Mariella’s eyes lit up like two full moons when she saw the horses. A dozen of them were huddled together with flies buzzing around their perky ears in the muddy stables on the West Melbourne ranch. The ranch hands looked like they had stepped out of an old Western movie, save for the cell phones on their belts.
Striding toward Moni’s car in artificially-faded jeans, Aaron didn’t exactly fit in. His T-shirt was more hang ten than Brooks amp; Dunn. Moni figured that he hadn’t ridden something with four hooves in a long time, if ever. But he had delivered on his promise that he’d take Mariella horseback riding.
“Fancy seeing you here, pard’ner,” Moni told Aaron in a hillbilly voice as she helped the awestruck girl out of her car.
“Howdy, little lady,” Aaron said with a tip of his imaginary hat. He ran his eyes over her tight slacks and spaghetti strap purple top that put her smooth mocha shoulders on display. “You don’t look ready for a ‘round up.”
“Considering all that has gone down in the past two days, I’ll take a pass on riding. I need to stay alert just in case.” She patted the sidearm strapped to her hip and underneath her shirt.
“Your friends in blue are on that, right?”
“The sheriff is on it, but if I see a certain Mr. Trainer pop up, he’ll be as dead as that gator you found in his fridge.”
They had the whole department looking for the Lagoon Watcher, but Sneed didn’t throw one more resource toward protecting Mariella. He hoped that the kid would help build their case against him and he even gave Moni some photos of Trainer to show the girl and see her reaction. Moni kept the photos of that creepy bastard in her bag. Mariella didn’t need something that would trigger another flashback to that horrible night. She had found the restless girl tossing and turning in her bed so many times. Mariella never screamed or cried. She scratched her nails against the wall and window until they were bruised purple.
As she strolled toward the horses with her hand clasping Mariella tightly, Moni scanned the pine trees across the field and the cars parked around the perimeter of the ranch. None of the pickup trucks resembled what Trainer drove. She spotted a flock of birds perched on a high wire like a conspiring gang. A watchful hawk circled the trees. As crazy as it sounded, she couldn’t rule out anything with a pulse.
All the risks of leaving the house paid off when Mariella reached the horses. Approaching a white horse with black spots, the girl rubbed it behind its neck and stroked its black mane. A ranch hand gave Mariella a carrot. After staring at it for a few seconds, the girl started munching on it.
“No, no, no!” Moni giggled. “That’s for the horse, baby.”
The bashful girl shrugged and offered the horse the carrot. Not minding sloppy seconds, the big guy munched it down. Mariella’s face lit up when the horse licked her fingers.
“He sure is a hungry fella,” Aaron said as he scratched the horse behind its ear. “Pay attention little one. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
While Moni signed the release form, Aaron grabbed the saddle of a tall, bulky black horse and stuck his skater sneaker into the stirrup. The horse whinnied and buckled at his ham-handed touch. The ranch hand told him to wait a minute, but Aaron persisted in climbing up its side. He flung his leg over the saddle and reached for the reins. The horse wasn’t having any of it. He galloped off before his flunky rider had a good grip. Aaron flew off as if he’d been launched from a catapult.
“Oh crap!” Aaron shouted as he twisted through the air. He stuck his arms and knees out as he hit the mud and rolled through the impact. Before Moni reached him, Aaron hobbled up with horse turds all over his pricy jeans and dirt-caked scrapes on his elbows. After gasping for air, he grew a wide grin. “That was wicked awesome… I’m never doing it again.”
Moni chuckled when she saw he didn’t get hurt. “You better not teach my Mariella to ride that way. For real.”
She saw the girl climbing onto the white and black horse with the help of a ranch hand. Mariella actually let a stranger near her. Even after seeing Aaron fall, the horse didn’t scare her one bit. With her shy grin transforming into a boisterous smile, it looked like Mariella didn’t want anything more in life than riding that horse. She had no problem settling into the saddle. This horse didn’t object. It pranced around the field with the ranch hand leading it by the reins. Her face practically beaming, Mariella waved to Moni and Aaron.
Moni had never seen the girl so happy. For the first time since she met her, Mariella looked like a normal child.
Then her cell phone rang with a reminder that Mariella’s life would never be normal. Mrs. Mint rambled on so frantically that Moni couldn’t understand the teacher.
“Whoa, what the hell are you talking about, lady?” Moni asked.
“The dog was killed. The Buckley dog. Someone cut its head off in their backyard and dragged it into a canal.”
“I’m sorry. That’s a real tragedy. But it has nothing to do with me. Call 911 and they’ll assign someone.”
“Nothing? It has everything to do with that girl of yours. Mariella cut the head off the Buckleys’ dog in a picture today and, look, it happened. It happened just like she drew it!”
Moni cast her eyes on Mariella, whose smile immediately disappeared into a grave pair of clasped lips. The girl’s horse halted its gallop. Even the ranch hand couldn’t get it going again. The horse waited while Mariella started getting off without any assistance.
The girl loves animals, Moni thought. She’d never hurt a dog. The frail girl couldn’t even if she wanted to. Besides, she had picked Mariella up straight from school. They had been together every second since.
