Randy Cooper looked more like a criminal than a witness to Moni, but he sat in the witness chair without handcuffs just the same. He had yellow-brown eyes that seemed as hyped up as a cheetah’s before it springs in for the kill.
This was one wounded cat. Cooper’s neck glowed raw red with a matted pattern like someone had nearly strangled him with several pieces of wire. One of the red grooves cut through the cursive tattoo of “Don’t Treat on Me” on his neck. His arms were dotted with tats, including a drooling bulldog, a rabbit’s foot and a snake around his wrist. His right hand had a heavy white bandage wrapped around it.
He even smelled like a zoo, or more like a saltwater aquarium. His black t-shirt and camouflage pants stunk of the lagoon. They were stiff with salt after drying from the middle of the night until morning.
Sneed hadn’t let Randy Cooper change a thing, from his dirty-blond buzz cut to his hunting boots, since the Lagoon Watcher had fished him out of the water and handed him over to the Coast Guard. That much of the story, they knew. The rest, Randy would have to recount.
Even for a seasoned hunter who worked in an outdoor shop and blasted bucks’ heads off, telling this hunting tale didn’t come easy.
“Aw, Robbie. He was my brother, man. He was my brother.” Randy shook his head and bit his lip. He wouldn’t let himself cry, not in front of police, but Moni recognized the red circles around his eyes as evidence that he had let the tears flow in private.
Randy sucked the moisture out of his sinuses and wiped his nose.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he told Sneed. “I wanna help you. I really do. I’m afraid you won’t believe this shit.”
Sneed told Moni before the interview that they should take Randy’s words with a grain of salt. He had a couple of DUI’s and an illegal hunting fine on his record.
“You just tell me what happened,” Sneed said. “All we wanna do is catch the guy who deprived you of your brother.”
“I didn’t say it was a guy… I think it was a gator. That’s what started it, at least. But what finished it, hell… I couldn’t imagine.”
Moni and Sneed traded looks of disappointment. She felt it much worse. Mariella remained the only witness who had probably seen the murderer in action. She still had the biggest target on her.
Not to say that Randy hadn’t seen enough carnage to send an experienced hunter into a padded room.
“I got home from a fishing trip and left my skiff in the canal behind my house,” said Randy, who lived in Palm Bay. “I went inside, grabbed a beer and when I went out back fix’n to lift it outta there, I saw a gator making off with my boat.”
“Hold up, son. Do you mean to tell me that a gator-a reptile dragging its belly-stole your boat?” Sneed asked.
“That’s what I fucking said, alright.” Randy wiped his eyes and took a deep breath. Sneed nodded him on. “I saw this beastly thing, must have been a nine-footer, chomp off the tether and drag my boat down the canal. I followed it on foot for miles all the way to the lagoon. That’s when I called Robbie.”
“Your older brother, Robert D. Cooper?” Moni asked.
“Yeah, Robbie. He has-he left behind a wife and a four-year-old boy.” With his lower lip quivering, he paused while those words resonated. Randy crossed his arms and stared at the floor. “He had a family. He had a damn good job as a computer tech. Robbie had it all. I shouldn’t have brought him into my troubles.”
“They aren’t just your troubles. It’s everybody’s beef now ‘cause we’ve got a killer running loose,” Sneed said. “So your brother had a boat? We didn’t find it in the water.”
“You won’t find it no more.” He bowed his head for a few seconds. “But, he had it. You can check on it, man. Robbie had a pontoon boat-an 18-foot booze cruiser. He kept it docked behind his home on the lagoon side of Indialantic. He used to take his wife and boy out on it. It wasn’t supposed to be for hunting. But I needed it to nab me that gator and get my boat back. I knocked on Robbie’s window ‘round one in the morning. I tell ya, he nearly blew my head off with a shotgun.”
“Is that how you brothers usually greet each other?” asked Moni, who figured the gator story could be cover for a brotherly fight that ended badly for Robbie.
Randy looked at her as if she had break-danced straight out of the ghetto and met a white man for the first time. She had seen that self-righteous bullshit more times than she cared to remember.
