It’s a ladder of rope, the rungs uneven. Your foot slips through at one point and you almost fall headfirst. You right yourself and ultimately climb down about ten feet to soft footing, maybe cinder. It is dark, but your night-vision goggles show, very nearly up ahead, two tunnels, left and right.
“Put it down!” you hear Lew shout. “Drop it! I said
put it down
! Put it down!”
You start running, thinking the noise is coming from the right tunnel.
“Drop the weapon! Drop the weapon right now! Put down your weapon!”
Automatic gunfire, a short burst and awful silence. Your heart pounding so fiercely that your vision is spotty, the fear so thick in your throat you can’t speak, you make a decisive right turn into the tunnel, your M-14 raised and ready—
Lew is bent over, on his knees. For a moment you think he’s been hit, lower torso probably—
“I told you to put it down! I told you.… I told you to put it down. Why didn’t you…”
Your eyes predominantly focused forward, you peek down and see in Lew’s arms a tiny face. You see a tiny arm, a tiny open hand. On the cinder below, you see what appears to be a water pistol, a toy weapon.
Gunfire scrapes the walls a few feet in front of you. The tunnel has a slight angle so they don’t have a straight shot. You fire back to let them know what’s coming if they advance.
“Lew!” you yell. “Lieutenant!”
It comes again, gunfire spraying the wall closer still as they advance. You and several other Rangers who have joined you open fire in return. Smoke and dust fill the enclosed space, rendering your night-vision goggles of little use.
Lew doesn’t move throughout the cross fire, cradling the young girl in his arms, rocking her, speaking into her ear.
“We’re getting the fuck out of here!” calls your company commander. “Move out! Move!”
“Lieutenant!” you call. “Lieutenant Stoller!
Tom!
”
You reach down and grab him by the arm and drag him. He offers no resistance. The two of you are thick in the cross fire now.
“Get the fuck up, Tom!”
Belatedly, Lew gets to his feet and you retreat to the ladder. The last to leave the tunnel, filled now with smoke, you toss a grenade to keep the enemy at bay. Your last vision is the little girl, sprawled lifeless on the cinder, the grenade rolling in her direction.
Bobby Hilton’s eyes looked out over the park, empty this time of year, save for two children trying to scrounge up what little wet snow remained.
“You know the insurgents use children,” he said. “Sometimes as shields. Sometimes they strap suicide vests to them. Sometimes they give them a weapon and tell them to open fire. You don’t know. You don’t fucking know.”
“I believe you,” I assured him. “I don’t doubt it for a second.”
Hilton picked at his teeth, trying to calm himself, wrench himself free of a memory that had an obvious effect on him.
“Whatever came of it?” I asked. “I didn’t see anything about this on his record.”
Hilton shook his head but kept that aimless gaze. “We called in Spooky. A gunship.” He looked at me. “An air strike. Fired five or six rounds into the house. Obliterated the house and most of the bunker and the insurgents with it. I wasn’t part of the team that went back in.” He grimaced. “But that little girl would’ve just been part of the wreckage. Hate to say it, but she was probably blown to pieces. I think there were seven dead, all in, maybe eight.”
“And how was Tom afterward?”
Hilton shrugged and leaned forward on the park bench. It was a frosty day, but these returning vets don’t seem to mind the cold so much. “Whatever happened to him, he kept it to himself. Yeah, maybe he was a little slower on the draw, maybe he talked a little less, but he was never a real
open sorta guy or anything. He kept doing his job. We did more missions. He kept it all inside. For a while, at least.” He looked at me. “Y’know, that tunnel he discovered, we didn’t know anything about it. Our intel in Mosul at that point was for shit. Turned out it was part of a network of tunnels smuggling in foreign fighters. They figured we destroyed a couple thousand rifles, over a hundred kilos of heroin, and we closed down a major network for smuggling terrorists. All because of Tom. But instead of walking out of there thinking of himself as a hero, he had to live with the fact that he shot an unarmed little girl. I mean, I heard him calling out to her to drop her weapon. He just—he didn’t know it was a damn water pistol. You can’t know. You’re on the spot, and it’s them or you. You don’t have time for conversations.”
