Aaron knew he’d need those cheesy eighties cop show sunglasses for something one day. The perfect opportunity for playing a bad-ass, cocaine cowboy-buster came when the real cops called him along for a search warrant. The target: Harry “Lagoon Watcher” Trainer.
Seated besides Aaron in the back seat of the police cruiser as they sped up A1A along the sand dunes and hotels of Satellite Beach, Professor Swartzman didn’t look all that pumped. Aaron overheard him pleading with Sneed over the phone that morning in the lab. The professor had told the police investigator that they were wasting their time. Trainer couldn’t possibly engineer a baffling organism like this, he had said. Sneed didn’t give a damn what the professor thought. He only wanted his opinion on what they found in the Lagoon Watcher’s digs in Merritt Island.
It looked like the Watcher had been growing a rain forest on his lawn. With the thicket of bushes, the knee-length tangle of grass and weeds and un-pruned trees, a passerby wouldn’t know the house sat on a canal leading into the lagoon without looking at the normal home next door. In this neighborhood of meticulously manicured beachside homes, Trainer’s shaggy place had a mailbox bulging full of letters, which Aaron guessed included many homeowner association fines.
“Recognize the place?” Sneed asked from the driver’s seat as he eyed Swartzman in the rearview mirror.
“I thought I would, until I saw it,” the professor said. “I remember when Harry had the housewarming party with his wife-ex-wife now. That was nearly 20 years ago. I haven’t visited in at least five years.”
“Was that the last time he mowed his lawn?” Aaron asked.
The wisecrack drew a chuckle from Sneed, but it didn’t get his professor off the hook.
“I thought you were all buddy-buddy with the Watcher,” the detective said. “What, he didn’t have you over for a couple beers or playing around with your microscopes?”
Swartzman folded his trembling hands. “Harry wanted me to review his research. I know he did most of it here after he got fired. He asked me to co-author papers with him, since no legitimate journal would accept an article from an unemployed scientist. But the subjects were too…” The professor winced. “Political. Most of my institute’s funding comes from the state, and the folks in Tallahassee wouldn’t appreciate us pointing out that they need to spend billions cleaning up the lagoon.”
“Well, you’ll get to see your pal’s research after all, and you can help me write up a police report to boot,” Sneed said. “It looks like your Watcher skipped out on us.”
He pointed out the empty driveway as they pulled in. The other patrol car, driven by Nina Skillings, parked on the curve. The policewoman emerged and circled around back.
“No sign of the boat,” Skillings shouted.
“And no sign of the suspect, I reckon. Give your buddy a warning call?” As Sneed killed the engine, he glared over his seat at Swartzman like a bulldog sticking its growling mug out of its doghouse at a trespasser in its yard. Aaron tugged at the door handle. It didn’t open. Of course, the backdoors of a police car wouldn’t open from the inside. Suddenly, Aaron felt like something other than a passenger.
“I’m not an idiot,” Swartzman said. “I haven’t told Harry anything since you called this morning.”
“So you have talked to him?” Sneed asked.
“I called him yesterday and asked him how he was doing, you know, after the incident where he picked up that boater after the gator attack.”
“You mean the same boater who got chewed up by rats?” the detective asked as he eyed Skillings.
“I saw it myself,” Skillings said. “Nasty shit. They didn’t take his head this time-maybe because he wasn’t near the water. But there was that purple stuff and the acid burns.”
“So we have two dead witnesses and both of them had a run-in with the Lagoon Watcher not far from the crime scenes on the day of the murders,” Sneed said.
Swartzman ran a heavy hand over his forehead, and the little hair he had left on his scalp. Aaron recognized the sign of disappointment from the many times he had botched his assignments for the professor.
“It is a compelling motive,” Aaron admitted. His professor shot him a stern stare. Aaron felt his GPA slipping and changed course. “But if the Watcher wanted to make everybody freak out and clean up the lagoon, wouldn’t he need witnesses to tell people about the creature attacks? It doesn’t help his cause if there’s no one left to blab for the cameras.”
“And I don’t see any way Trainer could order a manatee attack and then a rat attack,” Swartzman said. “There must be a biological explanation. Maybe the bacteria-infected animals seek out people who’ve been in the lagoon because they have a certain chemical signature to them.”
“Whoa, that would suck for me,” said Aaron, who remembered his dive only days ago.
“And for ten-thousand other people who’ve dipped more than a toe in the lagoon in the past few weeks,” Sneed said. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s have a look inside this place and then you can tell me what the Lagoon Watcher is capable of.”
They didn’t have a hard time getting inside. He had left his front door unlocked-perhaps expecting they’d stop by and break in so he might as well spare his locks and hinges. When Aaron followed the officers inside, his nose got overrun by a salty fish stench. It smelled like a commercial fishing vessel with the catch jammed into a festering tank that held more fish than it did water. He didn’t see the marine specimens amid the clutter of papers and boxes stacked waist high, but they were somewhere in that house no doubt.
Aaron thought of Trainer’s home like an ex super model who became a junkie. He caught glimpses of its former luxury peeking out from the mess. The marble countertops and the mahogany dining table hardly had any breathing room. They were smothered underneath a flood of paperwork. Aaron skimmed through a few boxes. Some of them dated back 25 years. The ousted scientist had brought his work home with him-every scrap of it.