“No. It was late and I scared him. What’d you think? My people ain’t thugs, lady.” He shook his head. “Anyways, my brother told me to hit the road. I told him I was taking his boat and going after the gator whether he came with or not. I know, I know. I played the little brother needs help from big bro card. Call me a selfish asshole.”
Moni couldn’t argue with that reasoning, especially considering how big brother had paid for it.
“Robbie, God love him, wouldn’t let me go alone. He snuck out. Didn’t even tell his wife and boy goodbye…” Randy paused and pinched the tear ducts at the corners of his eyes until he collected himself. “We suited up in hunting gear. Me being a dumb ass, I told him that life vests were for pussies. He took the shotgun and I took my crossbow. I had punched many a gator through the brain with that baby.
“We rode the pontoon boat out on the lagoon in the middle of the night. We didn’t see another soul on the water, just the lights from shore on either side. We found my skiff waiting for us in the mouth of Palm Bay, which feeds into the canal behind my house. We didn’t see the gator. Robbie thought I was drunk and imagined the whole thing like some little piss-ant. We shoulda known the gator had laid a trap for us.”
Sneed rolled his eyes. “The gator laid a trap? What is he, a Vietcong?”
“This ain’t a normal gator, boss,” Randy said as he eyed the lead detective with a grim stare.
Sneed never believed far-fetched stories. He poked holes through liars until they bled the truth. Moni had seen him turn the coldest of men into mounds of jelly. She doubted he bought half of what she told him. But this time, Sneed appeared convinced that Randy had encountered a gator. After all, Robert Cooper’s body had what resembled a gator bite on his right arm. A hungry gator wouldn’t usually let a meal go so its victim could get decapitated cleanly and then leave the body floating in the water. Even if the man had lost his head first, the gator wouldn’t taste a sample of the leftovers without lapping the whole thing up or storing it underwater for later.
“You’ve hunted plenty of gators before,” Moni said. “How’d this one trap you?”
“Oh, it didn’t do it alone,” Randy said. “We tied my skiff to the pontoon boat and Robbie started ribbing me about how he thought I had fallen off the boat like some dipshit and left it out there. It kinda set me off, so when a red-shouldered hawk landed on the railing of our boat, I took aim at it with my crossbow to let off some steam.”
“Is that what you call letting off some steam-killing defenseless animals?” Moni asked.
Sneed shot her a crossed look. No doubt, he had bagged plenty of birds in his day. In Moni’s eyes, killing animals for sport put them one step away from killing people. She remembered her father kicking her neighbor’s yapping poodle right in the mouth.
“I wish I would have shot that damn hawk, or whatever the devil it was.” Randy’s eyes narrowed angrily. “With my attention on the bird, I didn’t see the gator flop onto our deck. It scaled about four feet, from the water over the railing. Don’t ask me how it did that ‘cause I ain’t got any earthy idea. It must have been the hunger. The son-of-a-bitch sprang at me before I could turn my crossbow on it. Robbie was quick as a hiccup, though. He blasted the gator in the back with his shotgun. Saved my life.”
“That should have slowed the sucker down,” Sneed said. “Why couldn’t you finish it off?”
“That’s the thing. The shotgun blast didn’t slow it down one bit. It hardly bled from the wound.”
Moni remembered the decapitated bodies and how they hadn’t drenched the crime scenes with blood because they hardly had any left. The bacteria had thinned it out.
She hadn’t seen Mariella bleed. She hoped she never would.
“The gator didn’t flinch, man. It wanted one of us,” Randy said. “The gator spun around and snapped at my brother. I grabbed its tail and yanked it back. It missed him by a hair. Next thing I knew, the gator had its tail wrapped around my neck. That’s all what you see here.”
He pointed out the red grooves in his neck. Moni saw that they did resemble an imprint of a scaly gator tail. Of course, that made absolutely zero sense.
“Now I’m no reptile expert, Mr. Cooper,” Moni said. “But I don’t think gators can choke people out with their tails. Anacondas? Yeah. But a gator?”
