“Hey! That’s mine!” Kyle charged at her, but he couldn’t weave between the desks in time.
Mariella smeared the crayon against the page until it blotted out the dog’s head. She did the same to one of its front legs. Then the girl took a purple crayon and bashed it over the dog so it left blotchy spots.
Her parents had lost their heads, Mrs. Mint thought. Could this be a reenactment of what she saw that horrible night? If she wanted revenge on the Buckley boys, she’d use the most deadly thing she’s ever seen. That must be it. She would save the drawing for the child psychologist.
Mrs. Mint caught Kyle by the collar a second before he reached Mariella. She blocked off Cole and snatched him up too.
“That stupid wetback is ruing my picture of Butch!” Kyle protested.
“Watch your mouth. That’s a dirty word,” Mrs. Mint said as she dragged the brothers toward the timeout chairs. “You didn’t let her finish her picture, so now she’s putting the finishing touches on yours.”
Ignoring the familiar refrain of “It’s not fair,” Mrs. Mint put the mischievous twins in punishment. When she returned to face the rest of the class, she found them staring at the massacre Mariella had made of Kyle’s drawing of his dog. With it hanging in the window, everyone who passed by her classroom would know there’s a disturbed child inside. The girl had already returned to her desk, where she finished off her picture of Snowflake the mouse. The whittled stubs of red and purple crayons lay at Mariella’s feet. Studying her face, Mrs. Mint couldn’t detect a hint of the malice Mariella had bristled with moments earlier. It had dissipated like the ripples from a dropped stone smoothing out over the lagoon.
How much longer can I protect her, and still protect my class from her?
Chapter 19
Aaron knew he’d need those cheesy eighties cop show sunglasses for something one day. The perfect opportunity for playing a bad-ass, cocaine cowboy-buster came when the real cops called him along for a search warrant. The target: Harry “Lagoon Watcher” Trainer.
Seated besides Aaron in the back seat of the police cruiser as they sped up A1A along the sand dunes and hotels of Satellite Beach, Professor Swartzman didn’t look all that pumped. Aaron overheard him pleading with Sneed over the phone that morning in the lab. The professor had told the police investigator that they were wasting their time. Trainer couldn’t possibly engineer a baffling organism like this, he had said. Sneed didn’t give a damn what the professor thought. He only wanted his opinion on what they found in the Lagoon Watcher’s digs in Merritt Island.
It looked like the Watcher had been growing a rain forest on his lawn. With the thicket of bushes, the knee-length tangle of grass and weeds and un-pruned trees, a passerby wouldn’t know the house sat on a canal leading into the lagoon without looking at the normal home next door. In this neighborhood of meticulously manicured beachside homes, Trainer’s shaggy place had a mailbox bulging full of letters, which Aaron guessed included many homeowner association fines.
“Recognize the place?” Sneed asked from the driver’s seat as he eyed Swartzman in the rearview mirror.
“I thought I would, until I saw it,” the professor said. “I remember when Harry had the housewarming party with his wife-ex-wife now. That was nearly 20 years ago. I haven’t visited in at least five years.”
“Was that the last time he mowed his lawn?” Aaron asked.
The wisecrack drew a chuckle from Sneed, but it didn’t get his professor off the hook.
“I thought you were all buddy-buddy with the Watcher,” the detective said. “What, he didn’t have you over for a couple beers or playing around with your microscopes?”
Swartzman folded his trembling hands. “Harry wanted me to review his research. I know he did most of it here after he got fired. He asked me to co-author papers with him, since no legitimate journal would accept an article from an unemployed scientist. But the subjects were too…” The professor winced. “Political. Most of my institute’s funding comes from the state, and the folks in Tallahassee wouldn’t appreciate us pointing out that they need to spend billions cleaning up the lagoon.”
“Well, you’ll get to see your pal’s research after all, and you can help me write up a police report to boot,” Sneed said. “It looks like your Watcher skipped out on us.”
He pointed out the empty driveway as they pulled in. The other patrol car, driven by Nina Skillings, parked on the curve. The policewoman emerged and circled around back.
“No sign of the boat,” Skillings shouted.
“And no sign of the suspect, I reckon. Give your buddy a warning call?” As Sneed killed the engine, he glared over his seat at Swartzman like a bulldog sticking its growling mug out of its doghouse at a trespasser in its yard. Aaron tugged at the door handle. It didn’t open. Of course, the backdoors of a police car wouldn’t open from the inside. Suddenly, Aaron felt like something other than a passenger.
“I’m not an idiot,” Swartzman said. “I haven’t told Harry anything since you called this morning.”
“So you have talked to him?” Sneed asked.
“I called him yesterday and asked him how he was doing, you know, after the incident where he picked up that boater after the gator attack.”
“You mean the same boater who got chewed up by rats?” the detective asked as he eyed Skillings.
“I saw it myself,” Skillings said. “Nasty shit. They didn’t take his head this time-maybe because he wasn’t near the water. But there was that purple stuff and the acid burns.”
“So we have two dead witnesses and both of them had a run-in with the Lagoon Watcher not far from the crime scenes on the day of the murders,” Sneed said.
Swartzman ran a heavy hand over his forehead, and the little hair he had left on his scalp. Aaron recognized the sign of disappointment from the many times he had botched his assignments for the professor.
“It is a compelling motive,” Aaron admitted. His professor shot him a stern stare. Aaron felt his GPA slipping and changed course. “But if the Watcher wanted to make everybody freak out and clean up the lagoon, wouldn’t he need witnesses to tell people about the creature attacks? It doesn’t help his cause if there’s no one left to blab for the cameras.”
“And I don’t see any way Trainer could order a manatee attack and then a rat attack,” Swartzman said. “There must be a biological explanation. Maybe the bacteria-infected animals seek out people who’ve been in the lagoon because they have a certain chemical signature to them.”
“Whoa, that would suck for me,” said Aaron, who remembered his dive only days ago.
“And for ten-thousand other people who’ve dipped more than a toe in the lagoon in the past few weeks,” Sneed said. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s have a look inside this place and then you can tell me what the Lagoon Watcher is capable of.”
They didn’t have a hard time getting inside. He had left his front door unlocked-perhaps expecting they’d stop by and break in so he might as well spare his locks and hinges. When Aaron followed the officers inside, his nose got overrun by a salty fish stench. It smelled like a commercial fishing vessel with the catch jammed into a festering tank that held more fish than it did water. He didn’t see the marine specimens amid the clutter of papers and boxes stacked waist high, but they were somewhere in that house no doubt.
Aaron thought of Trainer’s home like an ex super model who became a junkie. He caught glimpses of its former luxury peeking out from the mess. The marble countertops and the mahogany dining table hardly had any breathing room. They were smothered underneath a flood of paperwork. Aaron skimmed through a few boxes. Some of them dated back 25 years. The ousted scientist had brought his work home with him-every scrap of it.