From the start, I knew this day would come, though I always thought it would be Chelsea’s husband or one of her three sisters who showed up on my front porch, not her son. After all, journalists are threatened all the time by the people they expose. I’ve been bullied, intimidated and terrorized. I’ve gotten death threats on my car and answering machine, found knives stuck in my tires or front door, and once, a decapitated rat in my mailbox.
I get it, too. I understand why. It’s not a pleasant thing to have your dirty laundry aired for all to see. Chelsea never asked for that crew camped out on her front lawn, for the camera-wielding reporters that followed her around like a pack of hyenas, for the humiliation and discomfort that came with having her transgression plastered across every American newspaper, television and computer screen—and neither did her family.
And once your secret is out there, there’s no taking it back, ever. It’s so much easier to blame the reporter who broke the story than it is to admit your wife or mother or sister molested one of her employees.
But Ben here doesn’t look the least bit vengeful. He slips his hands in his pockets and waits, watching me from under his bangs with an intent expression.
“Look,” I say, my voice coming across surprisingly strong and even, “I don’t know why you’re here or what you want from me—”
“Because you haven’t read any of my emails,” he interrupts. “If you had, you’d know that Maria Duncan is driving around Baltimore in a brand-new BMW convertible. She lives in a condo in some downtown high-rise, the kind with a doorman and a pool on the roof, and she carries a different designer handbag every day of the week. She also has the biggest boobs I’ve ever seen. They’re fucking ginormous.”
“You shouldn’t say the F-word.”
The kid rolls his eyes, and honestly, who can blame him? His mother preached loudly and to anyone who would listen about God’s message of one man and one woman, and then she molested her female secretary. What’s a little curse word compared to his mother’s front-page hypocrisy?
“That’s it?” he says. “That’s your answer, is don’t say ‘fuck’?”
I shrug. “Maybe Maria has a rich girlfriend.”
“She has boyfriends. Boys. A billion of them. And none of them last for longer than a couple of pictures on Facebook and Instagram.”
“So she went through a phase with your mother. So she experimented for a bit. Lots of girls do.”
“You don’t think it’s weird that she’s suddenly so rich?”
“Maybe. But there are plenty of ways to get rich quick. Just because she’s found one doesn’t mean the money is connected in any way to what happened between her and your mom.”
“Okay, then.” He slips the iPhone from his pocket, fiddles with the screen for a few seconds, then flips it around so I can see. “How do you explain this?”
It takes a beat or two for the film to load, and then it’s Maria, all right. I recognize her sharp cheekbones and delicate ears, her ruffled pixie cut, her thin, suntanned frame in a skimpy red bra and nothing else. And Ben was right about the boobs. They are inflated to ridiculous, porn-freak proportions, swaying up and down, up and down to the rhythm of the man riding her from behind.
“Should you be watching this?” I say. Even with the blurring and voice distortion, this video is pornographic, and far too hard-core for a twelve-year-old.
My question earns me another mouth twist. “Please. Nothing can shock me these days.”
I return my attention to the film, and I think how much Maria has learned since her last go-round with Chelsea. The lighting is softer, the images are clearer, the angles less awkward. It almost looks professionally shot, as if all the clip needs is some cheesy background music and a willing pizza delivery man to make it a halfway decent, if not predictable, porn flick.
And then I see the man’s hand, and what looks like an expensive watch winking on his wrist above a wedding band. He says something I can’t quite make out in a voice that’s distorted to be less dark bedroom and more Darth Vader. This isn’t a porn flick. This film is exactly the same as that decapitated rat some asshole once left in my mailbox: a threat.
Because it’s not a very far stretch to assume that whoever this man is, he would prefer his heaving, sweating, married face not be revealed on the internet, and his manicure and jewelry tells me he likely has the money to pay to make sure it doesn’t. Which means that the person who uploaded this film—and after what Ben just told me, my money is on Maria—did so with an intent to harm.