Robert Edward Hilton had just ended his second tour in Iraq only two months ago. He was a short, stocky guy in his mid-twenties with an acne-scarred face and prematurely receding dark hair. The public defender’s investigators hadn’t interviewed him because he was still in the war theater, but Joel Lightner had found him now that he’d returned to his home in Racine, Wisconsin.
Joel, seated next to me—a prover, in case Hilton got reluctant on me at trial—was keeping quiet but taking notes.
“So Tom shot some woman here in the city. Goddamn.” Hilton crossed his legs and put his arms across the back of the bench. “Post-traumatic stress? I mean, he was reliving Mosul?”
“It sounds like it,” I said. “You watch the interrogation video and you hear him playing out that scene. ‘Drop the weapon, drop the weapon, why didn’t you drop the weapon?’ I mean, it’s uncanny.”
“Aw, Tom. The poor guy—”
Hilton’s eyes filled. He was uncomfortable with the emotion, as if he possibly could be faulted.
“Tom shot this woman with a Glock 23,” I said, hoping to focus Hilton away from the pain and onto something technical. “He ever use a gun like that?”
Hilton blinked away his tears. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and breathed out. “In the military? Not that I remember. Tom bought a Glock?”
“I don’t know if he bought it, or how he got it. He’s a homeless guy.
Maybe traded for it or something. Maybe took it off somebody. The serial number was scratched off.”
Hilton thought about that. “Your investigator said he hit her between the eyes?”
“Right.”
“From how far?”
“They found the shell casing about ten feet away.”
Hilton smirked. “That’s good shooting, with a gun like that.”
Joel Lightner had thought the same thing. Something stirred inside my brain. A connection forming, maybe.
“I need you to testify,” I said. My heart skipped a beat as I envisioned the reaction on Judge Nash’s face. Discovery was due thirty days before trial. We were now twenty-seven days away. I’d need the court’s permission for the late submission. And the judge had no sense of humor in such matters.
Hilton blew out a sigh and got off the bench. “That’s up to Tom,” he said.
“Tom won’t open up.”
“Listen, guys.” Hilton seemed to become aware of the cold. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m talking to you because you said Tom wouldn’t. Or can’t. You should have this information. Maybe it will jar him or something. But I’m not talking about this in court unless Tom says okay.” He nodded presumptively. “Okay?”
This was what I was waiting for. It wasn’t perfect. Kathy Rubinkowski was a white, mid-twenties, unarmed woman, not a pre-teen Iraqi girl with a water pistol. She was shot between the eyes with a handgun, not through the chest with a rifle. And on the surface, at least, a quiet city street in January was nothing like a hotbed of danger in the scorching heat of an underground tunnel in Iraq.
Some of this could be explained away as circumstantial, like the weapon—M-14 rifles weren’t exactly readily available to a guy like Tom—but still, it was far from perfect.
Regardless, it was as close as I was going to get. And more important, even to a cynic like me, it was what really happened. It was the truth.
And that, more than anything, is what rocked me as I sat in that park: the truth. The truth is not usually something a defense attorney seeks.
Where the government seeks to construct a case, the defense lawyer seeks to tear it down. Where the government tries to clarify, the defense lawyer obfuscates. It was like I’d said to Tori: Most of my clients were guilty. There was something liberating about that. I’d still try my damnedest to win the case, but when I couldn’t, no matter how much I hated losing, it didn’t penetrate my shield. At some gut level, I knew that my clients had gotten what was coming to them.
But not now. Now I knew that my client really did suffer an episode of PTSD the night of the shooting. It wasn’t an argument. It wasn’t a theory.
Tom Stoller, by all rights, should be acquitted. And whether he went to prison or a hospital when this was over would be entirely up to me.
Bobby Hilton’s knees bounced as he stared through the thick glass. He looked over at me and seemed like he wanted to say something.
This was a guy who not so long ago was storming houses where high-powered weapons awaited him on the other side of the door. A guy who knew that any road down which he traveled could be laden with an improvised explosive device. A guy who worked in a place where the majority of the people there resented him at best, and wanted him dead at worst.
But here he was, nervous as a schoolboy, and all he had to do was say hello to an old friend.
“You think this might—bring him out of his shell?” he asked me.
“Don’t worry about that,” I said, as the door from the other side of the glass opened. “Just talk to him.”
