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

by Sharon Sterling

  “Oh, you’re Sara. I – uh hello. I expected you’d come inside.” His attempt to collect himself sounded lame in his own ears. He looked around for her car, but saw nothing. “Here, let’s go in where it’s private,” he said, holding the door open for her.

  “I’d rather not if you don’t mind. Too close for me. I expect we can talk out here. On the north side of the building we’ll be in shade.” She glanced up at the sun mounting the horizon and walked around the building. He followed her.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me about Ruth? And where is the letter? Cindy wasn’t her real name, you know. Tell me about my Ruth.”

  Bile began to rise in his throat. How dare this woman make demands on him? All his planning, the irony of the setting, the privacy it provided – he had planned it perfectly. Then this slug of a woman threw things off kilter and demanded he talk to her right out here in the open.

  “First, tell me what you’ve been saying to the detectives about her.”

  “I. . .how do you know that?”

  “I know a lot, you old biddy. What have you told them about her and her boyfriend?”

  “Do not speak to me that way!” Sara turned to go.

  He glanced around quickly and saw no one on the highway or in the fields. It reminded him of the Kofa: they were out in the open but not another person in sight. Without conscious volition his hands reached for her throat. They curled around it easily, fingers and thumbs overlapping around the small column of ropy sinews. He watched her face, eager to see her surprise and then the look of total despair when she knew she had lost, she was dead, and he had won the prize of killing her.

  He saw her eyes jerk wide. She tried to pull away, leaning back. Then her clenched fists and both arms came up fast inside the circle of his arms. Her fists grazed his chin then her arms reached full extension upward and outward, breaking the grip of his hands. He was stunned by the swift decisiveness of it. She was free.

  She turned to run. He lunged for her, caught her hand and pulled her to the ground. He bent to reach for her, a rush of blood in his ears, his face aflame. He touched but couldn’t hold her. She was thrashing, kicking furiously and writhing this way and that like a wild animal. A kick landed on the back of his knee and off balance, he went down. She rolled away from him, scrambled to her feet and ran.

  He stood, sprinted after her while a question flashed in his mind, why did she go in that direction? Why not toward the road, or toward her car? Another yard and he almost had her – then he stumbled over his own feet encased in the heavy work boots and fell again.

  He got up with dirt on his nose and grit between his teeth. Rage increased his speed, after her again. He was close enough to hear her gasps of breath and low moans of effort. In a few second he would grab the nervy bitch. Now he wanted her to look back. He wanted to see the terror on her face.

  Instead, he saw her approach the bridge, dodge around the warning sign and chains strung across it. Almost within his grasp, she leaped onto it. She swayed, stumbled. He stopped, transfixed with hope she would plummet down to the empty river-bed. Then she regained her balance and with arms out to steady herself, tight-rope walked the damaged footing toward the opposite side.

  Verbale slowed, trotted up to the span panting and now shaking with rage. She was almost a third of the way over. He couldn’t follow. He was seventy-five pounds heavier, and not as sure-footed. The bridge wouldn’t hold him. He tentatively stepped onto a beam, hoping he could shake her loose. There was no feeling of movement under his foot. The suspension was still firm, in spite of the decrepit condition of the surface. He stared after her, willing her to fall to her death.

  Suddenly aware he might be watched, he looked around. Still no one in sight. But it was hopeless. Her car must be parked on the remains of the old road on the other side. By the time he got to his car and drove to where that road joined the highway she would be long gone.

  • • •

  “I want to speak to Allie.”

  “I’m sorry, she’s not here today. Who is this, please?”

  “Sara. Sara Cameron. Tell Allie I have to talk to her now.”

  “She’s not in today, but I’ll transfer you to your case manager.”

  “No, I… “

  After two rings a cheerful young voice said, “Hello. This is Judy Squires.”

  “Who are you? I wanted to talk to Allie Davis.”

  “Yes, the receptionist told me. But Allie isn’t here today. I’m Judy Squires, your case manager.”