“You should take this to the police. Blackmail is a crime, and it’s punishable by law.”
Ben shakes his head so hard, his hair slaps him on the cheeks. “No way. That dude’s married. What if he has kids? What do you think will happen to them if his identity gets out? I’ll tell you what will happen. They’ll be fucking traumatized.”
This time, I let the “fuck” slide. Ben is right. They will be fucking traumatized, and so will his wife, his friends, his family, his colleagues, everyone he ever knew. The scandal will likely die down quickly, but by then it will be too late. The married man will have lost his family, his job and most likely a good deal of his savings.
Still, though. It’s really not any of my business.
“What do you want from me, Ben? I don’t write those types of articles anymore. I can’t...” I lift my shoulders and search for the words, settling finally on a definitive, “I can’t.”
“I don’t want an article. I only want to know that my mom was not the bad guy here. That she didn’t go after her secretary but the other way around. I want you to tell me that.”
I think about what he’s asking, for me to take another, closer look at Maria, to search for clues that she might have been a not-so-innocent victim of the affair with Ben’s mom, her boss. I think about what it cost him to come here, to the front door of the journalist who outed his mother and ruined his life, requesting not a retraction or even an article refuting my original claims against his mother, but an answer. All he wants is an answer.
But I meant what I told him before. Maybe she’s having an affair with a wealthy married man. Maybe she’s an amateur porn star on the verge of her big break. Maybe the money and film are not connected at all. I don’t know. My point is, there are unlimited possibilities, and the answer isn’t necessarily the one Ben is hoping for.
“What if I can’t tell you that? What if I do a little digging and find my original claims still stand?”
Ben thinks about it for a moment, lifts his bony shoulders. “Then at least I’ll know for sure. I’ll have closure.”
“I don’t know...”
I do know. The thought of reopening that old wound sends an army of fire ants skittering over my skin, biting me not with old guilt, but with new terror. After Maria’s pornographic performance, I’m terrified of what I’ll find. What if Ben’s right? What if Maria really isn’t as innocent as she made me think?
“You owe me.” Ben jerks his head sharply to one side, whipping his bangs off his eyes long enough to bore his gaze into mine. “You owe me everything.”
Those last few words come with a whiptail lash, and I stand there for a moment, waiting for my skin to stop stinging, for the spots to stop dancing in my vision, for the rope to stop squeezing my heart and lungs. But his words don’t settle. The knot around my middle doesn’t loosen.
Because, hell’s bells, Ben is right. I owe him everything.
I sigh, but it comes out more like a groan. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”
5
As soon as Ben leaves, I sit down at my desk and pull up Maria’s video, trying to ignore the shoveled-out feeling in my gut as the images light up my screen, trying to quiet the million questions that pull and tug at me, reeling me toward them with the appeal of an impending train wreck. I don’t wa
nt to see this clip. I don’t want to see it, and yet I have to look. Ben was right; if nothing else, at the very least I owe him an answer.
I prop both feet on my chair, wrap my arms around my legs and watch from the space between my knees. Now that I’m looking at the video on a bigger screen, I see I was wrong before. The angle is a little strange, as if the camera is wedged only a few feet or so away from Maria’s face and trained up. It gives me a fish-eye view of the left side of her face, her swinging breasts in all their porn-star glory, the man’s heaving chest and his hand as it slaps, over and over and over, a red splotch onto Maria’s ass. I don’t blink, I barely breathe, and I study every pixel for clues.
About halfway through, I drop my feet to the floor, hit Pause and zoom in on the frame. The man is middle-aged, somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties. Flabby skin over muscles fighting gravity, a few stray gray hairs on his chest. I lean in and zoom some more, see his wedding ring is a plain gold band, the watch a classic gold model, unadorned and without flash. He could be one of a million men in this town.