The guard led Tom Stoller to the seat on the opposite side of the glass. I was permitted to sit in the same room with him, as his attorney, but anyone else got the no-contact visitation room.
“Hey, Lew,” said Hilton, his voice shaky. He put his palm against the glass.
Tom looked the same to me as always, disheveled and detached, the vacant eyes, the nervous tics from the medication. But Sergeant Robert Edward Hilton had known him in a different context altogether.
I moved to the corner of the room, some attempt at privacy for the two of them, though I could still hear everything.
Tom didn’t seem to realize who Bobby was until he took the seat, at
which point he locked eyes with his comrade for a few moments before retreating to his detached gaze.
“Hey,” he managed.
“How ya—how’s—I mean…” Hilton didn’t know how to start. There was no obvious introductory small talk when your pal is in lockup for murder.
“Hey,” Tom said again. “Hey… Bob.”
“You doing okay in here, Lew? I mean, best as possible?”
“It’s—hot. It’s hot.” Tom stared into his lap.
“You look like you need to get some food in here,” Hilton said. “Gotta be better than the MREs, right?” He chuckled, but it fell flat. Tom was unresponsive.
“The vegetables taste like dirt,” Tom said. I thought all vegetables tasted like dirt.
“Hey, Clap and Rush said hey. I told them I was seeing you.”
“Okay.” Tom’s eyes moved everywhere except to his visitor.
Hilton was unsure of himself. Tom wasn’t exactly a sterling conversationalist these days. And more to the point, he was an entirely different person than the one Hilton had come to know in Iraq.
“Lew,” he said, “I told your lawyer about the tunnel. I told him about it. I told him that if it was me, I’d have done the same thing. That you tried to warn her and you couldn’t have known.…”
Tom turned his head, like he was responding to a sound to his left. He held it there, his gaze steadied on the wall.
“Lew, you got a good lawyer here, don’t you think? He wants to help you. You gotta let him. Can you talk to him about what happened the night that woman was shot?”
It was like Tom’s mental computer had frozen up. He didn’t move an inch. Save for the rise and fall of his chest, it was hard to tell if he was dead or alive.
Hilton dropped his head. He was talking to a man who had once been his superior officer, who had commanded his respect and admiration, to hear him tell it. How devastating it must have been to see Tom so utterly broken now. And that was to say nothing of whatever internal demons Hilton carried himself. Nobody would walk away from a war experience without scarring.
“I don’t remember,” said Tom, words as lucidly delivered as any I’d heard from him.
Hilton straightened. So did I, slouching in the corner. Dr. Baraniq had warned me that it was not uncommon for someone experiencing PTSD to have amnesia over the episode. But I’d been counting on Tom being able to recount at least some detail of the night Kathy Rubinkowski was shot—for Dr. Baraniq and for the jury.
I had no occurrence witnesses whatsoever. Tom couldn’t speak to what happened. There was nobody that heard Tom yelling to Kathy Rubinkowski to
drop the weapon, drop the weapon,
or anything to that effect. Nobody to testify that the victim posed any perceived threat to Tom whatsoever. No triggering event to which I could point that would explain why, at that moment, Tom Stoller suddenly fell into the grip of a PTSD episode.
I had nothing. Nothing but a hypothesis from a doctor.
Getting nowhere with Tom, Bobby Hilton returned to lower-key material. He told Tom how he was going to work in his father’s pizzeria in Racine with an eye toward taking over the place. He talked about how he was engaged now. He repeatedly asked Tom if he needed anything, but got nothing but one-word responses. Tom kept his head turned to the left, looking off in the distance, for the remainder of the conversation. It was painful to watch.
“Take care, Lew,” said Hilton. He placed his hand on the thick glass again before he walked past me and out the door.
I approached the glass. “Tom, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
My client didn’t answer. He was gone for the moment. No sign of recognition or emotion, save for a tear that formed and ran down his cheek.
When I walked back out in the hallway, Sergeant Bobby Hilton was on the floor, head in his hands, sobbing like a child.
He looked up at me with a tear-streaked face. “Tell me… what you need me to do,” he said to me, struggling. “I’ll do anything.”
Detective Gary Boxer led me into an interview room. He had a file folder in his hand and a small notepad. He dropped them both down on the desk and motioned to me.