“We’ve got a real pack rat here,” Sneed said as he sifted through Polaroid photos of various seabirds. “I wonder what else he collects. Heads and organs, maybe?”
He tossed Skillings a glance. She nodded, headed for the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator. “Holy shit!”
“What? What is it?” Swartzman tripped over a box on his way there and barely regained his balance.
“What man doesn’t own meat? He’s an organic food nut. He must be a vegan too,” Skillings said as if that fit the profile of an environmental activist serial killer. “By the look of these fresh vegetables, he’s gone shopping in the past week.”
“So something happened recently that made him abandon ship,” Sneed said. His roving eyes settled on Swartzman.
Aaron could think of a couple reasons why the Lagoon Watcher would take off. The man he pulled from the lagoon had gotten killed. That could mean Trainer did it, or thought he’d get wrongly accused of it. Or maybe he feared his name had made it onto the killer’s hit list. Either way, he had something to hide.
They cleared all but one room. The den had its windows boarded up and a padlock on the door-the only place where Trainer didn’t have an open door policy. When the officers pried off the lock and threw that last door open, they found the source of that fishy smell. The bookcases on the walls were stacked with jars full of marine life suspended in fluids-fish heads, manatee flippers, dolphin lungs and all kinds of internal organs. Some of them were large enough to be human, but Aaron couldn’t tell for sure without examining them closely. As he drew near, Aaron found that some of the specimens had purple bacteria tumors.
“The Lagoon Watcher has his eye on the thiobacillus strain too,” Aaron said as he pointed out the samples to his professor. “Some of these look months old. He knew before we did. He’s playing us, man.”
“Harry probably doesn’t understand what he’s looking at here,” Swartzman said. “We’ll examine his notes on the subject and then you’ll see.”
“That won’t happen today.” Skillings pointed out the empty desk, which had a frame of dust on its surface in the outline of the computer that had recently sat there. “Looks like he cleared his work station.”
“Oh, he sure didn’t have anything to hide,” Sneed told the professor. “Your boy didn’t know what the hell he was looking at in the lagoon, right?”
Swartzman stared at his feet, but an answer didn’t crawl out of his socks. Turning his back on Sneed, he hunched over a microscope with a sample of the bacteria in its sights.
“Harry would know enough to identify this as a type of thiobacillus, but that’s it,” Swartzman said while shielding his eyes from the detective behind the microscope. “He couldn’t do more without a DNA sequencer, and I don’t see one around here.”
“Maybe he took that with him along with his computer and the rest of his good equipment,” Sneed said. “If he knew we were coming, he wouldn’t leave behind the smoking gun, like whatever he uses to make that purple gook.”
Yet, the Lagoon Watcher hadn’t taken all the good stuff.
While everybody gazed at the jarred animal parts, Aaron headed for the industrial-sized freezer in the corner. He craved a beer, but doubted he would score one there. When he swung the heavy door open a clawed, scaly hand swooped out at him. Aaron leapt back. The decapitated gator carcass fell at his feet. The Lagoon Watcher had stashed it in the fridge like a scaly bloated turkey. The cut that severed its head had been done with more precision than any butcher’s knife could render. Its stubby neck had been separated along a line as smooth as the collar of a leather jacket.
A puffy purple tumor flourished in the cradle of its armpit. Before Aaron could say a word, Sneed bulled him out of the way and snapped a picture of it.
“I’ve got Exhibit A right here, your honor,” Sneed said. “This is your killer taking a practice run.”
“If he could slice through a gator’s leather neck, there’s no way a person would stand a chance,” Aaron said.
After examining it, Swartzman shook his head like a little kid refusing to admit he stole something. “He must have found this corpse after it had already been mutilated-just like how we found the human corpses. This doesn’t explain how Trainer could have committed these murders.”
“I think this explains it pretty well.” Skillings wrapped her arm around the professor’s head and shoved electric bone saw in his face.
“Agh, stop that!” Swartzman ducked.
With a cackling laugh, Skillings placed the bone saw on a metal tray with a collection of cutting tools, including a surgical scalpel and a pair of sharp tongs. The Lagoon Watcher even had an endoscopic tube that could probe deep into bodies with a camera and tiny surgical utensils. In the right set of hands, they could extract an organ while making only a small incision.
“Exhibit B, your honor,” Sneed said.
“No… These are standard tools for dissecting large animals and performing operations,” the professor said with sweat drenching his clammy forehead. “Trainer told me he did that here. He helped sick dolphins.”
“He didn’t tell you that he dissected people as well?” Sneed asked.
“No, he didn’t tell me… I mean, no! He wouldn’t do that,” Swartzman said. “A marine biologist has no need for human organs.”
“We’ll see. My boys will sweep this lab for any sign of the victims, down to a single strand of their DNA. In the meantime, I’m putting out a warrant for Harry Trainer’s arrest. Next time you talk to your buddy, tell him to check in at my station pronto.”
Swartzman hung his head with a heavy sigh. Aaron didn’t offer any comfort beyond patting his professor on the back. He couldn’t maintain a straight face while saying that the Lagoon Watcher probably didn’t do it.
At least he could tell Moni about the person she should protect Mariella from. Recognizing the threatening animals wouldn’t be as easy.