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

by Sharon Sterling

  “My name never came up with Wagner, right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And before that. You didn’t talk to him about his trash-talking and his obvious dislike of me? If he’s just the blowhard jerk I think he is, I don’t want anyone fighting that battle for me.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Good. But I guess he is the most logical suspect because I don’t know anyone else who could hate me enough to shoot me.”

  “Maybe someone whose grudge is against Apaches in general?”

  “A hate crime against Indians?”

  “Out of style now, isn’t it?”

  “There are better people to hate now. Terrorists, the Taliban, Isis, homosexual people who get married.” Kim slid further down under the sheet, and let the arm that held the phone rest on the other pillow beside her head. “I want this investigation to be over almost as much as I want you to get Cindy’s killer.”

  “I want the psycho who tried to kill you more, Wagner or whoever.”

  Kim’s thoughts slowed a little as the narcotic of sleep oozed into her nervous system. Her voice softened. “You know, my friend Allie called me. She’s the one who works at the office with Winston Verbale. It seems she changed her mind about him. We talked about the possibility he killed Cindy.”

  “We haven’t ruled him out completely. But what would his motive have been? Not money. She had very few financial assets and there was no insurance policy. We didn’t identify another woman – or another man – involved, so no love-triangle. The way she was killed doesn’t fit with that kind of motive, anyway.

  She responded, “I guess there’s always a motive, even if it’s just some asinine thing like ‘I wanted to see what it feels like,’ or ‘the devil-dog told me to do it'.”

  Lon said, “Cindy Cameron’s death was not a copy-cat a murder, the kind committed by people too stupid to delve into their own evil imagination.”

  “Ummm. I’m probably too tired to think about it anymore tonight, Lon. Murder doesn’t make for good bedtime conversation.”

  “Good night then Warrior Woman?”

  “Lon, please don’t call me that. I am no Lozen. Have you ever seen me carry a rifle or ride a mustang bareback?”

  “Umm. Stereotyping. You’re right. But I like to think of your strength and your toughness. It gives me a little more confidence that you’re okay when I’m not with you.”

  “I understand. I appreciate that. But still, don’t do it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good night, Lon.”

  “Then sleep well, Kim Altaha.”

  • • •

  Lon had heard her chuckle a little in the instant before she keyed off her phone, a low and throaty sound much like a cat’s purr. She couldn’t have imagined the rush of testosterone it triggered.

  He got up to brush his teeth, then fell into bed thinking of Kim and her Native heritage and how it must have influenced her growing up, how it had formed her perspective about life.

  Soon the focus of his musings turned from her mind and personality to her body. Vivid mental pictures of Kim flooded his mind, fueling erotic fantasies that kept him awake and restless. Damn! He was not a horny teenager. This was ridiculous. He tried the usual techniques for insomnia, getting up to get a drink, replacing his pillow and cranking the air conditioner setting down for a cooler room. His hormones and his imagination did not yield to behavioral strategies or to reason. Toward dawn he cursed the ordeal and was tempted to relieve his discomfort by masturbating. He angrily resisted the urge, only to wake at seven a.m. with the sticky evidence on his thighs that his body had overruled his mind and had its way with him, something that hadn’t happened to him in years.

  • • •

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Later that morning Lon grabbed his car keys from the holder hanging on the kitchen wall next to the garage door, aware of feeling sleepy and irritable at the start of the day. His phone rang. Impatiently, he answered and followed the prompt for a face to face. The freckled and genial visage of his friend Dean Reed of the Yuma Police Department greeted him from the tiny screen.

  “Hey, Lon, we’ve got something here you should see.”

  “What’s that, your favorite chick flick, Dean?”

  “I don’t go for them fat and headless, Raney.” Reed’s face disappeared. He had turned the phone toward the floor. Lon made out the image of a dark and shadowy something on the floor. A body.

  “Headless!” Instantly Lon was wider awake. “A homicide?”

  “What else? Not your jurisdiction, but there’s a poem here reads like that stuff Sara Cameron wrote. There could be a connection to the Cindy Cameron case you’re working on. Just get your butt over here, pronto.”

  Lon took down the address and backed the unmarked Crown-Vic out of the two-car garage of his house on County 9th Street. Just then his radio went live with the request to meet the man at Guzman Farm about a woman’s severed head. “Repeat,” he radioed back. The dispatcher did. Now he was very wide awake. This head goes with that body of Reed’s… And the victim might be connected to the person who killed Cindy Cameron. The satisfying feeling of closing a case, recalled from dozens of previous ones came to him, but he dismissed it as self-indulgent and seriously premature.

  He pulled the car over to the curb. Smiling in anticipation, he returned Dean Reed’s call. “You may have the body, Reed, but I’ve got the head.”

  “What? Like in a bowling-ball bag? Don’t give me that crap. This is no grade-B movie we got here.”

  “No kidding, Reed. I’m on my way to it now. It’s in the county – my jurisdiction after all.”

  “No way, you greedy fool. We’ve got the crime scene so that makes it ours.”

  “Then we have to work together if we want to take a whole body to the County Attorney.”

