Moni couldn’t settle down to sleep. As she lay beneath the sweaty sheets, she replayed the incidents with Darren and the snake over and over in her head. She couldn’t understand the timing of both attacks happening in such close succession. Did someone make the animal strike at her most vulnerable moment? It had caught her utterly unprepared. Aaron had saved the girl, not her.
Detective Sneed interrupted those lingering thoughts with a phone call at around five-thirty in the morning. Moni feigned a weary answer, as if he had woke her from a deep slumber.
“I heard you fired off a round in your house yesterday. You know, we got a firing range so you don’t shoot up your neighborhood like a damn hoodlum.”
“I shot a snake. I reported it and, as I wrote, Aaron took the carcass to the lab.”
“You and Aaron. Uh huh.” He huffed in disapproval. Officers shouldn’t date sources in an investigation, but Moni knew he got offended by something else-a black woman and a white man.
“I hope you have a better reason than that to drag me outta bed. I’ll be taking Mariella to school in a couple hours.”
“I got a plenty good reason,” Sneed said. “Remember Randy Cooper-the guy who escaped being a gator’s midnight snack? We haven’t heard from him since we dropped him back at his house. He hasn’t answered his phone. After you drop off the young witness, go head on over there with Skillings and Harrison. Let Cooper know that he can’t duck us. I got a search warrant that says he better open up.”
Moni rubbed her forehead, which had been basting in her sweat all night. He could have waited an hour before giving her that assignment. Not that he had really awoken her, but he had tried. Maybe Sneed spent all night working his cases like a general plotting war inside his tent. The master of paranoia had once again pointed his hairy finger at the victim instead of focusing on a killer that had him outwitted.
“I’ll knock on his door, but I’d prefer not to draw the search warrant,” Moni said. “The poor guy has been through hell in the past 24 hours.”
Moni got an early start on the day by packing Mariella’s bag and cooking her breakfast. The girl treaded through her morning motions somberly coming on the heels of two attacks, but Moni put a smile on her face by promising horseback riding that afternoon. She decided against mentioning Aaron. She didn’t know whether Mariella had fled from the snake or the man jumping at her.
After she dropped the girl off, Moni met up with Nina Skillings and Clyde Harrison in the parking lot of a Palm Bay shopping center a few miles from Cooper’s house. For sure, Skillings’ toughness and Harrison’s colossal strength could have done the job fine without Moni. She figured that Sneed had signed her up as a tag along so she’d learn how “real officers” handled themselves.
“So, you saw Sneed interview this crackpot,” Skillings said, hanging her head out the window of the patrol car parked beside Moni’s undercover Taurus. “Why do you think he’s gone quiet on us?”
“Telling us about his brother’s murder took a lot out of him,” Moni said. “We really should have sent him for a psychiatric evaluation before releasing him.”
Harrison leaned over from the driver’s side, and formed a scowl with his square jaw and bushy eyebrows. “If this runt doesn’t talk, I’ll give him an evaluation with my boot.”
Moni sighed and shook he head. “I’d say Randy has had enough big, dumb animals attack him for one week.”
He chuckled without a sign of taking offense. At least Harrison knew his role.
They found Randy Cooper’s old Ford pickup outside his house. He must have stopped by the home of his brother’s newly widowed wife on the beachside and picked it up. Moni couldn’t imagine how painful that meeting must have been for him. How could he look that woman and her son in the eyes and tell them that the man of their household is gone? How could he tell them he was snatched from his boat and killed during his reckless caper in the middle of the night? Moni understood why he didn’t feel like answering his phone, or his door.
“Randy!” Skillings shouted for the fifth time. They didn’t hear anything stirring inside. The curtains were tightly drawn, but the odor of stale bread, moldy cheese and spoiled beer wafted through the cracks in the window panes. “I can smell that slob’s mess from out here. That’s a reason enough for a search even without this warrant.”
“Okay. I got it.” Harrison pointed Skillings to the side so he could kick in the door.
“Hold the beef, cowboy. This one’s mine,” Skillings said. She grabbed the battering ram and pounded through the door in two blows. “No need to ruin a fine pair of boots.”
Moni rolled her eyes. At least this time, Skillings showboated on a defenseless door and not on Moni’s ribs in kickboxing class.
Even Skillings’ tough girl armor didn’t prevent her from clutching her nose and groaning when she entered Randy Cooper’s house. Pizza boxes with their rotting, half-eaten leftovers littered the floor. Some of them were atop piles of clothes. A familiar mud-stained shirt covered one of the boxes. He had left beer bottles all over the place-on the couch, on the floor, on the window sill, on the TV, and all over the kitchen counter where they also found a pile of toxic dishes overloading the sink. He had nearly run out of surface space for the bottles and dirty dishes.
“I guess he wasn’t a stickler for recycling, or cleaning,” Moni said as she trudged through the pizza boxes and foam takeout containers. “At least he didn’t make his garbage man work hard.”
“This isn’t by choice,” Skillings said as she drew her gun and checked the bathroom. She wretched, but didn’t fire, and quickly shut off the light. “Bleh. Something’s wrong. No one would live in conditions like this.”
“What are you talking about? When I got out of high school, I got an apartment with a couple of buddies and our shithole put this shithole to shame,” Harrison said. “When the pizza boxes get so high you can sit on them, that’s when you’ve got it made.”
Skillings, who kept her desk so neat that paper clips were sorted by their different sizes, shuddered.
“Our resident cave man has a point,” Moni said. “Let’s settle this. I bet our witness is sleeping off one wicked hangover.”
They crept toward the master bedroom. The door had been left open a crack. Through it, she caught a whiff of the most horrible stench yet. Maybe he never washed his sheets, she thought. But anyone who had visited a crime scene or a trauma ward would instantly recognize the meaning of that smell.
Moni paused and took a deep breath. With each beat, her heart pounded harder in dread of what waited on the other side of the bedroom door. She slipped into Randy Cooper’s room. Moni saw his body splayed out across the blood-soaked carpet alongside his bed. His flesh had been gnawed up. His skin hung off his face in ribbons of meat around his bare, round eyeballs. Randy’s lips had been whittled down, exposing a skeletal smile that was missing one tooth and sporting puffy gums. His clothes were in tatters, mostly from bite marks, but there were also patches of black ashes where the fabric had been burned through. The acid had singed his bed, which had the bloody tread marks of tiny rodent feet with needle-like claws: rats.
Moni tasted the half-digested eggs and ham from breakfast as they catapulted up her throat. She scampered for the bathroom, but the smell wafting from there turned her reeling back. She let it heave all over the tile in the hallway.
The wretched aftertaste of stomach acid only reminded her of the foul acid that the infected rats had burned Randy with as they ate him alive. On the same night Moni had barely avoided a snake attack, the only other person who had witnessed the lagoon killer’s work had been torn apart by rats in his bed. The monster wanted them. It wouldn’t stop.
Moni started back toward the room, but Harrison placed his palm on her shoulder in the hallway. Instead of its usual mauling, his hand lingered there warmly.
“If it’s too much for you, I’ll understand,” he said. “Hell, I wish I hadn’t downed that protein shake ‘cause it’s sitting extra heavy now.”
“Call the cleanup crew,” Skillings shouted from inside the bloody room. “And tell them to sweep the outside of the house. There’s a hole in the wall where the little bastards chewed their way in.”
Now that rats had started breaking, entering, and murdering, Moni couldn’t think of an animal she shouldn’t fear.