The Emerald Scepter

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The man leaning against the wooden building next to the site of the OK Corral gunfight could have been one of Tombstone’s desperado re-enactors, except for a major difference. Tyler Lee Clayton was a real killer.

Clayton was from Alabama where he’d knifed a man in a gambling brawl. The trial judge was a friend of the Clayton family, and said he would suspend the jail sentence if Tyler joined the army. Clayton signed up. At the time, the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for people to send to Iraq and Clayton’s anti-social behavior was seen as a boon rather than a barrier.

A thin cigar drooped from his lips as he surveyed the streets of Tombstone. He was around five feet nine, rangy in build, with stringy muscles packed on his slender frame. He had a lean face with high tight cheekbones and flat gray eyes that suggested the coiled violence of a rattlesnake.

He wore a black T-shirt and his bare arms were covered with death-themed tattoos. Without the pull-down cap, gloves and belt-knife, he bore little resemblance to the Ninja-leader who had destroyed the house in the Tubac hills a few hours earlier.

The expression of simmering anger contorting his hard features was stoked by the burning pain in his rib-cage. The handle-bar of the motorcycle had slammed into his mid-section like a steer’s horn and inflicted a long, dark bruise on his pale skin. Back in the day, he never would have allowed himself to be ambushed so easily. He had been under the impression that he and his men were disposing of a defenseless young woman, not the crazed road warrior who had roared out of the outbuilding and tried to run him over. He had taken a lot of crap from his comrades before he’d silenced them with a dangerous stare.

A man was strolling toward him along the boardwalk. He was dressed in black pants and T-shirt, too. Although he was shorter and broader-shouldered than Clayton, and his complexion was olive rather than fish-belly white, he had a similar dead-eye expression on his face. His name was Vinnie Tartaglia, and he had gotten into trouble of his own in Staten Island before becoming another bottom-of-the barrel army recruit. He was not as smart as Clayton, but he was equally as violent. Vinnie said. “Talked to a guy in that restaurant. A woman came in on a Harley a few hours ago and had breakfast. She was pretty quiet, he said.”

“She’s going to be quiet for a long time after I catch up with her.”

Vinnie snickered. “You hear from Tech?”

“Yeah. They say she left town headed southwest from here. They tracked her phone before it went dead a few miles from Fort Huachuca.”

“She could have gone toward Bisbee, maybe, or doubled back to Nogales and crossed the border. Maybe even slipped by us on the way to Tucson. She’s probably hundreds of miles from here by now.”

“Maybe not. I talked to our psych department. They’ve got the whole file on her. Crazier than a bedbug, but watch out when she’s cornered!” He patted his sore ribs for emphasis. “Some people will run for as long as they can when they get scared, but she’s a hunker-downer, they said. Looks for someplace she’s been before where she can hide instead of run.”

“This is big country. Lots of hiding spaces.”

“Tech’s running a check of her finances. Credit cards. Stuff like that. They’ll know where she’s been before. Maybe a motel or hotel. Or even a campground.”

“What do you want me and the rest of the guys to do?”

“Hang out for now. Grab some lunch while we call in back up to establish a perimeter.”

“Sounds good,” Vinnie said. He noticed the sign on the wall. “Hey, they’re doing a reenactment of the OK shoot-out in twenty minutes. Want to go see the good guys kill the bad guys?”

Clayton glanced at the sign.

“Naw,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “Too violent.”

After about an hour on the highway, Sutherland had pulled over and ditched her phone. She wasn’t taking any chances that someone would triangulate her position using her cell phone signal, and she still had her back up phone registered under a different name and number. Then she had headed south, where she had a place in mind that might be a good hiding spot.

Sometime later, she arrived on the outskirts of Fort Huachuca, where the U.S. cavalry had set up shop in 1877 to intercept Geronimo’s escape routes into Mexico. She turned off the highway south of Sierra Vista, away from the strip development along Route 92, and followed a winding narrow road into the quiet precincts of Ramsey Canyon.

At the end of the road, she parked near a low-slung building. The sign out front identified it as an inn. She had stayed at the B and B on one of her painting trips. It was a few hundred yards from a nature preserve where she had found many avian subjects for her canvas.

The middle-aged innkeeper was on her way into town, but she said no one was staying at the inn and there was plenty of room available. The hummingbirds that attracted the usual bird-watchers hadn’t arrived in the canyon yet. She told Sutherland to make herself at home and to enjoy a slice of fresh-baked apple pie.

