Fatal Refuge: a Mystery/Thriller (The Arizona Thriller Trilogy Book 2)

by Sharon Sterling

  Dr. Sirota nods at the other man, then says, “Sara, this is FBI Special Agent Manning. The gentleman to his left is Major Connolly, the base commander, and on his other side is Detective Reed from the Yuma Police Department. We’re here to talk about what happened three nights ago.”

  Sara is wary. She shakes her head and says nothing, unwilling to participate in what is evidently going to be some lying conspiracy against her.

  The man they call the commander sits forward in his chair and puts one forearm and hand on the table, fingers splayed. “You do remember three nights ago when you snuck on base? When you broke in?”

  “I didn’t break anything!” she says, with emphasis.

  Now he sits back looking angry, his hands grasping the metal arms of the chair. His voice is stern. “You entered the base illegally, at night, and created a disturbance. When the MP’s tried to talk to you, you became belligerent and assaulted them.”

  “They assaulted me. They had guns!”

  The FBI man speaks quickly, impatiently. “Mrs. Cameron, do you know you committed a Federal crime?”

  She doesn’t answer. She feels confused, and the words sound as if they come from a great distance away.

  He leans on the table and glares at her. “This is a Federal military installation. You were trespassing. You could be tried and sentenced to years in Federal prison. The only reason we are considering releasing you to the civilian authorities is that you appear to have no weapons, no history of arrest, and thus far you have made no threats, as such, against anyone.” He shakes his head as if in disgust, and adds, “The civilian authorities have valid charges against you.”

  “Sara,” Doctor Sirota says, “ Did you come here to hurt someone, or damage something on the base?”

  Sara shakes her head to clear it. Finally she says, “No! I don’t do those things. I just came to hand out my poems, to make you see war isn’t the answer. Yuma can be saved. The world can be saved. I know the nine hundred are here. I need to. . .”

  “Sara!” Doctor Sirota turns to calm her again with his eyes. His face somehow absorbs every word she is thinking and returns only understanding. “Do you have a plan to hurt someone on the base?”

  “I don’t hurt people.”

  “Do you have a plan to destroy anything on the base?”

  “Destroy?” Her voice rises in volume with her frustration. “That’s what I’m trying to stop. They’re the ones. They specialize in destroying! Why don’t you understand?”

  The base commander is leaning back in his chair now, arms folded over his chest. He stares at her, then turns to the others. “Our sick-bay isolation room is no place for this woman.” He stands and says, “The meeting is over, gentlemen. Thank you, Doctor Sirota, Agent Manning. She’s yours, Detective Reed.”

  “Give me a minute with these two gentlemen, will you?” the officer says to the Commander, indicating the FBI agent and Doctor Sirota. The Commander nods and leaves the room.

  Bruce takes Sara’s arm and she understands he wants her to leave also. “Wait a minute,” she protests, turning to each of the men in turn. “You can’t talk about me behind my back. It’s not right. You’re treating me like a child, like a criminal! I haven’t…” Bruce has her up and out the door before she can finish the sentence. Then he stops without closing the door all the way. She looks up into his smooth, chocolate brown face and he winks at her. He is going to allow her to listen to what they are saying.

  Detective Reed’s voice is loud enough for her to hear clearly. “I just want to know what we’ve got here. No hits on ACIC, none on NCIC, none on AFIS, none on the Watch Lists, none on the No-Fly Lists, she’s not on a missing persons watch, and no social media presence at all. Is that right?”

  Agent Manning’s voice comes slowly, as if reluctant to leave his mouth, but clear enough. “No criminal history we could find. But she’s a few tacos short of a combination plate, isn’t she? And we all know what people like her can do.”

  Doctor Sirota: “I understand you searched the Social Security records using Sara Cameron and a birthplace of Oklahoma. Good work.”

  “It was luck.”

