Mr. Buckley took a gander at the young man and held his nose. “Whoo-ee! What’s that smell? Is that shit on your pants?”
“Horse shit, if you gotta know,” Aaron said. “Now what about your stolen fence and shed? What were they made of?”
“Metal. Mostly iron, I reckon,” he replied.
“Now it makes sense,” Aaron said. “The dog wasn’t the target. It was the shed and fence. The bacteria wanted iron to feed on. Your dog just got in the way.”
“You’re saying that bacteria stole my stuff and beheaded my dog?” Mr. Buckley asked. Aaron nodded. “You really are a fucking moron.”
His face flushing red, Aaron clenched his teeth as the guy treaded back inside his house with zero confidence in the police. Someone should have told him that Aaron didn’t work for them.
Sneed patted the back of the young man. “Your theory’s not a bad one, kid. In the past week, we’ve had nine reports of boat thefts. They were taken right out of the water with nobody looking. And this isn’t the only report we’ve gotten of a stolen or damaged fence along a canal.”
“Remember when Kane’s boat turned up? It had been stripped of all the metal,” Aaron said. “Besides the iron in animal blood, there aren’t a lot of natural sources of iron in the lagoon. Somebody’s feeding the bacteria.”
“And the infected animals are helping them.” Moni pointed out the gator tracks near where the shed had been pushed into the water.
After waging snake and rat attacks inland, the killer had now deployed gators far from the lagoon. Moni had barely saved Mariella from a snake because it only took a single bullet. These infected gators were much tougher and they could hide in the canal less than a dozen feet from her back door.
Is that why the Lagoon Watcher did this? Is he sending me a message that he can strike us at any time?
Chapter 21
Mariella sat by her side on the child psychologist’s couch, but Moni felt as if there were steel bars between them. She had dropped the girl off with DCF Agent Tanya Roberts for babysitting, not an interrogation. A few calls from Sneed and Mrs. Mint about a disturbing drawing and a slaughtered dog had changed that.
Moni sat there for a good half hour hearing Roberts’ list of complaints. The girl hit a kid at school. She hasn’t uttered a single word or done anything social with the other kids. When bullied, she responded with violent imagery and apparently inspired real violence, Roberts said.
“Under normal circumstances, a child should be making steady progress toward normalization at this point,” said Ike McKinley as the psychologist tapped his pen atop his notepad, on which Moni figured he had already etched his conclusion on the girl. “That’s not happening here. If anything, Mariella is regressing under your care. You seem to be fostering her withdrawn behavior. And that absolutely baffles me, because that’s not the best thing for this child’s future or for your investigation.”
My investigation, Moni thought. That book-sniffing desk dweller put the whole serial killer saga on her neck. He didn’t know anything about murderers besides what he read in his text books that segmented criminals into broad categories; like they were types of pie. And then he dared say that he knew the best thing for Mariella-who he had seen for less than an hour.
“Mariella has come a long way since I found her in the mangroves. You have no idea,” Moni said as she stroked her hand through Mariella’s silky black hair. The girl didn’t pull away like she had a week ago. “Everyone recovers from tragedy at their own rate. There’s no manual for mourning your parents, especially at her age and the way it happened…” Mariella shrugged away from Moni’s hand and hugged her backpack against her chest. “The monster that did this is still out there and he’s not done. Can you think of anyone more dedicated to protecting this girl?”
“Protect her, fine, but what about protecting her classmates?” Roberts asked. “When I send one of our foster kids into a classroom and she raises a ruckus, how do you think that makes me look?”
“I know the feeling,” Moni said. “My boss is a big honky asshole, too. He doesn’t trust anything I do.”
The white psychiatrist crossed his legs nervously and vigorously scribbled something in his notepad. Moni loved making old white folk squirm.
The black government employee rolled her eyes at the attempt at finding common ground. “Let me tell you something, sista. I didn’t get this job by bitching and blaming all my problems on the white man. And I’m twice as dark as you are. Now I’m not saying some people didn’t try holding me back, but I worked hard and got the job done. They didn’t have any choice but to promote me. You should think about that.”
“Think about what?” As she bobbed her head, Moni’s braids hurtled over her shoulders like angry vipers. “You saying I don’t work hard enough? Girl, you have no idea what I’ve been through over the past two days.” She shook her finger in Roberts’ face. “No idea.”
“Well, I have some idea,” McKinley said. “I heard you shot a snake in your house. What kind of example is that to set for a young lady?”
“The snake was…”
“Ever hear of sweeping it out with a broom?” the psychiatrist asked. “That kind of brash behavior is exactly why a child like this doesn’t belong under your supervision. She needs intensive care in a clinical setting. There are people who are more prepared to deal with her sensitive condition.”
Those were the words Moni had feared the most. They choked her like a cord around her throat. They were so right. She couldn’t care for this child, no matter how much she loved her. All the love in her soul wouldn’t transform her into a good parent for a severely damaged little girl. Moni buried her face into her hands. It blocked the whole world out. She had fled into her closet, but she could never hide. He would come and take her, just like they came now for Mariella. This time Moni didn’t cower alone in that closet. The girl stood with her. They trembled side by side as they heard the heavy work boots plopping down the hallway. They saw his shadow piercing the straight line of light under the closet door. He grabbed the door-nearly ripped it off its hinges.
“You been fucking up my whole life, you little whore! All you do is screw up!”
This time he didn’t reach for Moni. He grabbed the smaller one. His bearish mitt seized her fragile thigh like a plump chicken wing. Mariella couldn’t scream. Moni heard her scratching and clawing at the walls as she tried to stay in the closet with her best friend, her only hope. Moni saw the girl’s tiny hand reaching out toward her.
“You can’t have her! You gave her to me and now she’s mine!” Moni shouted as she jumped out of her seat on the psychiatrist’s couch. As the girl jerked up with her, she suddenly realized she had been holding Mariella’s hand the whole time.
“That’s not your call. That’s up to the judge,” Roberts said. “And right now, I have a good idea what my recommendation will be tomorrow in court.”
Moni felt like sitting down, but the determined girl squeezed her hand tighter. Her spine stiffened. Mariella had cast her vote.
“You wanna talk about endangering other kids? That’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you put Mariella in a foster house,” Moni said. “Our prime suspect is this guy known as the Lagoon Watcher. We believe he’s after all the witnesses-especially this one.”
Moni gazed down at Mariella as she unveiled to the girl the deadly threat against her for the first time. She didn’t appear fazed at all. The kid had good instincts. She must have known that her life had never been safe, which explained a lot about her behavior.
“If you put her in foster care, you’re putting every child and every counselor there in danger,” Moni continued. “I can fend that freak off. That’s what I’m trained for. And there are security guards in the elementary school ready for it too. We’ve even assigned an extra officer there to keep watch. What’s your plan for protecting Mariella in foster care? You wanna put guns around all those overly medicated kids? Yeah, let them shoot it out.”