“I already told you-this ain’t a normal gator.” Randy flung the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and drew a deep breath. “It didn’t wanna eat me. It was kidnapping me. The gator leapt over the rail and splashed into the water. With its tail around my neck, I had no choice but to follow or get my neck broken. It dragged me to the bottom of the lagoon. My arm sunk into the mud.” He held up his arm and showed the flakes of dried mud stuck in his black hairs. “Thank the Lord it wasn’t that deep over there. I poked my boot out the water and Robbie found me. My brother coulda left me and gone back to his family. I got us into this shit, not him. But Robbie had a big heart, man. He didn’t hesitate for a second before diving into the lagoon after me. It was so dark underwater. The gator could have been an inch from his face and he wouldn’t have known.”
Randy paused and chewed on his fist. His eyes combed through the room as if searching for his brother. They lingered on the door and just waited.
Regardless of his attitude, Moni wished she could open that door and have Robbie Cooper bound through and comfort his little brother. Instead, the other side of the door had a hysterical widow and a father-less child awaiting him.
“So how’d Robbie free you from the gator’s, uh, tail?” Sneed asked.
“Robbie used a hunting knife and sawed into the tail until it loosened and I slipped out. You’d think the gator woulda quit after we cut halfway through its tail. Well, nope. Its snout popped right outta the water and it eyed us… It eyed us with these…”
“These what? I thought you said it was dark? How’d you see it?” Moni asked.
“These purple eyes. They were glowing solid purple.”
The blood rushed into Moni’s skull. Her hands went numb for a second. The purple tumors on the murder victims and the animals. The purple pimples inside Mariella’s lip. Now the ghastly purple glow of a gator’s eyes-the same animal Mariella drew the day before in class. Mr. Mint said that the girl’s gator didn’t look threatening. Moni believed her. She couldn’t let herself not believe.
The dots were laid out on the page for her in little purple bacteria mushrooms. She could connect them, but Moni had no idea where they pointed her. They were links in a much larger picture. There were so many other links on a page that suddenly stretched as far as a desert plain.
Just because they were connected, didn’t mean the dots were in order. Moni had never seen Mariella’s eyes glow. The girl had defended herself, but she would never attack someone. No, she had a small infection and had overcome it. Nothing more than that, Moni thought.
“Did you notice anything else purple on the gator?” Moni asked. “Any bumps or welts?”
“I couldn’t make out much besides the eyes and the snout,” Randy said. “Funny thing was it didn’t chase us when we climbed back into Robbie’s boat. We saw its purple eyes dip below water and sink until they were swallowed up by the bottom of the lagoon. We hadn’t even caught our breath when the air started smelling foul. It reeked of this awful rotten egg stench. And the fumes-they stung my eyes and my nose. It fucking burned. We would have motored away right then, but it knocked us on our asses. We were crawling on our bellies. By the time I could tolerate the pain enough to grab the throttle, it was too late. The motor revved up, but we didn’t move. I heard the bubbling and hissing around the boat, and still I couldn’t believe it. When I pulled the propeller out of the water, I saw it had been melted away.”
“Melted?” questioned Sneed.
“Melted,” Randy nodded with a frustrated huff. “Like with acid.”
Sulfuric acid-Aaron’s professor said the bacteria produced this as a byproduct. Moni remembered the stuff from high school science lab. It could corrode metal, but only a real high concentration of the stuff could devour it so fast.
“The lagoon turned to acid,” Moni said. “Sounds like a perverse version of the plagues in the Bible.”
“If it was a plague, it came straight outta hell,” Randy said.
“I promise you, I will throw somebody’s ass behind bars for this,” Sneed said. “And it won’t be the devil. I’ve seen people commit atrocities that Satan himself wouldn’t touch.”
Randy nodded. His hands clamped down on the sides of the table. With a nod, Moni gave the lead detective his due for coaxing the witness on.
“How bad did the acid damage the boat?” she asked.
“It breached the hull. We heard water sloshing around inside,” Randy replied. “My skiff’s hull across the way was looking bad too, but the engine was up and the propeller hadn’t touched the acid. Robbie told me I should jump first while he flagged down the Coast Guard on the radio and I went. I swear, I didn’t know what would happen.”
Randy wedged his fingers into his eyes until his cheeks flushed red. He couldn’t plug the tears back any longer. They seeped out from underneath his fingers and streamed down the sides of his nose and the corners of his lips. Gasping, Randy tasted the salty elixir that Moni knew all too well. He frantically wiped his mouth and his face as if the tears were acid from the lagoon.
