As Moni scooped the girl up and carried her like a backpack strapped across her chest, she sent a smirk Skillings’ way.
“Mm-hm. You were saying?” Moni asked.
“Try pulling that crying junk on a crack fiend,” Skillings said. “I’ll stick to a hard knee to the jaw and a pair of handcuffs.”
Moni decided against asking her how many kindergarteners she had brutalized. She didn’t need this girl finding another person she should fear. Skillings trailed her as Moni carried the girl toward Sneed in the center of the boardwalk.
“I’m Monique. But everyone calls me Moni for short. What’s your name, baby?”
She didn’t answer. Moni repeated the question in Spanish. She still didn’t respond. Must be the post-traumatic stress, she figured. Give it time.
When Sneed saw her coming with the child, he rushed toward her as if she had bought him a new Hummer. She marveled that a board didn’t snap under his rumbling girth.
“Well done, Williams,” said Sneed, who allowed her that moment of satisfaction. “Now what’d she say? What’s our suspect look like? Was it more than one?”
“Uhhh…” Moni stared at the girl. Nestled against her breasts like an infant, she gazed up at Moni. She could barely stand much less describe her parents’ murders. If they tried extracting the terrifying memories out of her too quickly and forcefully, she might never recover. Moni felt as if she were walking across slick tile carrying a porcelain vase atop her head.
But, at the same time, the person who had killed four people still lurked out there. The murderer would strike again-maybe soon. Those future victims needed Moni’s help too.
“Did you see what happened here?” Moni asked her. “Did you see what happened to…”
The girl’s face contorted in agony. Her brown eyes cringed like plump grapes drying into scrawny raisins. She curled back her lips and clenched her teeth. She didn’t say a word or even whine. She couldn’t, because her breathing accelerated into near hyperventilation.
Moni couldn’t put her through this. No one should be forced to re-live their darkest memories, especially one so young.
“I… I can’t,” Moni told Sneed. “She’s not ready now.”
“Yer shitting me,” said the red-faced detective. “We’ve got zero forensic evidence on a suspect, zero motive and we don’t have the faintest idea how they’re getting killed. If we have any prayer of catching this guy before he traces another chalk line for us, she’s it. So sweet talk her, buy her a fucking pony, whatever the hell you’ve gotta do, I want me some leads.”
Turning around, Moni shielded the girl from his rage. Sneed didn’t fret over his blatant discrimination against Moni, so he wouldn’t mind tossing a little girl into the flames to cook a suspect. The officers standing behind him must have understood his intentions for the child. Not one of them rose to the girl’s defense. Moni was it.
Skillings stepped alongside her boss and stuck her nose in Moni’s face as if she were a hypnotized snake coiled around Sneed’s arm.
“This isn’t a pre-teen shoplifting case and it sure-as-hell isn’t domestic abuse,” Skillings said. “The stakes are life and death. If you can’t handle being part of our team, why don’t you step aside and hand over the girl to the professionals?”
The girl’s fingers dug into Moni’s back so hard it would have taken a crowbar to pry them off. She definitely understood English, Moni thought.
“According to protocol, this girl is under custody of the DCF until a judge can weigh in,” Moni said. She scooted around Sneed and Skillings and headed for the parking lot. Sneed tagged along with her. She should have told him to back off, but he’d never let her on his investigation team if she stepped that far out of line.
In the parking lot, Moni ran into the DCF agent, a chunky dark-skinned black woman with a curly weave. She wore a black pants suit with a purple undershirt that could barely contain her double-Ds. She reached out for the girl with her beefy arms. Moni didn’t even try handing her over before the girl tightened her grip on her to make it nearly impossible.
“That’s a lovely coat you’ve got there. Does it ever come off?” the agent asked.
“For now, I think it’s better that I leave it on,” Moni said.
“Oh, that’s great!” Sneed exclaimed. “Treat my only witness like a coat. Why don’t you just make a scrap book out of the crime scene photos?”
“Excuse me.” The agent got right in the detective’s face like nobody’s business. “I’m DCF Agent Tanya Roberts and you’re on my case now. My first priority is the well-being of that child. She is more than a witness in my eyes.”
The grumbling detective crossed his arms and glared at Moni something fierce. She had led him into a realm where his words weren’t the final say. He couldn’t compel a child to testify unless a juvenile judge signed off on it.
When Moni finally had the girl safe with her in the back seat of the DCF agent’s car, she sat down beside her. The child immediately leaned her head against her shoulder. Keeping her eyes down, she didn’t look out the window for a second as they left the place where her parents had died.
“No day will ever be worse for you than this,” Moni told the girl softly. “That means there will be better days. I promise that I won’t let anybody hurt you, ever. I promise, baby.”
Chapter 2
Aaron Hughes shook his head of golden locks as he watched the sea turtle row its flippers through the air in vain. The poor guy was so sick he didn’t realize they had plucked him out of the Indian River Lagoon for a ride in their skiff. Or maybe he had devoted his last ounce of turtle strength towards escaping.
“Looks like the dude’s freaking out,” Aaron told his professor.
“What did you expect? He’s sick and he doesn’t know we’re helping him,” said Dr. Herbert Swartzman, the head of marine biology at the Atlantic Marine Research Institute. Although they were based out of Fort Pierce, the professor and his grad student had taken the 12-foot skiff up the lagoon to a spot not far from Kennedy Space Center.
Hiking up his board shorts, Aaron leaned down and examined the white tumors covering the green animal like mushrooms popping out of the grass after a rain. They were painfully wedged between its flipper and its shell, stuck on the corner of its mouth and atop its head. One especially cruel tumor covered half of its left eye.
“That’s nasty,” Aaron said. “The poor guy can barely swim.”
Aaron combed through his memories for the name for the tumors, but couldn’t dig it up. Swartzman didn’t need another reason he should consider his student a beach-brained slacker. He already had plenty, like his penchant for surfing during breaks between classes and then showing up with his wetsuit under his t-shirt or how he signed up for every outdoor assignment and avoided the lab coat as if it were a straight jacket. If he could help this sea turtle, instead of just hoisting it from the water like a deck hand, Swartzman would have a new-found respect for him. But he couldn’t remember that damn name.
“We talked about these tumors before,” Aaron said. “You called them…” Pausing, he waited for his professor to finish off his sentence before it became a question.
“Just in case you had your head in the sand that day, I’ll remind you that those tumors are called fibropapillomas,” Swartzman said, as he programmed the tracking beacon he had selected for their shelled subject. “As they spread, they hinder the turtles’ ability to function and can get infected. I’ve seen a lot of them in the lagoon over the past month, mostly from Cape Canaveral through Melbourne. The turtles in the ocean are barely affected.”
“So whatever caused this started in the lagoon and hasn’t spread across the Sebastian Inlet,” Aaron said. About 20 miles south of Melbourne, the Sebastian Inlet connects the lagoon to the Atlantic Ocean. It also spawns some gnarly waves.
“What do you mean something ‘caused’ this? It’s just a disease. It’s probably spread turtle to turtle.”