Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel Read online

  “These kinds of victims are living in a nightmare they can’t wake up from,” Navarro continued. “Almost all are suffering from some form or degree of PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That means no matter how much they want to break from the past, they can’t. Many, if not most, have lost relatives, parents or children our treatments are never going to bring back.”

  “What about medication?”

  “There are differing theories. We tend to proceed with antidepressants and antianxiety drugs on a case-by-case basis. Antipsychotics are prescribed, as a last resort, when a patient is deemed to be a danger to him-or herself.”

  They kept walking, seeming to head in no par tic u lar direction, as if Navarro wanted Caitlin to take in what she saw, perhaps become alienated by it enough to leave. Navarro might have been advertising for a counselor-slash-therapist, but that didn’t mean she expected someone like Caitlin Strong to show up with those specifications tucked in her pocket.

  The Survivor Center for Victims of Torture was housed in a former halfway house on a street well back from San Antonio’s famed Riverwalk but still in view of the Alamo from the right angle. From a halfway house it became a walk-in clinic before the Survivor Center moved in with substantial grant money behind it. Caitlin knew a lot of those funds were internationally based, coming in through such outlets as UNICEF, Catholic and Jewish charities such as the Anti-Defamation League, smaller humanitarian efforts and various alliances that were likely hastily hidden fronts for nations trying to absolve themselves of guilt.

  Rita Navarro stopped at the end of the dingy hall before the stairs and elevator, past the closed doors of the treatment rooms where sessions were currently in progress. “We have a staff comprised of eighty providers, both paid and volunteer, consisting of psychiatrists, social workers, attorneys, physicians and interpreters. The interpreters are especially important, given that many of our patients speak English poorly, if at all. The good thing is that a number of those interpreters are actually former patients.”

  “Successful graduates,” Caitlin said, immediately wishing she hadn’t.

  “There’s no such thing really,” Navarro explained. “Recovery from torture is similar to recovery from alcoholism. The fact that you were a victim never goes away; if you’re lucky, you learn how to live with it—live being the operative word.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Been volunteering up at the recovery center for Iraqi war veterans,” Caitlin told her.

  Something changed in Rita Navarro’s expression. At first it looked to Caitlin that she’d winced, until the gaze froze into a scowl. “And you think that qualifies you to work here?”

  “I was hoping so.”

  “You’re wrong. Nothing can qualify you for what you’re about to see and hear, if you stick it out.”

  “I’m no quitter, ma’am.”

  “Then why aren’t you with the Texas Rangers anymore?”

  “Simple question with a complicated answer.”

  “I’d like to hear more.”

  “I’ve said as much as I can on the subject.”

  “Then maybe you should just keep volunteering with wounded war veterans.” Rita Navarro’s eyes continued to blaze into her, reminding Caitlin of a hard-core criminal in the last instant before he goes for his gun. “How’s it feel?” she asked suddenly, stepping close enough to Caitlin to make her feel uneasy.

  Caitlin stepped back. “What?”

  “Being helpless. Having someone else hold all the power.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I don’t expect you’ve experienced that much, Ranger. But now you know what it feels like, a microcosm of what our patients will live with for the rest of their lives. What’s been done to them physically, as reprehensible as that may be, is nothing compared to how their spirits have been broken. They’ve got scar tissue layered over their souls, and if you think holding their hands and reading them bedtime stories amounts to successful treatment, then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  Caitlin straightened her shoulders, the way she did while staring into the mirror as a little girl, making sure she looked tough. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here, Mrs. Navarro.”

  Rita Navarro’s expression didn’t change much. “There are only thirty-five centers like ours in the entire United States and only a hundred and fourteen worldwide, Ms. Strong. If you want to Google that, you do it under ‘torture treatment center’ but we prefer the term ‘recovery,’ or ‘survivor,’ for obvious reasons.”

  Navarro pushed the button on the elevator even though they were only going to the second floor. “Like to hear more?”

  “I would.”

  Caitlin couldn’t tell if Navarro was pleased or surprised. “This is where I lose some applicants.”

  “I’m still here, ma’am,” she said, certain Navarro was pleased now.

  Navarro nodded, satisfied. “Our center is unique in that we offer in-as well as outpatient ser vices. Puts more demands on our staff and keeps us open twenty-four hours a day, but we’re one of the few centers that can treat those victims who otherwise would end up in the cesspool of state psychiatric hospital wards or on the street. Also means we see some of the most challenging cases.”

  The elevator door opened and Caitlin followed Rita Navarro inside.

  “We have eight treatment rooms, lab facilities and physical exam rooms on the first floor,” she said when the doors had closed again. “The second floor has a dozen inpatient rooms and the third houses our administrative offices. There’ve been times, though, where we converted those offices into sleeping quarters. You do what you have to when you don’t want to turn anyone away.”

  The elevator stopped. The door slid open. Rita Navarro led the way out, Caitlin wondering if this woman truly understood the kind of evil capable of putting men and women in a survivor center. Such monsters were a species unto themselves who feasted and thrived on the inability of normal human beings to conceive of their capacity for violence.

