Sneed must have influenced him, Moni thought. If the detective couldn’t buy the DCF or the judge, he’d pay off the psychologist that held sway with both of them. He didn’t give a damn what happened to Mariella as long as he had the murderer strapped on the gurney for lethal injection sure as Sneed had a deer head strapped to his office wall.
Damn it, but there’s no other way to catch the killer. I’ve already let enough people get hurt.
“There might be another option, but I’ll meet with my investigation team first and see how this case is going,” Moni said. “I’ll let you know before the hearing.”
“Okay,” said Tanya, who gave Moni a look that reminded her of how her mother had eyeballed her when she pined over a puppy she couldn’t have in the pet store window. “Mariella can stay in protective custody with you-for now.”
“Like she’d give me a choice?” Moni wrapped her arm around the girl. She saw a hint of a smile on Mariella’s lips for a second and basked in its flash of warmth. Someone wonderful had survived in there.
It took nearly an hour until they found a setup in the police station that didn’t make Mariella freak out. Moni tried leaving the girl in her office with a guard outside the door, but the girl started banging on the door and window the moment she left. Sneed told Moni to ignore it and get her ass in their investigation unit meeting. Moni sped back to the office and scooped up the frantic girl. Even with all that protesting, she hadn’t voiced so much as a whimper.
Since they couldn’t discuss the case with the only witness hearing the evidence, they compromised. Sneed begrudgingly moved the meeting to the maze of cubicles outside Moni’s office, which had a sound-proof window that gave Mariella a clear view of Moni, and vice versa.
The girl stared at Moni nonstop for nearly five minutes before finally finding the crayons and paper on the table. As the officers huddled around the folding table and ran through the gruesome evidence, Moni turned an empathetic eye back toward the child at each detail.
Like the other two murders by the lagoon before it, the heads had been severed smoothly, right down to the blood vessels. The vertebra had separated as easily as Legos unlocking and the nerves were cut, not yanked apart or twisted. Like the prior victims, the Gomez’ had their blood thinned out and stripped of all its iron. Yet they showed no signs of long-term exposure to iron deficiency anemia-the only medical explanation. Somebody had mined the iron from them quickly. They had taken many organs with it.
The first victim had been left nearly hollow, with bones and muscle but no organs. The second victim was missing about half her organs. For the Gomez couple, the killer had narrowed it down to their lungs, livers, kidneys and reproductive organs. Once again, they hadn’t been ripped out through the skin. The murderer extracted them through the gaping hole in his victims’ necks, much like orthopedic surgeons remove gallbladders through a small incision. Except these organs had been severed more precisely than even a surgeon’s scalpel could cleave them.
“This is the work of someone who’s done thousands of dissections,” said Paul Rudy, the Brevard County medical examiner. He would know, as he’s diced apart and stitched back together thousands of corpses. “The killer is working with top-notch equipment.”
“That should tell us something about the motive,” Sneed said. “The killer left their wallets and their car. They weren’t sexually assaulted. The freak wanted their organs and their heads. What a fucking prize.”
Moni gazed at Mariella’s angelic little face as she colored in a notebook. If the killer had seen her… An image of that petite body without a head, with blood spouting from its neck, flashed into her mind. She shook it off and eyed Sneed.
“Do we have any idea how the killer subdued the couple?” she asked.
“The results of the toxicology reports aren’t back yet, but I suspect something very nasty got into their systems shortly before their decapitations,” Rudy said. “The iron in their blood dissolved rapidly. They had internal chemical burns, like someone had injected battery acid into their veins.”
“Battery acid?” Moni covered her mouth. She remembered the time her father had burned her arm with a cigarette because she hadn’t cleaned up her toys. She still had a circular scar. “Were there injection marks on their bodies?”
“No.” The medical examiner shook his head. “At least, not below the neck.”
The heads of the prior two victims hadn’t turned up, so Moni didn’t expect they’d get any more evidence from these bodies. So far, they hadn’t found any signs in the rat trap of an apartment the Gomez family called home that indicated why they had gotten butchered. They were at a dead end, unless Moni coaxed something useful out of Mariella.
Moni caught Sneed eyeing Mariella in her glass box like a gator with its snout poking out of the water sizing up a limping lamb.
“We’ll be needing her side of the story ‘bout now,” Sneed told Moni.
The officers focused on Moni. They waited for the answers that she didn’t have. She shifted her gaze to Mariella, who looked right back at her. The girl’s hands had frozen clenching the crayons. Moni could lie and tell them the girl hadn’t seen anything. But they’d never buy it. She hadn’t been traumatized into selective mutism without seeing something terrible.
“I’m still working on it,” Moni said. “When girl gets over the shock, I’ll bring you what she has.”
“Yeah, and how long will that take? Weeks? Months? Her whole damn life?” Sneed threw his arms up and bumped the folding table with his belly so that it collided with Moni’s elbows. “How many people will die until she can get her shit straight?”
“Sir, I…”
“I don’t care!” Sneed hollered. Even though Mariella couldn’t hear the commotion, Moni saw her wince inside the office. She must have seen the rage on his boiling face. “My brother is with the Lord right now because people didn’t talk. We had four of them people who witnessed a gang-related shooting in Atlanta and none of them said a damn thing about what happened right in front of them. We didn’t catch the gunman until after my brother pulled him over for driving like a motherfucking crazy man. As soon as he stepped out of the patrol car, that thug blew his head off. If even one of those witnesses had offered up his name, it never would have happened…” She could see the stinging pain in his red eyes as they stared her down. “So I don’t wanna hear no bullshit. The girl talks.”
Moni hung her head. She caught Mariella sending an anxious look her way after spending so much time locked in the office. Moni could only protect her for so long until she started putting other peoples’ lives at risk.
“I’ll talk to the psychologist and push her as far as she can go,” Moni said. “But don’t expect a breakthrough right away.”
“Well, when there is a breakthrough, why don’t you ask her about her mother’s hand?” said detective Nina Skillings. “There was a big bruise on it. Looks like it came from some little fingers squeezing really tight.”
Sure, that would be an easy question. Skillings assumed all girls were made of bricks and barbed wire like her.
“That bruise could have happened shortly before or shortly after her mother died,” Dr. Rudy said. “But it’s clear that Mariella left the mark. She’s stronger than she looks.”
Moni watched the girl gently coloring in the finishing touches of her drawing.
“Sometimes overwhelming grief and fear can give you a strength you didn’t know you had,” Moni said. “But when you deny yourself an outlet and turn that fear against yourself, it eats out your soul.”
No one could follow that somber tone in her voice. Sneed, who knew about her father because he had access to her personnel file, must have understood how deeply it reflected on her life. He dismissed the investigation unit.
Moni dashed back into her office. Mariella leapt off the couch and wrapped her arms around the officer’s waist. Now she knew why people had children.