I push Play and watch the rest. There’s a lot of grunting and slapping, mixed in with some dirty talk—him—and exaggerated moans—her—and then, at the very tail end of the video, when the activity crescendos into a loud and rather explosive grand finale all over Maria’s back, I see it. What I missed the first time on Ben’s tiny iPhone screen. What plunges my stomach into the crawl space under my office floor.
Maria looks straight at the camera...and smiles.
The empty hole in my gut fills in an instant, swelling with a churning mush. I push back from the desk with a hard shove. “Fucking hell.”
Could Maria really be that brazen and greedy to have sex with someone, record it, then use it to squeeze some cash out of him? Could she really be so evil and coldhearted, especially after what happened with Chelsea? My nausea rises up, crawling through my stomach and strangling the calm, reasonable voice telling me surely, surely Maria couldn’t be that evil.
I rewind the last ten seconds and watch them again, stopping on the exact moment when her pretty lips twist in so much more than a smile.
They twist in a deliberate taunt.
With her face still filling up my screen, I reach for my phone and scroll until I find the number I’m looking for, the one I haven’t dialed in almost three years.
Floyd picks up on the second ring. At first all I hear is background noise—a shouted command, an explosion, the staccato stream of gunshots. I’d be alarmed, except I happen to know the battleground sounds come from a video game.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Abigail Wolff. I thought you’d gone off and died on me,” he says in the rapid-fire Baltimorese I’d forgotten he spoke.
I force myself to slow down long enough for small talk, then summon a tone friendly enough to smother my rolling stomach and hammering heart. “Hey, Floyd. How are you?”
“Not bad, not bad. I played fifteen rounds of Spartan Ops last night and ranked up from twenty-six to thirty-three.”
“I have no idea what any of that means.”
“Halo 4, hon. It’s the bomb.”
Though Floyd and I have never actually met, I’ve always pictured him as the type of guy who lives in his parents’ basement—hair a little too unwashed, social skills a little too awkward, middle a little too mushy from a constant diet of pizza and Cheetos. But if anyone knows how to flush out Maria’s shenanigans, it’ll be him. Floyd is a computer whiz who specializes in financial investigations, and one thing I know for sure is that money almost always leaves a paper trail.
“My bad,” I concede, then steer us on to the reason I called. “As much as I’d love to hear all about your mad PlayStation—”
“Xbox.”
“—your mad Xbox skills, I need you to check on someone’s finances for me.”
“An assignment, huh? I thought you quit.”
“I did.” I search for an explanation, then decide on the truth. “This one’s personal.”
It’s all I needed to say. The background noise plummets into a muted silence, and Floyd’s tone makes a drastic U-turn, from fun and Xbox games to all business. “Give it to me.”
I relate a quick lowdown on Maria, being careful not to reveal any more detail than absolutely necessary. Her name, her moving-on-up lifestyle and very little more. I don’t mention a word about her five minutes of internet fame. If that’s connected to her bank account in any way, I want Floyd to ferret it out by himself.
“You got it,” he says, and I already hear his fingers flying across a keyboard. “I’m kinda slammed, so it might take me a week or two to get to you. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
“Thanks, Floyd.”
“Oh, and, Abigail?” He pauses, and I can hear his smile. “Welcome back, hon.”
* * *
After I hang up with Floyd, I wander through my house, looking for something to take my mind off Maria. I could unload the dishwasher and mop the kitchen floor. I could finish removing the drain in the bathroom and take out the shower pan. I could sort through the million emails in my inbox. Nothing sounds even remotely appealing. Maria’s images replay on a constant loop through my mind, shooting ice water through my veins, knocking me sideways with that smile, because my gut...my goddamn gut is telling me—three years too late—that I missed something the first time around.
I change into shorts and a T-shirt, shove my feet into my sneakers and bang out the front door to burn off my frustration in a long run through the district, but my feet get tangled up in something unexpected on my welcome mat. A large brown envelope. No address, no postage, no writing or stamps on it anywhere at all. I cut a quick glance up and down my quiet street, which is, of course, ridiculous. Whoever leaves an unmarked, unstamped envelope for a person on their front doorstep doesn’t wait around for that person to find it.
