They finally called her by her name: Mariella Gomez. The girl didn’t bat an eyelash. Her thin lips didn’t come unglued. They might as well have called her, “Paper Bag.”
Moni couldn’t believe how deep the girl had fallen down the well of debilitating post-traumatic stress. She had comforted children who had lost their parents, but never right before their eyes. Sometimes the children were in school or asleep when it happened. A few times, Moni had spoken to kids after they awoke in the hospital from an accident that claimed their parents. Usually, the first task was helping them accept that their parents were actually gone. That wasn’t a problem for Mariella. Seeing a mad man hack off the heads of her mother and father and do unspeakable acts to their corpses would make an even deeper imprint on the psyche of the young mind.
Moni discovered the names of Mariella’s deceased parents from the identification cards on the bodies. The killer hadn’t touched the Mexican immigrants’ cash. The DCF officer and the child psychologist that joined Mariella and Moni in the counseling room knew of Pedro and Rosa Gomez as well, yet none of them would dare mention their names in front of Mariella — not on the same day the girl had lost them. They feared it would spook her deeper into her hole like a burrowing mouse.
The eight-year-old girl had shown mild improvement in the hours since her rescue. She had wet her pants twice, including once on Moni’s lap, and sat in the filth without saying a word. After following Moni into the bathroom and watching her do her business-since Mariella stuck by her everywhere-the girl had used the toilet once by herself. The child had become so cautious she could hardly take a step without making sure Moni walked beside her.
Moni tried setting the girl down on one side of the psychologist’s couch and letting Tanya from the DCF sit between them. Mariella immediately jumped down, scooted in between the two women and rested her head on 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 cigarette because she hadn’t cleaned up her toys. She still had a circular scar. “Were there injection marks on their bodies?”
“No.” The medical examiner shook his head. “At least, not below the neck.”
The heads of the prior two victims hadn’t turned up, so Moni didn’t expect they’d get any more evidence from these bodies. So far, they hadn’t found any signs in the rat trap of an apartment the Gomez family called home that indicated why they had gotten butchered. They were at a dead end, unless Moni coaxed something useful out of Mariella.
Moni caught Sneed eyeing Mariella in her glass box like a gator with its snout poking out of the water sizing up a limping lamb.
“We’ll be needing her side of the story ‘bout now,” Sneed told Moni.
The officers focused on Moni. They waited for the answers that she didn’t have. She shifted her gaze to Mariella, who looked right back at her. The girl’s hands had frozen clenching the crayons. Moni could lie and tell them the girl hadn’t seen anything. But they’d never buy it. She hadn’t been traumatized into selective mutism without seeing something terrible.
“I’m still working on it,” Moni said. “When girl gets over the shock, I’ll bring you what she has.”
“Yeah, and how long will that take? Weeks? Months? Her whole damn life?” Sneed threw his arms up and bumped the folding table with his belly so that it collided with Moni’s elbows. “How many people will die until she can get her shit straight?”
“Sir, I…”
“I don’t care!” Sneed hollered. Even though Mariella couldn’t hear the commotion, Moni saw her wince inside the office. She must have seen the rage on his boiling face. “My brother is with the Lord right now because people didn’t talk. We had four of them people who witnessed a gang-related shooting in Atlanta and none of them said a damn thing about what happened right in front of them. We didn’t catch the gunman until after my brother pulled him over for driving like a motherfucking crazy man. As soon as he stepped out of the patrol car, that thug blew his head off. If even one of those witnesses had offered up his name, it never would have happened…” She could see the stinging pain in his red eyes as they stared her down. “So I don’t wanna hear no bullshit. The girl talks.”
Moni hung her head. She caught Mariella sending an anxious look her way after spending so much time locked in the office. Moni could only protect her for so long until she started putting other peoples’ lives at risk.
“I’ll talk to the psychologist and push her as far as she can go,” Moni said. “But don’t expect a breakthrough right away.”
“Well, when there is a breakthrough, why don’t you ask her about her mother’s hand?” said detective Nina Skillings. “There was a big bruise on it. Looks like it came from some little fingers squeezing really tight.”
Sure, that would be an easy question. Skillings assumed all girls were made of bricks and barbed wire like her.
“That bruise could have happened shortly before or shortly after her mother died,” Dr. Rudy said. “But it’s clear that Mariella left the mark. She’s stronger than she looks.”
Moni watched the girl gently coloring in the finishing touches of her drawing.
“Sometimes overwhelming grief and fear can give you a strength you didn’t know you had,” Moni said. “But when you deny yourself an outlet and turn that fear against yourself, it eats out your soul.”