“It’s okay.” Moni placed a firm hand on his shoulder. His trembling gradually eased. “No one could have known what would happen.”
Randy grasped her hand as if it were a life preserver. His breathing steadily calmed. She felt his heart rate through his palm normalizing as well.
“I’m sorry,” Randy said. “I know you’ve got work to do. This is pathetic.”
“No, it’s not,” Moni said. “You’re going to relive this moment in your brain a million times, and it’ll always be hard. Just take your time and we’ll get through it.”
Sneed rolled his eyes. He didn’t fix on giving him any more time. Randy saw his gesture and got going.
“So I was in the skiff and Robbie radioed the Coast Guard. He told me they were on the way. And I told him… I told him to hurry up onto my boat. Robbie leapt across the water between our boats and up it came.” He held his bandaged hand sideways and had his hand with the snake tattoo rise from underneath. Randy grabbed his hand so hard Moni feared he might have broken a finger. “The gator came outta the water and snapped onto his arm. I heard Robbie scream. I saw the horror on his face the moment he realized he’d never see his wife and son again. I reached for him, but I couldn’t make it. In the blink of an eye, they were gone into the lagoon. I didn’t even think. I just plunged my hand into the water.” He placed his bandaged hand on the table. “They said these are second degree burns. I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve been stabbed before and this hurt a hell of a lot worse. I would have dove into the water after him. I should have… You don’t know how bad I… It’s just the pain…”
“You did all you could.” Moni reached across the table. He yanked his bandaged hand away before she could touch it. “Something about that gator made it immune to the acid, but it would have fried you. There’s nothing you could have done at that point.”
Sneed looked down his nose at Randy as if the grizzly detective would have jumped into the acid bath and snapped the gator’s neck if that would have saved his brother. Luckily, Randy didn’t notice anything besides the back of his own hand as he shielded his face.
“My hand was burning, so I ran. I slammed the throttle and bolted out of there so freaked out I didn’t even look back. The skiff’s motor lasted about a minute and then it died. No gas. Those fuckers drained the tank.”
“What fuckers?” Sneed asked. “I thought you were fighting a gator?”
“Like I said, it wasn’t a normal gator. This beast wasn’t a creation of God, I tell ya. It left me out there on my skiff stranded in the middle of the lagoon. The smell of the rotten acid in the water and the fish getting fried alive with their hot guts bursting-it made me heave over the side. When I saw that my puke didn’t boil in the water, I knew I had escaped from the acid. The gator was still out there, though. If it wasn’t for the Lagoon Watcher, it woulda got me for sure.”
Sneed grilled him on the timing of his rescue. Harry Trainer, known in boating circles as the pesky Lagoon Watcher, fished Randy Cooper out of his skiff around a quarter to three in the morning. Somehow, he had heard the distress call before the Coast Guard and found himself in better position for a response-less than fifteen minutes after the call. He came wearing a black wetsuit rather than the trademark tropical shirt and shorts everybody knows him for in daylight hours. Randy said the Watcher didn’t seem all that surprised by his story, but he circled the boat around the lagoon while Randy called out his brother’s name-all while skillfully avoiding the acid slick near Palm Bay. Randy had screamed until his lungs ached. For the longest time he heard nothing besides the water lapping up against the Watcher’s boat.
“Out of the blue, I heard a bird flapping its wings,” Randy said. “When I looked in that direction, I saw a pair of purple eyes. At that point, I was ready for the damn gator-shotgun or no shotgun-if it meant finding Robbie. I told the Watcher, ‘Take me there.’ He must have seen it too, but he didn’t ask questions. Then I saw it-the red-shouldered hawk. It was…” He wiped the perspiration off his face and clenched his fist over his chin until he could spit out the words. “It was perched on Robbie’s life vest. Just the life vest and shoulders-that’s all I saw. His head was… It was gone.”
