“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.
“It’s okay.” Moni placed a firm hand on his shoulder. His trembling gradually eased. “No one could have known what would happen.”
Randy grasped her hand as if it were a life preserver. His breathing steadily calmed. She felt his heart rate through his palm normalizing as well.
“I’m sorry,” Randy said. “I know you’ve got work to do. This is pathetic.”
“No, it’s not,” Moni said. “You’re going to relive this moment in your brain a million times, and it’ll always be hard. Just take your time and we’ll get through it.”
Sneed rolled his eyes. He didn’t fix on giving him any more time. Randy saw his gesture and got going.
“So I was in the skiff and Robbie radioed the Coast Guard. He told me they were on the way. And I told him… I told him to hurry up onto my boat. Robbie leapt across the water between our boats and up it came.” He held his bandaged hand sideways and had his hand with the snake tattoo rise from underneath. Randy grabbed his hand so hard Moni feared he might have broken a finger. “The gator came outta the water and snapped onto his arm. I heard Robbie scream. I saw the horror on his face the moment he realized he’d never see his wife and son again. I reached for him, but I couldn’t make it. In the blink of an eye, they were gone into the lagoon. I didn’t even think. I just plunged my hand into the water.” He placed his bandaged hand on the table. “They said these are second degree burns. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve been stabbed before and this hurt a hell of a lot worse. I would have dove into the water after him. I should have… You don’t know how bad I… It’s just the pain…”
“You did all you could.” Moni reached across the table. He yanked his bandaged hand away before she could touch it. “Something about that gator made it immune to the acid, but it would have fried you. There’s nothing you could have done at that point.”
Sneed looked down his nose at Randy as if the grizzly detective would have jumped into the acid bath and snapped the gator’s neck if that would have saved his brother. Luckily, Randy didn’t notice anything besides the back of his own hand as he shielded his face.
“My hand was burning, so I ran. I slammed the throttle and bolted out of there so freaked out I didn’t even look back. The skiff’s motor lasted about a minute and then it died. No gas. Those fuckers drained the tank.”
“What fuckers?” Sneed asked. “I thought you were fighting a gator?”
“Like I said, it wasn’t a normal gator. This beast wasn’t a creation of God, I tell ya. It left me out there on my skiff stranded in the middle of the lagoon. The smell of the rotten acid in the water and the fish getting fried alive with their hot guts bursting-it made me heave over the side. When I saw that my puke didn’t boil in the water, I knew I had escaped from the acid. The gator was still out there, though. If it wasn’t for the Lagoon Watcher, it woulda got me for sure.”
Sneed grilled him on the timing of his rescue. Harry Trainer, known in boating circles as the pesky Lagoon Watcher, fished Randy Cooper out of his skiff around a quarter to three in the morning. Somehow, he had heard the distress call before the Coast Guard and found himself in better position for a response-less than fifteen minutes after the call. He came wearing a black wetsuit rather than the trademark tropical shirt and shorts everybody knows him for in daylight hours. Randy said the Watcher didn’t seem all that surprised by his story, but he circled the boat around the lagoon while Randy called out his brother’s name-all while skillfully avoiding the acid slick near Palm Bay. Randy had screamed until his lungs ached. For the longest time he heard nothing besides the water lapping up against the Watcher’s boat.
“Out of the blue, I heard a bird flapping its wings,” Randy said. “When I looked in that direction, I saw a pair of purple eyes. At that point, I was ready for the damn gator-shotgun or no shotgun-if it meant finding Robbie. I told the Watcher, ‘Take me there.’ He must have seen it too, but he didn’t ask questions. Then I saw it-the red-shouldered hawk. It was…” He wiped the perspiration off his face and clenched his fist over his chin until he could spit out the words. “It was perched on Robbie’s life vest. Just the life vest and shoulders-that’s all I saw. His head was… It was gone.”
While Randy grabbed a tissue and dabbed his face, Moni pondered how his brother had been passed from a gator’s jaws to the surgical serial killer. Robbie’s corpse had the usual grocery list of organs taken from it. The head had come off along a line as straight as an architectural drawing. The only injuries that didn’t match the previous victims were the deep gator bite on the arm and the second-degree burns that had reddened most of his skin. The acid had roasted Robbie, but not for so long that his flesh dissolved down to the muscle. The gator-or something else-had pulled him out of the acid slick. They couldn’t tell whether it happened before or after the beheading. They wouldn’t know without seeing his head, and by now everybody knew that wouldn’t turn up.
How could the killer make the gator cooperate? What other animals work for him?
Moni offered Randy a tissue. He proudly brushed her hand aside and wadded the original tissue, which he had soaked, into his pocket. When he finally redeployed his tough guy scowl and looked her in the eyes, Moni fired back with the question that had been gnawing at her.
“What about the hawk? Was something evil about it like with the gator?”
Lines creased across Randy’s forehead as if he were aging by the decade right before her eyes. “The damn bird… It lured us into that trap. Then it called me over with its purple eyes so I could see my brother’s body. The site will haunt me for the rest of my life. The moment I shined a flashlight on the hawk, it took off like I startled it, but it didn’t make a sound. It flew as clumsily as a winged donkey. I would have sworn it had been shot, but I know I didn’t hit it.”
As her memory flashed, Moni’s heart raced so fast that the pulses through her blood vessels could barely keep up. She remembered how the raven had flown crookedly after she had pulled it off her windshield. It didn’t have purple eyes, but the hawk didn’t either the first time Randy spotted it. The bird had set him and his brother up for an attack. Moni wondered whether the killer had dropped the raven on her car for the same reason. Did she narrowly avoid death when she touched the raven? Or did the murderer leave it for Mariella instead?