  Sara was about to hang up the phone but as frightened as she was, still her natural aversion to rudeness checked her.

  “Sara, I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call you and introduce myself. Maybe we can meet and get acquainted later this week.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m your case manager. I can help you with things that concern you. I can drive you places you need to go or I can get food for you from the food bank if you’re running short – things like that.”

  In spite of her desire to be polite, the pitch and volume of Sara’s voice rose. “I don’t need food. I need someone to protect me from the guy who’s trying to kill me. Can you do that?”

  “Trying to kill you?”

  “Yes. Earlier today. He tried to choke me but I ran. His name is Larry Hebo.”

  “Who?”

  “Larry Hebo. He said he’s the cook at a restaurant called The Diner.”

  “Sara, I need to meet with you about this, now. Are you at home?”

  “Yes, with the door locked.”

  “I’ll be right there – ten minutes at most. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “I’m not about to leave this room. Didn’t you hear me? The guy tried to kill me! You sound like you’re young enough to be wet behind the ears, and you’re telling me what to do?”

  “I’m sorry, Sara. I don’t mean to be bossy, but I’m your case manager. Uh – I’ll be right there.”

  Sara hung up the phone. She stood paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. So she was a “case,” someone who needed advice from a girl probably young enough to be her granddaughter, a person who wanted to give her a hand-out of food, an act of charity she didn’t need. Just because her brain didn’t work like everyone else’s, did they think she was stupid? Did they think she was helpless?

  She began to pace the room. In only five paces she reached the wall and had to turn. Five paces back, turn again. Then again. Then again, not fast enough, not long enough. This isn’t helping. This is frustrating! She clenched her fists, let out a low-pitched, guttural cry of anguish, pushed over one of the chairs at the table, reached for the throw pillows on the bed and tossed them against the far wall. She reached for the back of the other chair, grasping the wood until her fingers grew numb. Her mind, too, went from frantic to numb and empty.

  Then a name inserted itself into the emptiness. She heard the name “Michael,” repeated and repeated in her mind, in that voice, in Michael’s own voice, as if he was reminding her of himself, calling for her to reach out for him.

  • • •

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The voice of Michael saying his own name. Sara was shocked and angry. She pushed the voice away, refused it. Maybe she even said it aloud, she wasn’t sure. “Go away!” Gradually the name faded. Her mind returned to seeing and feeling and sensing the room and all that was around her. Her breathing slowed.

  A knock at the door. She pushed the curtain aside to see a tall, slender woman in her twenties with a purse hanging from her shoulder and a briefcase in her hand. The woman looked back at her through the window. “Sara, it’s me, Judy.”

  Sara opened the door and the woman came in. Judy Squire’s face was heart-shaped, unlined and pink. Her fine, light brown hair was cut short with bangs above alert blue eyes. She wore a loose denim jumper over a short-sleeved white shirt. Disc-shaped ear rings in blue and blue cloth shoes completed her look.

  Sara saw the young woman glance around at the disarray in the room. He
r face and manner changed, even more serious now. She righted the overturned chair and indicated for Sara to sit down. She put her briefcase down on the worn linoleum floor, hung her purse on the back of the other chair and sat down. “I can see you’re upset, Sara. What can I do to help?”

  “I don’t know. You wanted to come see me. You tell me what you can do.”

  “Well, did you call the police after the man…the man tried to kill you?”

  “I was afraid to. They told me not to make trouble. They said they didn’t want to have to arrest me, they never wanted to see me again.”

  “Why do you think the man tried to hurt you, Sara? Have other people tried to hurt you like that?”

  “No. I don’t know why he did it and no one was with him.”

  “No, I mean other times before…have people tried to hurt you or follow you or sort of…sort of persecute you at other times?”

  “Sort of? Sort of? What are you saying – that I imagined it? It was something I imagined?”

  “No, no, I didn’t say that. So, tell me what this man looked like, Sara. Maybe we can figure it out.”