No one could follow that somber tone in her voice. Sneed, who knew about her father because he had access to her personnel file, must have understood how deeply it reflected on her life. He dismissed the investigation unit.
Moni dashed back into her office. Mariella leapt off the couch and wrapped her arms around the officer’s waist. Now she knew why people had children.
But Mariella didn’t belong to her. No matter how much the child needed her, Moni couldn’t become a parent while working on this case, because a parent would never let Mariella dwell on this horrible day again.
Moni’s phone rang. It turned out that the demons in her past wouldn’t leave her alone either. She didn’t feel like answering, but if she didn’t, he’d show up on her doorstep with his calloused hand extended for her cash.
“Hi father,” she answered in an ice-cold tone.
“Saw you on the news today, darlin’,” Bo Williams said with the slur of alcohol on his lips. “You was carrying a little Mexican girl away from a crime scene. It was a nasty one, I reckon?”
Small talk. He always did it before getting to the point: money. With his work as an auto mechanic, he could probably pay his own way if it weren’t for all the boozing and gambling. The fact that this animal knew of someone as fragile and precious as Mariella settled in Moni’s stomach like rotten cheese.
“Yeah, it was rough out there today,” Moni said. “And I’m real busy working on the case so…”
“Great! I’ll make it right quick then,” he snapped. She could have hung up. She could have hung up on him right there and not answered the call when he rang her back. But, just like how she never fled her childhood home and never called the police on that abusive monster, Moni let him roll on. “My landlord’s fix’n to kick me out on my ass next month if I don’t make rent. You don’t wanna see your old man out on the street again, do ya?”
As much as that bastard deserved sleeping underneath a bridge every night, that would only give him more time out in public where he could encounter new victims. If he panhandled again, he might jump in the car with a woman and have his twisted fun.
God, why’d they let him out? Ten years in prison wasn’t nearly enough.
Bo Williams might have stayed in the pen if the girl he had beaten had died, but she survived to live on with barely any use in her arm. Moni should have protected her friend from him, but she led the girl right into her home. She had watched her father wrench Sasha’s arm behind her back until it broke. Her friend screamed and bawled tears. And when Moni begged him to stop, her father shoved her against the wall. She sat where she fell as Sasha’s beating continued. She covered her eyes and ears, like if she didn’t see or hear it, it wasn’t happening.
“You wanna be like this girl? You wanna be fashionable, don’t cha?” her father had shouted at Moni as he pulled her friend’s braids and slammed her face against the dining room table. “You think I’m gonna buy you all this nice shit? Well, when you earn a nickel, you can pay me back for all the money I wasted on you. I’m taking all those clothes your mother bought, taking the receipt and returning them to the store. I don’t want you ever splurging on that shit without my permission again!”
Moni gripped Mariella’s hand as the memories flooded back to her. She had once been a defenseless child. No one stuck up for her. Moni’s mother, bless her soul, had a fragile heart that couldn’t stand up to him.
Now this young girl had no one fighting for her. Everyone saw her as a jewelry case filled with gems of information. A case proves useful only until it’s opened. When it’s empty, it’s thrown away. Moni couldn’t let that happen to Mariella.
“I’ll send you a check for another nine-hundred dollars, but don’t you come by and pick it up,” Moni told her father. “I’ll mail it.”
She’d cut ties with him for good another time. Right now, Moni needed her father as far out of her life as possible.
“Nine-hundred?” he asked incredulously, like he had any negotiating power besides being annoying as hell. “How about an even grand?”
“I know what your rent is. I’m not paying you a nickel more.”
“Well, a man’s gotta eat, don’t he? You want me scrounging outta a dumpster like a raccoon?”
She wouldn’t mind watching that at all. Hell, she’d take a picture, frame it and hang it in her office.
“I’ll put your check in the mail tomorrow,” said Moni, who made sure she didn’t commit to an amount. Arguing with him killed her. Every time her old man raised his voice, her jaw would ache from where he used to slap it as he scolded her.
“I’m sure that you will. I know you’ve got a big case and all, but don’t forget your old pa.”
As they ended the call, Moni wished she could forget him. She understood why the little girl holding her hand and showing her a drawing of a manatee should be allowed to let her demons slip from her memory as well.
Moni sent DCF agent Tanya Roberts a text message: In court tomorrow, I will ask for temporary custody of the child. Let me protect her.
Without even looking at the words Moni had typed, Mariella gave her a big smile. She must have seen the shift in her demeanor towards her. Duty be dammed, Mariella was more than a witness.
“I’ll take care of you, baby,” Moni said as she put her arm around Mariella. “You won’t be afraid no more.”
If only Moni had someone to tell her those words.