  “I went through the records and saw she went on disability about thirty years ago for unspecified mental issues. Probably for paranoid schizophrenia rather than cognitive deficits. She appears intelligent and organized in her thinking when she’s not actively delusional. There are virtually no medical records, none of childbirth, so I understand you’ve ruled out a Cynthia Cameron connection.”

  The FBI man: “That wasn’t our concern. What we feared was another Uni-bomber – someone deranged enough to kill people and think they can justify it by writing a bunch of opinionated trash. We didn’t uncover any mention of the President or anyone else in Washington in her scribblings, so we haven’t alerted the Security Service, but she needs to be locked up, now. Isn’t that what you concluded, Doctor Sirota?”

  “No, it isn’t.” The doctor’s voice carries both tension and irritation. “Your psychiatrist and I agree that Sara displays an unusual variation of delusional thinking for a paranoid schizophrenic. She generalizes the fear of being threatened or targeted. She extends it to include the world and the whole human race as potential victims.”

  “Yeah. She thinks people like Reed and myself are the enemy, not to mention the whole Marine base. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’s true she sees the military and politicians in general as threats, as persecutors. But she’s managed to deviate from the idea of violently retaliating against those she considers enemies. Instead, she’s obsessed with the idea of saving the ones they threaten.”

  The sound of Manning’s laugh emerges smooth and sibilant. “Saving the world by writing asinine poems?”

  Dr. Sirota’s voice has a tone that suggests he is losing his patience. “It’s an understandable variation of the Messiah complex that fits with her delusional thought system.”

  Agent Manning: “We have your report, Doctor.” The sound of a chair-back rebounding as its occupant rises alerts Bruce and Sara. The FBI man is coming. Bruce grabs Sara’s arm and pulls her across the hall into an empty room before the FBI man emerges.

  • • •

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Detective Reed glanced at the FBI man’s back as he left the room then turned to Doctor Sirota and lifted his eyebrows. “Okay then. Our problem now. City of Yuma has her for littering and maybe theft if any of that mountain of stuff in her truck was stolen. I was with the FBI when they went through it. Sure didn’t look like anything in there was worth committing a crime for.”

  “They told me she has a lot of books, including the complete works of Shakespeare,” Dr. Sirota said, with a faint smile.

  “That and a bunch of old albums and 8-track tapes of folk music – mostly ‘make love not war’ type lyrics, some books of poetry and just a lot of junk. The FBI will turn it over to us. If we want to inspect it again, it will take days. I think she’s one of those hoarders.”

  “Probably not. Obsessive people collect things. Schizophrenic people accumulate things. She finds and keeps the things that support her ideas, delusional as they may be.”

  “Then is she crazy or not? Likely to start howling at the moon or stuffing mashed potatoes into her ears?”

  Doctor Sirota didn’t smile. He shook his head. “I doubt it. More people than you suspect have paranoid schizophrenia. They can appear normal and behave normally if they’re on medication, which of course she should be.”

  “Why isn’t she?”

  “We gave her an anti-psychotic and tranquilizer cocktail by injection several times in the past three days, but it has a relatively short half-life. Today there’s enough residual effect to keep her relatively coherent and under control. Tomorrow – no guarantee.”

  “I would hate it if she got violent and I had to restrain her – a skinny old woman like that. Don’t even like to touch someone like her. All that negative coverage in the news media about excessive
force. A few abusive cops out of tens of thousands of good ones puts us all on the defensive.”

  “She’s not likely to become violent, but then I don’t know her full history. Acute stress or a severe psychological shock could send her into another psychotic episode.”

  Reed shook his head. “No guarantee to keep her stress-free in the Yuma County Detention Center. The judge has to see her within twenty-four hours to get her plea. If she pleads innocent and if she’s lucky, the judge will release her on her own recognizance. But if she goes off the deep end in the meantime, we’ll send her to the local psych unit.”

  “I’m medical director there. If she shows up she’ll be my patient.”

  “Good. The County Attorney isn’t eager to keep people with a psych diagnosis locked up, unless it’s for a violent offense, a felony. We might even drop the charges if it turns out she’s just a nut who likes to litter.”