  “Crap, Raney, it’s not the body, it’s the perpetrator we need to take to the frickin’ C.A., so she can indict him.”

  “I know. I’m on it.”

  “The hell you are. Not unless you’ve got the suspect in a bowling-ball bag too.”

  “So you just found the victim. When did she die?”

  “Last night, we think. The dog, one of those little, yappy ankle-biters barked all night and all morning till the neighbor came to investigate. She had a key.”

  Lon had no trouble finding the Guzman Farm. In this wide valley it lay at the lowest elevation, visible from the gentle slopes and low plateaus around it. In the middle of the green field, a dark circle of humanity placed the gruesome body part at its bullseye. The field workers and other employees were silent, some crossing themselves, others exchanging excited comments in rapid-fire Spanish. He and Sam Guzman succeeded in shooing the workers away just minutes before the Medical Examiner’s van arrived to take the head to the morgue. A few minutes was all the time he needed to examine the gristly, pathetic thing.

  Fifteen minutes later he drove down the quiet residential street where Debbie Smith had lived, busy now with its own crowd of onlookers.

  He made his way under the yellow crime scene tape and past the uniformed officer. Before entering the garage he paused long enough to don blue cloth shoe covers. Inside, he saw Detective Reed talking with one of Yuma’s crime scene techs, seemingly unaffected by the evil stench clouding the enclosed space. It was a dense amalgam that might have been brewed in hell: six liters of blood pooled and filming dry on the floor where the head should have been, the victim’s excrement, sweat from more than one body, an undertone of oil and steel, the stench of fear and the merest hint of semen.

  Lon approached Reed and the other man cautiously, avoiding contact with thousands of blood spatters. Blood defiled the floor, the car, the walls, virtually every surface. He only glanced at the headless body as he walked past but it was enough. It told him she had died and been beheaded in the spot where she lay, and there had been no genital sexual assault.

  He nodded with no intent to shake the gloved han
ds of Reed and the tech, who he had met before. The tech looked at Lon’s shoe covers and said, “No need to pussy-foot around any longer. I already took all the pictures and samples from the spatter.”

  Lon nodded and said, “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Reed? I’d say she’s probably dead.”

  “Better late than never, Raney? And where’s the head you promised to bring? No gift for the host?”

  “I’ll bring a bouquet of roses to your funeral, Reed. In the meantime, what about inside the house? The perpetrator probably went in to clean up before he took her head for a ride in the country. Could be bags full of DNA evidence in there.”

  “No kidding, Sherlock?” Dean looked up from his note pad. “Another team is in there sweeping the place, and we’re not welcome. What about the head?”

  It’s in the M.E.’s wagon on the way to the morgue. Didn’t take long to see it was drained dry and washed before it was dumped in the dirt.”

  “Washed? Why”

  “DNA. The guy probably came on her face.”

  “Disgusting…!”

  “Yeah. But he could have taken a dump on her. That’s been known to happen. If we’re lucky the M.E. will find traces of semen in her ears or up her nose.”

  “You see anything else when you examined it?”

  “Not much else to learn except he choked her before he cut her. Finger indentations under the chin and in the throat.”

  “Could be fingerprints in the flesh.”

  “Not unheard of. Crime Scene labs can sometimes recover prints from flesh.” He turned to the tech. “But I think he wore gloves. So, what’s this about a poem, and Sara Cameron?”

  “See for yourself.” The crime scene tech handed him a clear plastic evidence bag with a slip of paper inside. “It was pinned to the front of her dress.”

  There were faint, watery pink stains on the edges of the paper. Lon looked closer but saw no trace of finger prints in the stains; whoever wrote the note had been gloved. Then he read the block printed verse aloud,

  “Soldiers and sailors have no hearts

  For war they plot and oft.

  Their selfish wishes earn no mercy,

  So with their heads let’s off.”

  He read it again, silently, then shook his head. “This is bullshit.”

  “What, you don’t appreciate good poetry, Raney?”

  “Yes, I do, but this isn’t it.” He handed the evidence bag back to the tech. “This is written in block print, but the ones I saw by Sara Cameron were longhand. Hers aren’t Shakespeare in quality either, but this is rhyming trash.”

  Reed’s full, pink-skinned face sank into an uncharacteristic somberness. “True. Let’s take this outside.” He led the way out, leaving the crime scene tech behind. They walked to Reed’s unmarked car, “…away from the lookie-loos,” he said, away from those who lingered hoping to get a glimpse of the body being removed.

  Reed leaned against the car, oblivious to its ever-present coating of dust, crossed his arms over his chest and began to tap the curb with the tip of one shoe. He didn’t look at Lon when he said, “You’re right, Raney. Whoever did the deed wrote the stupid poem and we’d be crazy to like Cameron for it.” He jerked his head toward the garage. “This woman was big,” he said, “a lot bigger than Cameron. Cameron isn’t strong enough to do what was done to that woman.”

  Lon nodded. “The guy trying to pin it on her had his head up his butt.”

  “Just to be sure she wasn’t involved somehow, I called County Psych and she’s still there. Has been since we sent her out a week ago. Lucky her psychiatrist was there, a Doctor Sirota. He forgot the HIPPA crap long enough to tell me she’s there, in a locked ward, otherwise I wouldn’t have learned squat.”