  “Nothing to figure…oh, all right.” She described Winston Verbale in detail, and repeated the name he had claimed was his. “His name is Larry Hebo.”

  Judy didn’t try to hide her disbelief. “But, Sara, I know him. I know Larry Hebo, the daytime cook at The Diner. He doesn’t look anything like that. He’s short and heavy set, and has dark… But there are a few other guys who work in the kitchen there. Maybe it was one of them, just using Larry’s name.”

  “How could I know that?”

  “Sara, have you been taking your medications?” Judy turned to look on the counter by the sink, then at the bedside table.

  “Medication? I’m not talking about my medication. What do drugs have to do with this?”

  No response from Judy.

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I did not imagine that someone tried to kill me! He did!” She put her hands to her neck and rubbed the sore places where Verbale’s thumbs had pressed hard.

  Judy’s eyes followed the gesture. She said, “Yes, your neck looks a little red there.”

  Neither spoke for a long moment. Finally Judy asked, “Sara, Allie isn’t available, but you know Dr. Sirota, don’t you? Why don’t we go talk to him about this?”

  “Yes, I know him. A psychiatrist. A nice man. But I’m not going anywhere right now. I don’t feel safe out there anymore.”

  “Okay, but I’m going to talk to him and maybe he can figure out something to make you feel better.”

  “What can he do? I’ll feel better if I never see Larry Hebo again. Will you just listen to me for a minute without asking me anything?”

  Judy said, “Yes, of course.” When Sara had told her story in detail, Judy said, “Thank you for sharing all that with me. But don’t worry. I think you’re very safe here.” She retrieved her brief case and purse and walked to the door. She turned to give her new client a smile. “Take care of yourself, now,” she said.

  Her fake smile evaporated a second later. She walked to her car with her mind in turmoil. Larry Hebo was her older sister’s husband. She often entered the kitchen when she was at The Diner for lunch, and she knew most of the staff, even the evening workers. None matched Sara’s description of her attacker. The woman must be decompensating. Her paranoia no longer in remission, Sara must be delusional again. Judy asked herself silently why she hadn’t contacted this relatively high-risk client before. The answer was the same as most of her similar inquiries: because my case load is impossibly high and I don’t have time.

  When she reached her car she turned on the motor, cranked up the air conditioning and lifted her i-pad from the brief case. In a few key strokes, she had access to all Sara’s current psychiatric records. They showed what she suspected, that Sara hadn’t seen the psychiatrist in almost a month and Allie even longer.

  An hour later she entered Dr. Sirota’s office. When she finished relating what had happened in her first contact with Sara, he leaned far back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. “I’d almost rather believe someone did try to kill her. Damn! What caused her to regress that much?”

  “I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve seen her.”

  “Because there’s no question about not taking her medications. The injection I gave her lasts a month and she’s not due for another until five days from now. It’s the newest and best anti-psychotic drug on the market. She did so well on it for almost three months.”

  “I know. But her room was a mess. She had trashed it. And besides the fact that my brother-in-law did not assault her, she didn’t make any sense, talking about a church and a bridge and a car like a black hearse. Then she said that God told her the man who attacked her was the same man who killed her daughter.”

  The muscles around Dr. Sirota’s eyes tightened, deepening his crows’ feet and the wrinkles in his forehead. “I guess it’s not surprising. With her tenuous grasp on reality, learning about her daughter’s death was more than she could take. But we gave her a brief reprieve, didn’t we?”

  Judy felt touched by the psychiatrist’s need for reassurance. She nodded, blinked back tears and cleared her throat. Looking into Doctor Sirota’s face she mused that his lower lids drooped in a way that reminded her of a sad clown.

  He spoke again, his voice softer and slower. “Well, it may be only a brief reprieve but let’s get her in here. There’s always something else we can try in these atypical cases.”