  They rose, shook hands and left the conference room together. Doctor Sirota went down the corridor in one direction, while Detective Reed walked the other way to the unmarked door where Sara had been held for three nights. He had to read her her rights.

  When that was done, he handcuffed an incensed Sara, walked her outside and now she was locked in the cage-like back seat of his patrol car where she sputtered that she had never been arrested. She leaned forward, bumped her head against the Plexiglas partition and asked, “Where is my truck? Where is all my stuff?”

  “It’s in safe keeping. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Where? When can I get it? And where is my notebook? I need my notebook.”

  Detective Reed sighed, then reminded himself to be grateful that so far this prisoner was behaving just like any newly-arrested pain-in-the-butt. He had not had to touch her except for the brief act of handcuffing. At the station he finished booking her and congratulated himself silently when he handed her over to the female guard.

  The guard was middle-aged, dumpy-bodied, and coarse featured, her face red with blotches of a parasitic infection called rosacea over which she wore a mask of bored indifference. She grabbed Sara’s arm to take her for processing. Sara’s hands were still handcuffed behind her back but she pulled back and jerked her arm free. “Don’t touch me.”

  “Don’t touch you, Lady? You’ll get touched a lot while you’re in here if you act like that.” The guard grabbed her prisoner’s arms, and pushed her down an empty corridor.

  Sara couldn’t feel herself stumbling and tripping as the woman behind her pushed her down the corridor. Instead, shock sent her consciousness out of her body to hover near the ceiling. She didn’t feel anything, but saw her body in the grasp of the guard as they walked clumsily down a hallway. From the worn concrete floor to the blank grey walls, their scraping footsteps echoed a raspy whisper of despair.

  Then somehow she came back, back in her body again, walking. She looked into the empty cells with iron doors and imagined the one that would slide shut on her and suddenly it all became real. She imagined the confinement, the boredom, the hopelessness and the complete dependence on others for the basic needs of life. No. She had to do something. “Wait! I get a phone call, don’t I? Isn’t that what they say? I’m entitled to make one phone call.”

  “Yeah, sure.” They turned and the guard led her down a different corridor. They entered a concrete square of a room totally bare except for three old-style telephones mounted six feet apart on one wall. The phones were black, the cords only a foot long when kinked at rest. The guard picked up the receiver of the nearest phone and said, “I’ll dial for you.”

  “I don’t know the number. I have to see a phone book.”

  The guard went to the adjacent wall and from her pocket pulled a lanyard with a set of keys on the end and inserted a key into a recessed cabinet. She produced a phone book, handed it to Sara and folded her arms across her chest to wait. She didn’t move but looked away, a gesture that implied she was giving her prisoner some privacy.

  • • •

  Yuma Heat crime reporter Jane Myers kicked off her retro-style wedge heel shoes with the thought that everything old should not become new again. She toed the shoes under her desk and took her first sip of a café Americano. She stared at the orange scone, indulging in guilt feelings that would not prevent her from devouring it, when a call from the receptionist came in. “Jane, this one’s for you. Line four.”

  “Hey, isn’t that an old beer commercial? Got a cold one for me?”

  “Ha. You wish.” The receptionist chuckle cut to a dial tone.

  Jane took another quick sip of coffee and pressed line four. “Hello, this is Jane Myers, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m being held illegally in the jail, and I…”

  “Illegally? Why is it illegal?”

  “Because I’m trying to save people, not hurt them. They won’t listen to me.”

  Jane sighed and bit into her scone. Another call from the County Detention Center by a person innocent in no reality but their own deluded one. She chewed and asked, “What are the charges against you Ma’am?”

  “Charges? Oh. They said littering, but that Marine knocked them from my hand and…”

  “A who? A Marine? What Marine, Ma’am?”

  “On the base. It was my best one yet, but they took them from me, and they have my truck and they won’t give me my notebook.”