“So Mariella drew a disturbing picture. That’s to be expected from a child dealing with post-traumatic stress,” Moni said. “I’m telling you, there’s another explanation. Has anyone else seen her drawing?”
“I faxed Detective Sneed the picture. He’s already on his way to the Buckley house.”
Moni held her hand over the phone and groaned. That fat pit bull would chew this bone until Mariella popped out a confession-never mind that she couldn’t talk or possibly overpower a full-sized dog.
“If he finds that Mariella had anything to do with this, I better not see that girl in my classroom again,” the teacher said.
“I’m going over there myself, but I can already promise you that she didn’t go near their house,” Moni said. “You teachers never change. It’s time that you thought more about helping this victimized girl instead of passing her off on someone else.”
After Moni hung up, she saw Mariella timidly sulking up to her. The girl must have seen from her expression that she had done something wrong. She must think she got in trouble for the nasty picture, Moni thought. She couldn’t know about the bloodshed that followed. Moni knelt down and met her with a hug.
“What happened?” Aaron asked as he watched them with his hands in his pockets. “Is she over horses already? That was quick.”
Moni tried standing up but Mariella wouldn’t release her from their embrace. So she scooped the girl up and stood with her in her arms.
“There was another incident,” Moni said. “I’ll drop her off with the DCF agent for a few hours. I want you to come with me to investigate.”
“Okay. So that makes us partners or something?”
“Or something… Just do what you usually do and find that some tiny bug with a long name did it. Please…”
The Buckley dog had been beheaded alright. It had been rendered off as cleanly as all the others.
The front leg of Butch the Labrador had also been cut off, but that hadn’t been done smoothly at all. By the rough bite marks and the matching tracks leading to the canal, the investigators were convinced that a gator had pried off the dog’s leg. Coincidently, that matched the red blotch on the leg that Mariella had drawn on the picture.
Moni kept switching her eyes between the mutilated dog and the photocopy of Mariella’s drawing. She couldn’t deny it-this had been violence imitating art.
Mariella couldn’t have done this. It’s impossible. The dog weighed more than she does.
She grabbed Sneed by his beef slab of an arm and spun him around.
“You said the teacher hung this in her window, right? Anyone passing by could have seen it. The stalker must have. The Lagoon Watcher has been following Mariella, hunting her, so he made it happen.”
“If Trainer wanted your girl dead, why would he bother killing this dog?” Sneed pointed toward the furry carcass splayed out alongside the canal.
“He’s playing mind games,” Moni said. “He wants us to point the finger at Mariella. We can’t fall for that trap.”
“Maybe… I could see him doing that,” Sneed said.
From behind his back, Officer Skillings shook her head. She usually agreed wholeheartedly with the lead detective, but not when it came to giving Moni an ounce of credit.
Moni headed for Skillings with a few choice words on her mind, but a yellow-bearded chubby guy in a Florida Gators jersey cut her off. She instantly spotted his resemblance to his kids, the Buckley twins.
“If you don’t find who did this, I’ll kick that punk’s ass myself,” Mr. Buckley said.
Moni found it funny that it didn’t occur to him that four officers and one scientist was a big crew for a dead dog investigation. Should they have brought in the National Guard?
“I bought that shed four months ago. And I installed the fence myself.” Mr. Buckley pointed at the empty slab of concrete his shed once stood on and the remains of fence posts along the canal, which led into the Indian River Lagoon. “They dumped it into the canal like a bunch of junk.”
“Wait a minute,” Aaron asked as he turned his back on the dog and approached Mr. Buckley. “What were your fence and shed made of?”
Mr. Buckley took a gander at the young man and held his nose. “Whoo-ee! What’s that smell? Is that shit on your pants?”
“Horse shit, if you gotta know,” Aaron said. “Now what about your stolen fence and shed? What were they made of?”
“Metal. Mostly iron, I reckon,” he replied.
“Now it makes sense,” Aaron said. “The dog wasn’t the target. It was the shed and fence. The bacteria wanted iron to feed on. Your dog just got in the way.”
“You’re saying that bacteria stole my stuff and beheaded my dog?” Mr. Buckley asked. Aaron nodded. “You really are a fucking moron.”
His face flushing red, Aaron clenched his teeth as the guy treaded back inside his house with zero confidence in the police. Someone should have told him that Aaron didn’t work for them.
Sneed patted the back of the young man. “Your theory’s not a bad one, kid. In the past week, we’ve had nine reports of boat thefts. They were taken right out of the water with nobody looking. And this isn’t the only report we’ve gotten of a stolen or damaged fence along a canal.”
“Remember when Kane’s boat turned up? It had been stripped of all the metal,” Aaron said. “Besides the iron in animal blood, there aren’t a lot of natural sources of iron in the lagoon. Somebody’s feeding the bacteria.”
“And the infected animals are helping them.” Moni pointed out the gator tracks near where the shed had been pushed into the water.
After waging snake and rat attacks inland, the killer had now deployed gators far from the lagoon. Moni had barely saved Mariella from a snake because it only took a single bullet. These infected gators were much tougher and they could hide in the canal less than a dozen feet from her back door.
Is that why the Lagoon Watcher did this? Is he sending me a message that he can strike us at any time?