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.”
“But you don’t know how. You didn’t tell us what caused it, right? So nobody knows?”
“Nobody knows for sure,” said Swartzman, who wouldn’t jump out on a limb if it were ten feet wide. “But fibropapillomas wasn’t started by something in the lagoon. It’s been found as far back as 1958 in the Pacific. The only thing new is how rapidly it’s spreading here.”
“You sure that’s the only thing new? What about this?” Aaron pointed to a tumor on the underside of the turtle’s neck, near its jugular. While all the rest were white and lumpy, this tumor was purple and smooth as a marble. It looked like a purple bead had been half-way imbedded into the turtle.
Easing off the throttle so the skiff slowed to a glide, Swartzman peeked underneath the turtle’s head. His eyes widened. Aaron had never seen anything astonish his teacher-anything scientific, at least. He had looked plenty perplexed when Aaron showed up on the first day of class with a mask and flippers over his shoulder like a masters course in marine biology was Scuba Diving 101.
“That’s not normal, is it doc?”
“No, it certainly isn’t normal.” Swartzman couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I don’t know how you missed it when you got it untangled from the mangroves.”
Like the professor didn’t miss it too, Aaron thought.
“Think it’s some kind of infection inside the tumor? Whoa. Maybe we discovered a totally new disease!” His dreams of making scientific journal headlines were dashed when he saw his professor’s sour expression. Keeping the animals in the lagoon healthy had been the man’s life’s work. “I mean, it would totally suck if it were a new disease hurting these turtles.”
“Yeah.” Swartzman sighed and combed his fingers through the Brillo Pad of hair remaining on the sides and back of his pointy skull. Out on the water in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, he had clearly come expecting his student would tackle the dirty work in the lagoon, and that chore looked like all he expected out of Aaron.
I’m capable of so much more. These guys have been spinning their wheels for decades trying to figure out what’s wrong with these turtles. If I could crack this case…
“Hey! Greetings there Herb!” shouted the only boater in the lagoon who used a megaphone. Harry Trainer, the Lagoon Watcher, inched toward them in his boat, which had been decorated with a paint-by-numbers marine life scene. He drove that boat as slowly as an old lady on the Interstate. He wouldn’t chance hitting one of his underwater buddies.
Taking his focus off the unidentified tumor, Swartzman stood and waved at his former research partner with a welcoming grin. “Come on over, Harry. I’ve got something pretty weird. That makes it right up your alley.”
They had worked together when Trainer was the chief biologist at the Ocean Village theme park in Orlando about a decade ago. Aaron hadn’t exactly seen the two lagoon-loving scientists chatting over beers, but he figured they kept in touch even as Trainer took his research solo-not that he had any choice.
Aaron linked the crafts together with a line and Trainer hopped aboard.