  Jane was tempted to toss the phone back in its base and finish her scone, but an unfortunate vulnerability to guilt guided and informed her ethics. Even a person like this deserved a professional response. “What makes you think your truck and your notebook and a charge of littering are news, Ma’am? Wait a minute, what’s your name?”

  “Sara. Sara Cameron.”

  The words of dismissal were on the tip of Jane’s tongue when the last name triggered her memory. “Uh, Mrs. Cameron, tell me a little more about when and why and where you were arrested.”

  The narrative that followed was disjointed, sometimes vague and sometimes painfully detailed, but eventually it became clear to Jane that the caller was the poet with the anti-war message. The scattered poems had created a minor nuisance and earned only a few paragraphs in the paper. But…there might be a human interest story here, and better yet, this Sara Cameron might be related to the dead woman at Kofa.

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. Visiting hours at the Detention Center would be over soon. “Okay, Mrs. Cameron, I’d like to hear more but I need to come and visit you. Now.”

  “Here? You’ll come here?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there in about ten.” She hung up the phone, downed her black coffee, and with a wistful grunt wrapped the partly eaten scone in a paper napkin. She decided against recording the woman’s voice with her smart-phone. Instead she grabbed her tape recorder and headed out.

  Yuma traffic was nothing compared to some cities where she had worked but at three o’clock in the afternoon school buses, car-pooling parents and school zones to drive through at agonizingly slow speed complicated the trip. She made it with only fifteen minutes visiting time left.

  Jane had interviewed inmates at the Yuma County Detention Center before, but today she was especially annoyed by the check-in routine that ate up so much time. The uniformed officer inspected the contents of her purse, directed her through a metal detector, remotely unlocked the door to the main unit where another officer escorted her down the hall to the visiting room. There, she sat in a cold, hard metal chair in the empty room wondering again how she could establish enough rapport with someone to do a good interview while separated by a wall and a window. She consoled herself with the thought that this time she might actually get a story – the prisoner had seemed very eager to talk.

  The guard entered with Sara, who spotted Jane immediately and came to sit on her own hard metal chair on the other side of the window. They looked at each other through the glass. Neither spoke. Jane registered a stab of mental resistance to the fact that a vulnerable and harmless-looking older woman like this could end
up in the Detention Center. She was sincere when finally she said, “I want to hear more about you, Sara.”

  “When I came to Yuma, I didn’t know I’d be doing this. I started to look for my daughter. But when I saw what they were up to in the Kofa, and realized what’s going on at the Marine Base, I knew I had to try.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean about Kofa and the Base. Please, tell me more.”

  “I saw it back in January, when I camped there. Trucks with military and civilians driving right up the mountain side. Strange noises and lights at night, and the jets flying over all hours. Back in the Second World War they tested guns and tanks and such at the Proving Ground, but now their evil is something else, and it’s spreading into the Kofa. It will be the end of us all if I can’t stop it. We need the nine hundred, and you can help me...”

  “Wait, Mrs. Cameron…”

  “Call me Sara. It’s a Bible name and a good one, not some made-up word nobody ever heard of. Call me Sara.”

  “Okay, Sara. Listen. In January, a group of civilians and some Marine volunteers from the base transported trucks full of antelope to release into the Refuge. Maybe that’s what you saw. And I’m not surprised if you saw strange lights and heard noises at night near the Proving Ground. They’re still doing testing there.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? What they’re doing there will kill us all!” Sara’s features seem to shrink to the center of her face, giving it the drawn effect of a shriveled apple. When she spoke again her voice sounded both accusing and sad. “You’re not one of the nine-hundred, I expect.” She looked down at the floor.

  Jane lowered her voice to the tone of a gentle inquiry rather than a question. “What nine hundred is that?”

  “Never mind.” Sara turned away as if about to leave.

  “Wait, Sara. I want to hear more. You spoke about the poem you took to the base. I want to see it. Do you have a copy?”

  “The copy is up here.” She tapped her temple with an index finger.

  “You memorized it?”