resemble an imprint of a scaly gator tail. Of course, that made absolutely zero sense.
“Now I’m no reptile expert, Mr. Cooper,” Moni said. “But I don’t think gators can choke people out with their tails. Anacondas? Yeah. But a gator?”
“I already told you—this ain’t a normal gator.” Randy flung the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and drew a deep breath. “It didn’t wanna eat me. It was kidnapping me. The gator leapt over the rail and splashed into the water. With its tail around my neck, I had no choice but to follow or get my neck broken. It dragged me to the bottom of the lagoon. My arm sunk into the mud.” He held up his arm and showed the flakes of dried mud stuck in his black hairs. “Thank the Lord it wasn’t that deep over there. I poked my boot out the water and Robbie found me. My brother coulda left me and gone back to his family. I got us into this shit, not him. But Robbie had a big heart, man. He didn’t hesitate for a second before diving into the lagoon after me. It was so dark underwater. The gator could have been an inch from his face and he wouldn’t have known.”
Randy paused and chewed on his fist. His eyes combed through the room as if searching for his brother. They lingered on the door and just waited.
Regardless of his attitude, Moni wished she could open that door and have Robbie Cooper bound through and comfort his little brother. Instead, the other side of the door had a hysterical widow and a father-less child awaiting him.
“So how’d Robbie free you from the gator’s, uh, tail?” Sneed asked.
“Robbie used a hunting knife and sawed into the tail until it loosened and I slipped out. You’d think the gator woulda quit after we cut halfway through its tail. Well, nope. Its snout popped right outta the water and it eyed us… It eyed us with these…”
“These what? I thought you said it was dark? How’d you see it?” Moni asked.
“These purple eyes. They were glowing solid purple.”
The blood rushed into Moni’s skull. Her hands went numb for a second. The purple tumors on the murder victims and the animals. The purple pimples inside Mariella’s lip. Now the ghastly purple glow of a gator’s eyes—the same animal Mariella drew the day before in class. Mr. Mint said that the girl’s gator didn’t look threatening. Moni believed her. She couldn’t let herself not believe.
The dots were laid out on the page for her in little purple bacteria mushrooms. She could connect them, but Moni had no idea where they pointed her. They were links in a much larger picture. There were so many other links on a page that suddenly stretched as far as a desert plain.
Just because they were connected, didn’t mean the dots were in order. Moni had never seen Mariella’s eyes glow. The girl had defended herself, but she would never attack someone. No, she had a small infection and had overcome it. Nothing more than that, Moni thought.
“Did you notice anything else purple on the gator?” Moni asked. “Any bumps or welts?”
“I couldn’t make out much besides the eyes and the snout,” Randy said. “Funny thing was it didn’t chase us when we climbed back into Robbie’s boat. We saw its purple eyes dip below water and sink until they were swallowed up by the bottom of the lagoon. We hadn’t even caught our breath when the air started smelling foul. It reeked of this awful rotten egg stench. And the fumes—they stung my eyes and my nose. It fucking burned. We would have motored away right then, but it knocked us on our asses. We were crawling on our bellies. By the time I could tolerate the pain enoug
h to grab the throttle, it was too late. The motor revved up, but we didn’t move. I heard the bubbling and hissing around the boat, and still I couldn’t believe it. When I pulled the propeller out of the water, I saw it had been melted away.”
“Melted?” questioned Sneed.
“Melted,” Randy nodded with a frustrated huff. “Like with acid.”
Sulfuric acid—Aaron’s professor said the bacteria produced this as a byproduct. Moni remembered the stuff from high school science lab. It could corrode metal, but only a real high concentration of the stuff could devour it so fast.
“The lagoon turned to acid,” Moni said. “Sounds like a perverse version of the plagues in the Bible.”
“If it was a plague, it came straight outta hell,” Randy said.
“I promise you, I will throw somebody’s ass behind bars for this,” Sneed said. “And it won’t be the devil. I’ve seen people commit atrocities that Satan himself wouldn’t touch.”
Randy nodded. His hands clamped down on the sides of the table. With a nod, Moni gave the lead detective his due for coaxing the witness on.
“How bad did the acid damage the boat?” she asked.
“It breached the hull. We heard water sloshing around inside,” Randy replied. “My skiff’s hull across the way was looking bad too, but the engine was up and the propeller hadn’t touched the acid. Robbie told me I should jump first while he flagged down the Coast Guard on the radio and I went. I swear, I didn’t know what would happen.”
Randy wedged his fingers into his eyes until his cheeks flushed red. He couldn’t plug the tears back any longer. They seeped out from underneath his fingers and streamed down the sides of his nose and the corners of his lips. Gasping, Randy tasted the salty elixir that Moni knew all too well. He frantically wiped his mouth and his face as if the tears were acid from the lagoon.
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