  These days the problem has become identifying them. Caitlin’s dad and granddad had been Rangers when the bad guys pretty much announced themselves and their intentions. These days, though, the monsters have moved into the kinds of neighborhoods people go to to escape them. John Wayne Gacy played a clown and civic humanitarian while burying the bodies of thirty-eight molested boys in his subbasement. The BTK killer was a Boy Scout troop leader.

  That made Caitlin wonder what she was doing here, applying to help the victims instead of going after those who had victimized them. Navarro led her down a hallway that had six matching rooms on either side of the hall. The doors were all open, revealing simple dormitory-style furnishings within. A few of the rooms had been spruced up with personal items.

  The first held a legless black man seated in a wheelchair. His skin was ebony colored, Caitlin guessing he was a native of Nigeria, Kenya or some other African country mired in perpetual civil war. His pupils were barely distinguishable amid the whites of his eyes and the lids didn’t seem to be working properly.

  The next room down was occupied by a woman with an eye patch and her right arm missing below the elbow. Her face was peppered with light spots set against her otherwise olive skin, making her nationality difficult to determine. She turned toward the doorway and caught Caitlin looking at her. Her one eye registered nothing, before shifting back toward a television, the glow of which framed her face in a deep shadow she seemed ready to vanish into.

  The next patients lay in their beds, only their faces exposed. A woman peeked out fearfully from beneath the covers, weeping and whimpering. Considering what might be revealed with those covers pulled back sent a dread chill coursing up Caitlin’s spine. But all the expressions left their mark, a mix of fear and resignation thanks to memories so painful and powerful that the past would never let them go.

  “You don’t really have the qualifications to work here,” Navarro told her along the way. “I’d be doing you a
favor by telling you no. But something tells me otherwise. Something tells me the things you’ve seen and done might help you reach some patients traditional therapists can’t. Like our latest one,” Navarro finished, stopping just before the last door on the right. “Been here two weeks and none of us have managed any progress with him whatsoever.”

  Inside the room, a figure in a faded cotton bathrobe sat in a faux-leather chair, his back to them facing the window.

  “We don’t know his name, what exactly was done to him, or why,” Navarro resumed. “We only know that he suffered some of the most prolonged physical and mental torture we’ve ever encountered. John Doe.”

  She stepped into the doorway, beckoning Caitlin to join her, and knocked. “John? There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”

  The man in the chair turned slowly, mechanically. A simple response to stimulus from someone battered on the inside and out. Caitlin met his blank stare and felt her insides turn to grating glass. Her whole body went numb and her breath bottlenecked in her throat, making her feel light-headed.

  Because the man in the chair was her dead husband, Peter Goodwin.

  7

  EAST SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Pablo Asuna’s head was ducked under the hood of a souped-up Chevy Cavalier when Cort Wesley Masters’s boots clacked across the slick floor of his two-bay garage. Asuna wiped the sweat from his brow with a greasy rag and looked up at him, then down at the boots.

  “Hey, I gave those to you.”

  “Told me you took them off a dead man.”

  “A lie, amigo.”

  “What a shock.”

  Asuna had always been a key contact who knew where to find the Latino gang members Cort Wesley was gunning for. An overflowing fountain of information as good with sources as Cort Wesley was with bullets.

  Asuna came out from under the Cavalier’s hood, accepted Cort Wesley’s hand and wrapped his other arm around his back. “It’s good to see you, amigo. I heard you were getting out.”

  “How?”

  Asuna backed off and wiped the rest of the grime from his face with the lower half of his white T-shirt, exposing his substantial, beer-fed gut. Cort Wesley remembered it being about half that size when he went in.

  “Don’t know,” Asuna shrugged. “I hear things, that’s all. Didn’t think I’d be seeing you, though.”

  “I need something.”

  “Name it.”

  “Where to find the bitch Texas Ranger who framed me.”

  Cort Wesley’s thirty-day housing allowance came in the form of an efficiency room in the Alamo Motel, featuring a badly chipped coonskin cap on the marquee. He stopped long enough to drop off the stuff he’d kept in storage for five years. Then decided to try on some of his old, musty-smelling clothes just to see what the years had done to him. Yanked on a pair of jeans that sagged on his thinner waist and could feel the tightness in an old chamois shirt’s shoulders thanks to hours of pumping iron on the inside, part of a ritual that included five hundred push-ups a day to pass the time as much as anything. He studied himself in the mirror, barely recognizing the face that looked back. Not because he’d changed, since other than the milk-pale features from lack of sunlight, he looked pretty much the same; he just hadn’t looked at himself much in prison. Add some length to the prison-cropped haircut to discourage lice and he could have been the same man who went inside nearly five years back. But the old clothes felt wrong on him, so he redressed in the khakis and work shirt issued by Huntsville before heading over to Pablo Asuna’s.

  “I don’t know, man,” Asuna said, moving to a small, grease-stained refrigerator. He came out with three beers, tossing one to Cort Wesley.

  “What don’t you know?”