And while we’re at it, why me? This is the kind of thing someone leaves for a journalist, not a washed-up ex-journalist turned health care content curator.
I look up as a car slides by. A neighbor from up the street waves from behind the wheel, and I’m too frozen to wave back. I check up and down the street again, even though I know the effort is futile. Whoever left the envelope is long gone.
I carry the package into the house, hook a finger under the seal and rip it open.
At first, what I find inside doesn’t make any sense. It’s about twenty pages of sworn statements, a written transcript of someone’s testimony. Someone by the name of Corporal Daniel Kochtizky, a surname so uncommon that I recognize it from this past year’s news coverage.
Corporal Kochtizky was the medic for Zach Armstrong’s platoon.
I return to the papers, skimming the testimony. The first few pages contain a lot of back and forth on details like name, rank, title, then moving on to dates, locations, logistics of the battle. Pretty standard fare, and nothing I haven’t read before and in a million places.
I skim the testimony, refresh my mind of the details of the army’s most famous soldier, whose death became its worst nightmare.
Zach’s death was like one of those perfect-storm cases, where one little thing sets off a chain of seemingly innocent events that end in disaster. In his case, it all started with a broken-down valve on an armored vehicle that brought the entire platoon—thirty-five soldiers spread out over eleven vehicles—to a screeching halt. A spare part was summoned, the platoon was split, a battle ensued. Zach Armstrong took three bullets to the head. His brother Nick, crouched a few feet away, was the one to recover his body.
But what nobody seems to be willing to talk about, what the US Army has refused to even discuss, is who shot him. Even more suspicious, the army spent the first few months after Zach’s death touting him all over town as a hero. They awarded him medals and posthumous promotions in elaborate, nationally televised c
eremonies. They built memorials and slapped his name on bridges and highways. They created scholarships and grants in his name. Meanwhile, nobody else was reported killed or wounded in that battle, not even the enemy.
Jean Armstrong called foul, and she demanded answers in the form of a congressional investigation into not just who pulled the trigger of the weapon that killed her son, but also the army’s subsequent handling of his death. General Rathburn—we’re not technically related, but he is my godfather—is one of the three-star generals being investigated. The other is General Tom Wolff. My father.
I’ve just flipped to the fifth or sixth page when it occurs to me.
This document has not been censored. There are no dark stripes of marker, no blacked-out names or classified details. Every single letter is there on the page, lit up like strobe lights.
I rush through the living room to my office and my computer. After a bit of poking around on the internet, I find the censored version of the same document on the Department of Defense’s website and hit Print.
As it’s rolling out of my machine, I nab a pink highlighter from the drawer and lay the pages side by side, highlighting the blacked-out words on the DOD’s version in pink on my gifted copy. The name of the investigating officer. Others in the chain of command. Comments that could be construed as opinion, the medic’s version of what happened, hearsay and accusations. And then, on page seven, I highlight a name I’ve never seen before.
Ricky Hernandez.
According to the medic, Ricky was present on the scene when Zach was killed, and he was one of the thirty-six eyewitnesses briefed back at the base. Thirty-six. My pulse explodes like a bottle rocket.
So why does every single transcript the army ever released, every news magazine article ever printed and every evening news report ever broadcast maintain there were thirty-five soldiers on the field the day Zach was killed? And now there are thirty-six?
Thirty-six.
The word travels through me like electricity, rushing through my veins at the speed of light. I stare at the pink-striped papers fanned across the surface of my desk, feeling my scalp grow hot, then cold, then hot again with the realization that I’m looking at classified information. Whoever sent it to me is someone with inside knowledge of the operation—a soldier? an army investigator?—and wants me to know the truth. They want me to know about Ricky.
The Ones We Trust Page 3