Moni’s knee.
“She’s become quite attached to you, I see. That might be to replace someone who’s no longer here right now,” said Dr. Ike McKinley, the blue-eyed psychologist with thin gray hair. Despite the sweltering weather outside, he kept his office sub-zero and wore a green sweater over his lanky frame like a Mr. Rogers wannabe. Although, he specialized in children, his office didn’t have anything more fun to play with than ink flash cards and wooden blocks. McKinley’s bookshelf had cheery decorations like posters of the human brain and its various regions and a row of stress relieving squeeze toys. Moni grew frustrated by the sight of them because she could never grasp one hard enough for it to pop open.
“It’s good that she has someone for the moment,” Tanya said. “We can’t track down any relatives in the states. The public school system has her down as a second grader at Challenger 7 Elementary. Her teacher said the girl speaks English slowly and is very shy about it, but she chatters on and on in Spanish with her Mexican classmates.”
“But she hasn’t responded to any Spanish with us,” Moni said.
She gazed at the silky black hair of the child leaning against her. Mariella flipped through flash cards-some with ink blots and others with pictures of staple items like cats and milk. She studied them thoroughly, but didn’t respond when Moni or the psychologist asked her what she saw. The girl wasn’t stupid. Her teacher had told Tanya that she was a B student.
“It’s called selective mutism,” Dr. McKinley said. “It’s when children who can speak choose not to and become extremely withdrawn. A traumatic event is a common trigger for this behavior, but the damage can be undone.”
“You can help her?” Moni asked.
“I believe so, if we place her into a facility with specialized care,” the psychologist said.
As soon as the words left his mouth, Mariella dropped the cards and held fast to Moni’s waist. Without saying a word, the girl let everybody know who she felt comfortable with.
Moni had seen the deplorable conditions in state foster homes-the rooms crowded with bunk beds and the understaffed counselors chasing after kids with severe behavioral problems. Some kids had gotten raped or beaten in state care, if it could even be called care. A lucky match with the right counselor in a home that didn’t house a future sociopath would really help Mariella, but Moni couldn’t toss the girl’s life on the craps table. Life had dealt her a crappy roll of the dice already.
“I don’t know about that. My girl here might crack under the stress of a foster home,” Moni said. “I’ve seen some kids that previously gave good testimony crumble into jelly after spending a few months in a home.”
“Yeah, it ain’t the Ritz, but it’s what we got,” Tanya said. “I don’t see another place for her right now. If you can think of a better option, then I’ll tell the judge at the hearing tomorrow.”
Moni knew she had another option, but it seemed out of the question. She couldn’t possibly investigate these murders while caring for a recovering child, especially the one at the center of the investigation. At 32 years old, she was ripe for having children but her choice of men had proven disastrous. Moni hadn’t so much as changed a diaper because she had spent too much time polishing the rims of her man-child’s ride. Until she could chase her ex-boyfriend Darren away for good, no child would be safe with her, Moni thought.
The girl stared into Moni’s eyes. She looked as terrified as she did in the mangroves. Her hands quivered around Moni’s waist. With the girl’s body pressed up against hers, Moni felt her heart beating as rapidly as a fax machine spitting out data.
“Right now, my recommendation is highly specialized foster care,” the psychologist said. “You can see her every day under my supervision. Starting tomorrow, we’ll work with her about drawing for us what happened today. A sketch of the perpetrator would be a good start.”
Mariella grabbed Moni’s hand and squeezed it until it turned white. Her mocha complexion did that under pressure. And that’s how Mariella must have felt-pressured to death. When Moni was a child, the last thing she needed after her father had left her battered in her closet was a reminder of his face with its buck teeth, shaggy brown hair and the scar across his chin. In the dining room, she ate sitting in the only chair where she could avoid seeing his photo every time she lifted her head.
While poor Mariella struggled to forget the monster that had killed her parents, the psychologist wanted that beast branded front-and-center on her mind.
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