  Lon’s head tilted. “Why did you release her from Detention? Did the County Attorney decide not to prosecute?”

  “She’s still out on that decision. We released her to the hospital because she had what the shrink called a ‘acute psychotic episode.’ Staff at the Detention Center said she went stiff as a board, like turned to stone. Screamed for someone named Michael, then wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t move. Catatonic. At the hospital they’ve been shooting her up with some heavy-duty juice. The Doc said she’s just now starting to come back from La La Land.”

  “Who is Michael?”

  “Maybe no one. I heard from the orderly at the base that she yelled that name a lot the night she broke in and while they were holding her there, like he would appear out of nowhere and rescue her.”

  “Did you follow up?”

  “Hard to follow up on just a first name. What I can tell you is that none of the homeless we questioned knew of a Michael and an older woman hanging out together. Not one of them knew her name or recognized her picture. She kept a low profile.”

  “More reason to work together. We have homeless sites in the county you haven’t checked.”

  “Yeah. I think we can get approval for an inter-agency task force. The FBI is back in the picture already.”

  “Why? They turfed her to local and now they’re taking her back?”

  “They heard she freaked out when that brainless reporter told her Cindy Cameron was murdered. The Feds gave themselves a do-over on whether or not the two were related. Turns out they are mother and daughter.”

  “How did that escape them in the first place?”

  “Cindy’s real name was Ruth. She wasn’t born in a hospital, she was delivered at home and the birth was registered by Sara a week or two later. On the birth certificate she used her own name as ‘Mother’ but under ‘Father’ she put ‘Evil Smiles’.”

  Lon laughed. “Any relation to the daredevil?”

  “We’d have to get DNA to confirm it. That’s how the FBI nailed it with Cindy and Sara. Isn’t it amazing that it takes months for us to get DNA results, but the Feds can finesse it in weeks?”

  “National security, Reed. Have some respect for our guardians of freedom.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You know this just complicates our job.”

  “Right. Instead of a relatively harmless but wordy psychotic, we have another murder suspect on our list.”

  “What list?”

  “A short list. Okay, a blank list. But we’re working on it, Reed. Have some confidence.”

  “I have no confidence that the woman murdered her own daughter.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem likely but we deal with the unlikely all the time.”

  “How about the M.E.’s report?”

  “Yeah, it says the bullet trajectory aimed slightly downward. That means the shooter had to be someone taller than Cindy, or her mother stood on a rock to shoot her only daughter.”

  “I’d put a ‘U’ for unlikely next to Sara Cameron’s name.”

  “Agreed, but I’d still like to see the inventory of items in her station wagon.”

  “It’s a mile long and reads as boring as the telephone book, but I say you’re welcome to it.”

  • • •

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Allie pulled into the parking lot of the Psychiatric Hospital, which staff members humorously called The Resort. One reason she liked the two days a week she worked at the hospital was the element of surprise. She never knew who or what she would face. The private practice she was trying to establish didn’t keep her busy five days a week and the hospital gave her a fascinating set of different experiences that required different skills. It was a challenge she hoped kept her alert and learning.

  On the down side, many of the hospital patients were psychotic and sometimes abusive or violent. Most of the psychiatric nurses and psych techs had been kicked, punched, spit on or hit with foreign objects, including chairs. Allie had never experienced an assault, although one patient, who had to be twenty-five years her senior, referred to Allie as “that old bitch,” a name so inappropriate it bounced off her back. As difficult as the hospital population could be, she liked spending professional time with people desperately in need.

  Whe
n Dr. Sirota had asked her to see a new client she was shocked to discover the woman was the newspaper’s “Peace Poet,” Sara Cameron, the mother of her friend who had been murdered. She hesitated to take on the counseling job because ethical considerations always came into play if a therapist had some connection to a client. The issue was whether she could remain both objective and effective in counseling the client.

  She had discussed her hesitation with the doctor and reflected long and hard. In the end she knew her compassion and motivation to help the woman would be no more, no less, and no different than what she experienced with other seriously mentally ill clients.

  The next morning she read Dr. Sirota’s psychiatric assessment of Sara, which made no attempt to downplay the severity of the woman’s mental illness. The signs and symptoms that helped him reach a diagnosis for Sara were her paranoid delusions as well as delusions of reference and last, failure of the ability to think abstractly. He tested her abstract thinking by asking her to interpret the meaning of common allegories. To the one about not crying over spilled milk, Sara said that you can always mop it up and only cry-babies cry over a little thing like that. Her thinking was consistently concrete, and would probably remain so even if other symptoms of schizophrenia were held at bay by antipsychotic medications.

  Allie’s office in the corridor of the north wing of the hospital always felt chilly, even in the blazing heat of July. Here, no windows allowed the golden sunlight or relieved the indifferent ambience of uncarpeted floors and smooth plaster walls. Down the corridor from Allie’s were three other offices, for the head nurse, the psychiatrist and the director of the facility. On one end of the corridor was a double-door exit to the outside and at the other the door to the ward where patients were housed.