Mute (10 page)

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 underneath 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 you 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.

Every fiber in Moni’s body told her she shouldn’t
leave Mariella alone at school. She thought of the raven that had been splayed
across the back windshield of her car in a fake death - like someone’s gruesome
mockery of Jesus pulled from the cross and rising from the grave. Mariella had
a demon on her heels and her guardian angel was stuck 25 minutes away.

When her cell phone rang, Moni banged her knee on
the underside of her desk as she jumped and answered it. No one responded. She
checked the number. It hadn’t been a call. The phone had reminded her of the
first task force meeting over the Indian River Lagoon killer.

She stuffed a folder full of haphazard notes, so at
least it looked like she had done something useful, and shuffled down the hall
to the conference room. She had sat in on sexual predator task force meetings,
but never for homicide. Moni had finally broken down the door of Sneed’s good
ol’ boys club.

Too bad Sneed wasn’t seated in his leather chair at
the head of the conference table when Moni entered with swagger, her hips and
braids swinging. She notice that her grand entrance had caught the eye of a
blond cutie with a lab coat fashioned around a surfing t-shirt. He reminded her
of a puppy that hadn’t yet tasted red meat, just those little cardboard
nuggets. When he looked her up and down with eyes as blue as the waters of
Aruba, Moni saw him longing for a taste of some soul food sista’. Instead of
licking his chops, he blushed.