  Asuna laid one can down on a workbench and popped the tab off the other, swigging some down. “Giving you the 411 on this Ranger bitch sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

  Cort Wesley held his beer, but didn’t open it. “I seem to be getting that a lot today.”

  Asuna guzzled the rest of his can, tossed it aside, and swiped a sleeve across his mouth. “Hey, amigo, things are a lot different now than when you went in. Time’s passed you by. It’s a new world out there, man, a new world. Your old bosses, they pulled up stakes and went back to New Orleans. The city rebuilds after Katrina, business comes with it, so the Brancas stepped in to fill the void, comprende?”

  “What’s your point?” Cort Wesley asked him, tightening his grip on the unopened beer can.

  “Your old friends in the Latin gangs learn you got no cover, they’ll be bringing the heavy artillery.” Asuna started to reach for the second beer, then stopped. “My advice: shack up for a while away from the game.”

  “That Ranger framed me, Pablo. Think about it, me working the border with a bunch of Mexican drug mules under Emiliato Valdez Garza. Now there’s a pretty picture. What’s wrong?” Cort Wesley asked, seeing Asuna go tense.

  “Garza, man.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Nobody ever meets him. Man’s a fucking ghost. They say, you see him, you’re already dead.”

  “You think he’s the one wants me dead?”

  “Hey, take your pick, amigo. Once his Mexican Mafia, or the Juárez Boys, or MS-13 find out you’re walking the streets, you’re gonna have lots bigger problems than this bitch Ranger who planted your blood in the desert. That’s all.”

  Cort Wesley felt the beer can compress in his grasp. The aluminum finally burst at the seams, sending a quake of liquid and foam spewing in all directions.

  “All the more reason why I need a gun, Pablo,” he said, giving no quarter for Asuna to escape his stare. “Now.”

  PART TWO

  Certainly one of the most famous early-day Texas Rangers was John Coffee “Jack” Hays. He came to San Antonio in 1837 and within three years was named a Ranger captain. Hays built a reputation fighting marauding Indians and Mexican bandits. An Indian who switched sides and rode with Hays and his men called the young Ranger captain “brave too much.” Hays’s bravado was too much for many a hostile Indian or outlaw. In dealing with persons deemed a threat to Texas, Hays helped establish another Ranger tradition—toughness mixed with a reliance on the latest in technology.

  —Mike Cox, with updates from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum staff, “A Brief History of the Texas Rangers”

  8

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  “You may be seated, Mr. Delladonne,” the chairwoman of the Government Oversight Subcommittee said into the microphone, her voice echoing through the chamber.

  Harmon Delladonne lowered his right hand as he eased himself into his chair. “Thank you, Senator Winstrom.”

  “It is the chair’s duty to remind you that you have the right to have counsel present, sir.”

  “I’ve waived that right, Senator. In writing.”

  “In that case, Mr. Delladonne, let the record show that this committee thanks you for honoring its request to appear without subpoena.”

  “And I thank you for being so understanding about the postponements of the testimony I’m here to give today. Let me begin by making a request that these proceedings be held off-the-record,” Delladonne said coolly.

  The windowless, wood-paneled chamber looked cramped and claustrophobic when packed from front to rear but absurdly large in a closed hearing like this. The ventilation was always poor and the summer months inevitably birthed a stale, musty odor like warmed-over standing water no amount of disinfectant could relieve.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. If you wish to retain counsel, this committee will gladly entertain a re—”

  “Ma’am, I have no need of counsel. It’s the members of this subcommittee I’m more concerned about,” Delladonne said, rotating his unblinking stare among the five senators seated on the dais before him.

  Senator Letroy Raskins leaned in toward his microphone. “I’m sure we members of this committee can take care of ourselves, Mr. Delladonne.”

/>   “Oh, I’m sure you can, Senator.”

  “Then let’s proceed, shall we?”

  “Please do, sir. I have nothing to hide.”

  Senator Franklin Bayliss, seated next to Raskins on the far left of the dais, cleared his throat. “This committee has convened in closed session to review the actions of your company, MacArthur-Rain, Mr. Delladonne, not yourself.”

  “I am my company, sir. When you look into it, you look into me.”

  “Then let me say,” started Senator William Gottlieb from the far right, loud enough to cause a screech of feedback through the chamber’s speakers, “that we have serious questions about the actions undertaken by both of you.”

  “By which, you mean . . . ?”

  Gottlieb donned a pair of glasses and consulted a page in front of him before responding. “Specifically, the development of so-called passive surveillance techniques and systems under contracts previously approved by the full standing Oversight Committee and the Senate as a whole.”

  “What I believe the senator is saying,” picked up Chairwoman Winstrom, “is that we have yet to see any reports on the contracts dispensed at a cost of roughly $500 million.”

  “You question their effectiveness.”

  “Right now, sir, we are questioning their very existence, since we have not seen one single shred of demonstrative evidence that taxpayer money has bought us anything worthwhile or, in fact, anything at all.”

  “Security issues,” said Delladonne. “Any report as to function would reveal technological specifications I am not about to share publicly.”