  • • •

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It was Monday, August eleventh, the last day of the “dog days of summer.” Most of Yuma’s heat-enduring public had no idea how the phrase “dog days” originated. Most would say it referred to rabid dogs, once terribly common on the streets in late summer, but it was coined in the lexicon of astronomy and describes a cosmic event. Every year between July third and August eleventh, the “dog star” Sirius rises in conjunction with the sun, as if to challenge the sun’s celestial prerogative.

  On the morning of this August eleventh, Allie woke very early with an unsettled feeling. She lay in bed trying to identify specifics and assign cause to her emotional discomfort. The annoying buzz of the alarm clock sounded. She rolled over, turned it off and got out of bed. When she finished in the bathroom, she came back to sit on the edge of the unmade bed.

  Winston Verbale would bring her coffee again this morning. What was wrong with that? The answer came like a rebuke from a well-meaning friend. “Because he’s been pumping you!” Yes, exactly. He usually turned the topic to the Cindy Cameron murder, trying to gain more information about the investigation. Why? What had been niggling at the back of her mind was that his curiosity had a different flavor than a natural interest in the death of someone who had been close to him.

  So, again, why? Could he be involved somehow? Could he have killed her? She had discussed the possibility with Kim but she couldn’t imagine it. A second later she told herself sternly that many things that couldn’t be imagined were real. In many cases of murder, rape or sexual abuse, the perpetrator’s friends and relatives were shocked and unbelieving. They couldn’t imagine the person they knew so well doing such a thing. More likely, it was that they wouldn’t imagine it. They didn’t see it when it was right under their noses or didn’t believe it even when incontrovertible facts spelled out the truth.

  But Win – just last week she had accidentally walked in on him in the bathroom. The look of surprise on his face was still vivid in her memory. It had seemed – off somehow, contrived. A month before, a staff member confided in Allie about the same kind of event, saying she couldn’t talk to HR about it because the person she walked in on was the HR director. And of course, Debby Smith, traumatized by her bathroom encounter with Win and then, poor woman, a murder victim. Wait! What did Debby and Cindy have in common? Winston Verbale. And Debbie had been murdered just a week or so after Verbale had learned she would take the city council se
at he lusted for.

  The sequence of memories and their association kicked Allie from diffuse uneasiness into the realm of shocked reality. The man she thought she knew was a paraphilic, a sexual deviant, a pervert. And also, very possibly, a murderer, the murderer of two women she knew and liked. Cindy had been a gentle, empathetic woman who took pleasure in small things and loved to provide pleasure and healing to others. That was how she had viewed her career as masseuse. And Debbie – she was a vulnerable woman but bright and capable with a lawyer’s grasp of political nuances. She would have made a good council member.

  Literally laid low by the realization of Verbale’s true character, she fell back onto the bed then rolled over into a fetal position while she tried to process it. When she allowed the thoughts in, their logic became apparent. Although his motive escaped her, Verbale had had the means and the opportunity to kill Cindy. If he had committed the murder it would explain his strange reaction when she told him Cindy was dead, and it would explain his prurient interest in every detail of the investigation. And Debbie Smith? His motive, if it was Verbale, was perfectly clear and totally debased. He wanted the council seat enough to kill for it.

  Finally, logic brought emotional surrender. She lay flat on her back and stared at the ceiling. How could she have been so wrong about him? Why hadn’t she seen it all before now? After many minutes of dealing with self-condemnation she rallied her self-respect. Confusion gave way to determination. She wouldn’t think about Debbie Smith and what had happened to her. It was too much. Her first concern and her debt of friendship was to Cindy.

  • • •

  Verbale didn’t want to go to work today, not with this feeling that he had lost, that he was losing. The humiliation of his encounter with Sara Cameron had shaken him. He forced an internal dialogue that it hadn’t changed anything; he had given her a false name and in any case law enforcement would never credit the word of a crazy person. The antithetical thoughts that followed were that if she ever saw him again she would raise an embarrassing alarm that could eventually lead to a very bad outcome for him.