While Randy grabbed a tissue and dabbed his face, Moni pondered how his brother had been passed from a gator’s jaws to the surgical serial killer. Robbie’s corpse had the usual grocery list of organs taken from it. The head had come off along a line as straight as an architectural drawing. The only injuries that didn’t match the previous victims were the deep gator bite on the arm and the second-degree burns that had reddened most of his skin. The acid had roasted Robbie, but not for so long that his flesh dissolved down to the muscle. The gator-or something else-had pulled him out of the acid slick. They couldn’t tell whether it happened before or after the beheading. They wouldn’t know without seeing his head, and by now everybody knew that wouldn’t turn up.
How could the killer make the gator cooperate? What other animals work for him?
Moni offered Randy a tissue. He proudly brushed her hand aside and wadded the original tissue, which he had soaked, into his pocket. When he finally redeployed his tough guy scowl and looked her in the eyes, Moni fired back with the question that had been gnawing at her.
“What about the hawk? Was something evil about it like with the gator?”
Lines creased across Randy’s forehead as if he were aging by the decade right before her eyes. “The damn bird… It lured us into that trap. Then it called me over with its purple eyes so I could see my brother’s body. The site will haunt me for the rest of my life. The moment I shined a flashlight on the hawk, it took off like I startled it, but it didn’t make a sound. It flew as clumsily as a winged donkey. I would have sworn it had been shot, but I know I didn’t hit it.”
As her memory flashed, Moni’s heart raced so fast that the pulses through her blood vessels could barely keep up. She remembered how the raven had flown crookedly after she had pulled it off her windshield. It didn’t have purple eyes, but the hawk didn’t either the first time Randy spotted it. The bird had set him and his brother up for an attack. Moni wondered whether the killer had dropped the raven on her car for the same reason. Did she narrowly avoid death when she touched the raven? Or did the murderer leave it for Mariella instead?
Moni had no idea who could manipulate animals like that. But Sneed had a strong notion.
“How did the Lagoon Watcher react when he saw what was left of Robbie?” Sneed asked. “I can’t imagine an honest scientist would have seen such a sight before.”
“I was too, uh, emotional to pay that guy much mind,” Randy said. “Eventually, he tapped me on the shoulder and told me we should bring the body on board before a gator or shark rips it apart. Now when he saw it, the Watcher didn’t seem disgusted at all. Hell, he was fascinated by it. It reminded me of the first time I watched my dad gut a deer.”
“So you think the behavior of the Lagoon Watcher, Harry Trainer, was unusual?” Sneed asked as he leaned close to the microphone. When Randy agreed, he pressed on. “I suppose that’s not a stretch. His role in all of this is questionable, if you ask me. He got there eighteen minutes before the Coast Guard. You didn’t see any other boater on the water. So he was the only person in your proximity when your brother went under. Now I don’t know how the killer slices up his victims, but I’m sure your timeline of events would give the Watcher plenty of time to do some carving.”
“You think that he…” Randy gasped. His face whitened.
“Hold on.” Moni blocked the conclusion from leaving his lips. “If this guy with the corny name was the killer, why would he rescue you, Randy? You said yourself that you were vulnerable out there on the skiff.”
While Randy shook his head and shrugged, Sneed answered for him.
“Maybe it’s because he knew the Coast Guard was on the way. The Watcher had time for one victim, but he figured he couldn’t put both through the meat grinder before the searchlights came out.
“And this wasn’t the first time he’s been conveniently near one of these murder scenes,” Sneed continued. “My old pal Matt Kane, may God bless his soul, he saw the Watcher just before he found those two Mexicans dead. And then Kane became the next victim.” Sneed pounded his fist into his palm. “I best have a word with him.”
Moni couldn’t deny that it made tremendous sense. The Lagoon Watcher had been some type of environmental scientists who went a little whacko. Maybe he developed the mutated bacteria and set it loose, Moni thought. Yet, if the psycho scientist had beheaded Kane because he saw something at the murder scene, what mutilation did he envision for the young girl who had witnessed the closely-guarded secrets of his killing method?
The pickup truck that lingered outside Mariella’s school yesterday-who had been behind the wheel with binoculars? Whether it had been the Lagoon Watcher or some other kind of watcher, Moni knew exactly what he wanted.
“What types of vehicles does Trainer own?” Moni asked Sneed.
“I gotta check up on it,” he replied.
She didn’t need an answer. Moni just knew.