Mute by Brian Bandell Page A

District, who earlier introduced
herself as Laura
Heingartner. “Some of the fish corpses tested positive for the mutated strain of thiobacillus.”
    Sneed leaned his chubby chin on his palm in a
complacent pose. “I think you’ve got the wrong meeting. This is the county
sheriff’s office, not Green Peace. My only concern with your thio-whatever is
that it contaminates corpses and muddles the evidence.”
    “It might be more than that,” medical examiner Rudy
said. “I can’t rule out the bacteria as the first cause of death. It’s possible
that they caught the infection before the decapitation. Someone might have
poisoned them with it.”
    “Those decapitated bodies were in the water for
quite a while—long enough to pick up all kinds of stuff,” Sneed said.
    “And why would a killer use some obscure strain of
bacteria to off someone?” Skillings asked the scientists. “There are much
easier ways if you wanna whack somebody—believe me.”
    She slipped Moni a condescending glare. Skillings
had racked up near-perfect scores in the shooting range while Moni graded out
average. Moni seethed in frustration as Skillings aimed to upstage her once
again.
    Aaron caught the exchange between the two women and
stuck his head into the line of fire.
    “There’s no way the bacteria are acting alone,”
Aaron said. “We found a sea turtle with an infected tumor on it, but the
critter escaped. Now our GPS shows him cruising along at 40 miles per hour a
couple times a day. Either the turtle learned how to jet ski, or somebody’s
making him spread this bacteria all over the lagoon.”
    “Wait, wait, wait,” Swartzman told his student. “We
still haven’t caught that turtle and you couldn’t take that sample I
asked for. So we can’t say for sure that it’s infected.”
    “The turtle had a fat purple tumor. What else could
it be?” Aaron asked.
    Purple—the word triggered something in Moni’s
brain. It felt like a string from a repressed memory. Where had she seen a
strange purple lump before?
    “Did you say the infection looks purple?” Moni
asked Aaron.
    “Like little purple pimples, or big purple tumors,”
he replied.
    “I have a picture of what they look like on a human
body,” the medical examiner said.
    He turned his laptop toward Moni and she saw the
tiny purple goose pimples along the underarm of one of the corpses. It was
Mariella’s mother. Moni choked up. She had seen the body that day, but she had
barely known the girl then. Now it felt like she had lost a mother too. Moni
remembered her mother’s tranquil ebony face as she lay in her open casket. Moni
imagined a purple tumor growing out of the skin on her mother’s forehead until
it covered her face. She tried closing the eyelid, but the purple blob flung it
open.
    No. That wasn’t where she had seen it.
    The momentary fear stirred up the volatile mix of
memories in Moni’s mind. She found the buried coal without going back far at
all. The first day she found Mariella, she had brushed the despondent girl’s
teeth for her. Moni had seen a few purple bumps inside her mouth, just behind
her lips. She should have called the doctor. She couldn’t remember why she
didn’t. Moni didn’t understand how it had gotten overlooked during Mariella’s
check up. The doctor said the girl appeared perfectly healthy—physically, at
least.
    Moni felt a chill run up her spine. Mariella had
been infected. The bacteria feasted on the iron and oxygen in her blood. It
churned out sulfuric acid inside her body. And yet, the girl showed no ill effects.
Moni couldn’t see how she could shake that off. Maybe Mariella beat the
infection.
    “So you’re not sure if the bacteria kill people?”
Moni asked Aaron.
    Aaron opened his mouth, but before he got a word
out, his professor answered for him. “They should feel sick, but I can’t say
for sure it would kill them by itself. Thiobacillus shouldn’t even survive
inside people or animals. It belongs in