Sutherland took her up on the offer then went for a quick hike in the preserve. She was famished when she returned and polished off, not without some guilt, around half of the newly-baked pie. Then she settled into a Western print sofa opposite the stone fire place, opened her laptop and wrote a message to Hawkins, asking him again to contact her. She waited a few minutes, but there was no answer. After chewing over a few more what ifs, she consoled herself with the fact that he and Calvin were very good at what they did.

Besides, she had to watch out for her own butt.

It was clear what had happened. Lulled by the peaceful setting of her desert home, she had forgotten that the cyber network she used to detect threats was a two-way street to her front door. She had blundered in trying to get at the Arrowhead Foundation’s tax status. She had set off alarms when she made the amateurish call to the Foundation, then compounded her error when she got too nosy about Trask.

She had placed filters on her phone number and email address, but anyone with a brain could have followed the trail back to her. Especially an outfit like Arrowhead which specialized in security.

Still, the speed and fury of the response surprised her.

The men who burned down her house had come to kill her; she was convinced of that. The intruder who had removed his mask before destroying her paintings was the same man who had led his fellow soldiers to attack her back in Iraq. A jerk named Clayton. She thought she had dealt with him when she salted his record with child pornography and couldn’t believe he had come into her life again.

She started to shiver.

Get a grip, she told herself. They know who you are, but you know who they are, too.

Rather than look for new data, with its inherent risks, she called up the Trask file.

Trask had been born in a small town in Oklahoma. He had graduated from a run-of-the-mill university with average grades. His private practice floundered within months. No surprise. You’d have to be crazy to go to a faker like Trask. He had gone to work for the military training soldiers how to survive as prisoners. He might have disappeared into obscurity if not for 9/11 and The New York Times, which had published a report on the CIA use of water-boarding and sexual humiliation in interrogating terror suspects.

Trask’s work became public because of a complaint filed against him with the Oklahoma State Board of Psychologists. The complaint came from another Oklahoma shrink, working with a lawyer and law professor. It documented in detail Trask’s role in the harsh interrogation techniques, asking that his license to practice be pulled. It said he had misrepresented his qualifications and that his torture techniques, in addition to being immoral and illegal, lacked a scientific basis.

He was described as working as a private consultant, never replied in public to the charges, and a funny thing happened to the complaint. The state board tabled the accusation after the three filers failed to pursue the case. She looked into the background of the complainers. The professor had retired, the lawyer moved to another state and the psychologist who instigated the complaint was dead.

Cold fingers clutched at her heart. The psychologist had died in an accidental house fire.

She forced herself to keep reading.

According to the Arrowhead website, he was involved with the children’s project after his work with the CIA. But in the years in between, when he supposedly worked as a consultant, he did the psychiatric evaluations of Sutherland and Hawkins that led to their discharges.

Arrowhead was a private foundation, but Sutherland was aware from her Iraqi experience that contractors occupied a twilight zone, neither civilian nor military, but something in between.

She went back to the website where she had discovered the link between Trask and Murphy. She called up the photo of Trask and the teddy bear, with Murphy guarding him from the little girl. There was another man standing in the field behind Murphy, also wearing a flak jacket.

She enhanced the photo using computer software. His mustachioed face came into focus. It looked vaguely familiar.

Hell, it couldn’t be.

She opened the folder for the Newport Group. She had given each member of the group his or her own file and established preliminary bios with photos.

She clicked on the bio for Captain Michael McCormick. Hawkins had said the guy had acted like a jerk. The photo showed him wearing a navy officer uniform and his lip was clean-shaven. Instead of dark sunglasses he wore heavy-rimmed spectacles. His mouth was spread wide in the same wolfish grin he wore on the Arrowhead site.

Sutherland placed the two pictures side by side, and then looked at them upside down. They showed the same man; she was sure of it now.

Captain McCormick had worked for Arrowhead.

Trask had worked for Arrowhead.

Murphy had worked for Arrowhead.

McCormick worked for Arrowhead and the Newport group.

She started to sift in earnest through the lives of everyone in the group, following links to look for other connections to Arrowhead or to each other. It would take hours of tedious work, and she was aware her queries could be traced back to their source, but tip-toeing in and out was the kind of thing she was good at. She looked forward to the challenge. She would need to prepare herself for the task ahead, though.

She set the laptop aside, got off the sofa, went into the kitchen and cut herself another piece of apple pie.