The Ones We Trust. Kimberly Belle
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.
I turn back to my computer, fingers flying across the keyboard. A few hours later I’ve compiled a mountain of papers to sort through. Every document the army and DOD have ever released around Zach Armstrong’s death. Every hit on Ricky and all four Armstrongs—soldiers Zach and Nick, mother Jean, brother Gabe—that my content curation software spits out. Thousands and thousands of pages.
A slow sizzle begins somewhere deep in my gut, heating me from the inside out. What if Ricky Hernandez watched three bullets tear through Zach’s skull on the battlefield that day? What if he saw whoever pulled the trigger? What if he pulled that trigger himself? At first, the warmth feels like a phantom limb, vaguely familiar and not entirely real, and then I remember.
This is what a story feels like.
I toe off my sneakers, lean back in my chair and get comfortable. I’m going to be here awhile.
Early Saturday evening, I’m studying my menu in Bar Dupont’s sleek lounge when a rhythmic thump-click, thump-click pierces the chatter around me like the steady beat of a drum. I twist on my bar stool, as do half the people in the place, and find my former boss, Victoria Santillano, coming at me on crutches. She’s wearing an oversize black boot on her right foot and a dragged-down expression, heavy with equal parts crankiness and effort. All long lines and sharp edges, Victoria has always had the hardscrabble air of someone who’s forgotten to exhale, only now she looks pissed about it.
“What the hell happened to you?”
She juts her chin at the dirty martini that, just two seconds before, the bartender slid in front of me. “If that’s vodka, extra cold and extra dirty, I need it far more than you do.”
I signal to the bartender for another and push my still full glass in front of the empty seat next to me. Victoria hobbles up to the stool, flings her crutches against the bar and drinks half the glass in one giant gulp.
“Jesus, that’s good,” she says, smacking her lips.
“Please, tell me that boot isn’t just a scheme to get free cocktails.”
She snorts. “Now that you mention it, it is one of the better perks. But, alas, no. Damn ankle broke in three spots, can you believe it?”
I can’t, actually. Victoria is one of the most indestructible women I’ve ever met. She’s trekked through deserts and jungles, crawled through caves and fields of land mines, chased down thieves and dictators and drug lords, and lived to talk about all of them in front-page, top-billed feature articles. The woman survives on adrenaline and vodka and caffeine, and the only thing I’ve ever known her to break is a nail.
“Were you rappelling off an Afghani cliff? Skydiving into a war zone? Scaling the Kremlin with fish wire and Scotch tape?”
“I fell down the stairs.” Her long, unmanicured finger comes within millimeters of my nose. “And if you tell anyone that’s how I broke my ankle, I’ll have you murdered in your sleep.” She plucks an olive from her glass with two hooked fingers. “So what’s new and exciting in content management these days?”
“Not one goddamn thing.”
“Excellent,” she says, nodding sagely. “Business services, was it?”
“Health care. Health&Wealth.com is the leading health care web magazine for today’s active seniors.”
“Mmm-hmm. Sounds fascinating.”
Victoria buries her nose in her glass, and I do the same with the fresh one the bartender hands me, neither of us quite willing to rehash old arguments. She was there when I broke the Chelsea Vogel scandal three years ago, and she was there two weeks later, after Chelsea was found hanging in her Herndon shower, when I shoved my press pass to the very back of my kitchen junk drawer and handed in my resignation letter. She never questioned my decision to quit. She never, not once, tried to talk me out of it. She just told me to call her when I found my balls.
For the next six months, I sent her every type of ball I could come up with. Soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls and footballs. A ten-pound bag of meatballs and a monogrammed bowling ball. A framed vintage poster of Lucille Ball. A custom Magic 8 Ball where every side of the triangle popped up as “Hell, yes!” Finally, when I paid a delivery service to dump a box containing a thousand ping-pong balls onto her office floor, she sent me a one-word email. “Uncle,” it said in the subject line, and nothing more. After that, we picked up where we’d left off, with regular email check-ins and cocktails every time she swings through town, which is often.
But we never broach the one subject that hangs between us in gleaming, glittering strobe lights—that by walking away from the Chelsea Vogel aftermath all those years ago, I walked away from my duty as a journalist to seek the truth and report it to the public.
Only now I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours researching an article I’m not writing, looking into a story I’m not covering, and though I’m not certain I’ve found my balls, I have, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, found a thirty-sixth soldier. One who was in Zach Armstrong’s convoy of vehicles rumbling down an Afghani street when small-arms fire rained down from the upper level of an abandoned building. One who fought alongside both Armstrong brothers and was returning fire when Zach took three bullets to the head. One whose interview was cataloged and then buried, whose name disappeared from every army account except one—the uncensored transcript I’m not supposed to have.
“What?” Victoria says, studying me with squinty eyes.
“What do you mean, what?”
“I mean, what’s going on here? You have that look about you, like maybe I should check between your teeth for canary feathers.”
My skin prickles, and my scalp buzzes with the thrill of new knowledge I can’t hold in another second.