Presumed Guilty (9 page)

“Pretty, huh? ” He finally turned around and looked down at her. “Want to hear why I got it?”
She did not. She wanted it to go away, disappear right before her eyes, restore her son’s skin to its purity. But she knew she had to hear just the same. She nodded slowly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you must not interrupt me. Understand that? Don’t interrupt me because I’m only going to say this once, and once I get started I can’t stop or it won’t come out again. Got it?”
With effort she said, “Yes, Jared.”
He nodded once, then lay down on the floor, facing up, and closed his eyes. For several minutes he breathed, rhythmically, his chest rising and falling like a soft swell in the ocean.
When he finally spoke, his voice was calm yet distant. “It was the end of the battle for Fallujah. Our squad was mopping up. We followed a column of infantrymen heading east just below the main highway between the northern and southern sections. It was like a science-fiction movie about the end of the earth. Rubble everywhere. Every house had at least one hole through it. We went inside houses, ready to shoot if we had to. And then, from the south side of the street, fire. And grenades. There were insurgents in a house, and they were trying to kill us.”
Dallas listened, her heart falling.
“I felt a sting in my arm. I got hit in the bicep. But I didn’t say anything because I could keep going. I could be one-handed if I had to. A buddy of mine got hit in the back, just below his flak jacket. They hauled him off to the big bus. That’s the medical vehicle. I thought that’s where I was going to end up eventually, only I was sure it would be by way of a body bag.”
Jared’s voice was almost a monotone. This, as much as the story itself, filled Dallas with dread.
“We kept going. Every step we had to watch. There were all these improvised explosive devices rigged. It was like they were waiting for us, just waiting. And every house we went into had some sort of weapon. Grenades. Whatever. We got to one house, empty, and some of the Iraqi special-forces guys assigned to our unit found some rice and vegetables and made lunch. We had some warm chow. But halfway through there was an explosion outside and a window shattered, throwing shards of glass into the food.”
He paused, his eyes still closed, his breathing rhythmic.
“When that happened, I screamed. I screamed with anger and maybe fear, I don’t know what all it was, but it didn’t even seem like me. But I started to have thoughts I never had before. I won’t even bother telling you about those, because it’s not really the thing I want to tell. We got up and kept going, house to house.
“We got to one about two blocks from a staging area. We were almost out. It had been about five hours of this. I thought we’d make it out, and I’d get my stupid arm taken care of, get out of this hell town. And then we went into this house, full of rubble, full of . . .”
He stopped for a long moment. Dallas, silent, watched him. His breathing, for the first time, quickened.
“There was something about this place. It smelled more like death than any of the others we’d been in. Like it had been down the longest, like it was leading the death parade. I was the one who went around the last corner. The last look. That’s when I heard something move.”
Dallas watched his chest rising, falling.
“I lifted my weapon, trigger ready. I wish it had gone off. I wish it had exploded and killed me. I saw a little girl, maybe eight, nine. Dead. Spread out dead. She wasn’t moving. There was a dog on her. It was chewing her body, it . . .”
Dallas felt inner wiring ripping out of sockets, shutting her down. Blacking out would have been a relief.
“I shot the dog. Just blew him away. And that’s sort of the last thing I remember for a long time. I did wake up in a hospital and I do remember cursing. I cursed God because he hadn’t seen fit to put me in that body bag. That’s when I let go of the last of whatever beliefs I had. And that is what I wanted to tell you.”
He slowly opened his eyes and raised to a sitting position.
“Jared . . .” Dallas leaned forward, and the moment she did, Jared put up his hand.
He pulled his shirt back on and said, “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. Just stay here.”
He stood and walked away. Dallas heard the back door close.
And immediately she thought,
He’s going to kill himself.
She ran to the door and threw it open. “Jared!”
He was getting into his truck.
“Jared, wait.”
He slammed his door shut. The window was rolled up.
“Jared, please!”
The truck started and burned rubber out of the driveway.
Dallas clutched her throat.
Dear God dear God don’t let him do it restrain him God keep him from it dear God dear God.
She dropped to her knees on the concrete, closed her eyes, made fists.
Dear God dear God protect him . . .

It’s more efficient than Uncle Sam’s. There’s a lot prisoners get done this way. Like making a jailhouse drink called pruno. They get a plastic bag and save up all their orange rinds and fruit bits and put them in water to ferment. It’s powerful, I’m told.

But mostly they talk to each other through written messages, sometimes with the consent of the jailer.
I got one such message yesterday.
When my lunch was shoved through the door at me I saw on the tray a bit of tin foil. About the size of a marble.
That was definitely out of the ordinary. I knew immediately something was inside it.
Something meant for me.
I sat on my bunk and unraveled the foil.
Inside was a wad of toilet paper.
This I unraveled as well.
Someone had written on the toilet paper, in blue ink: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”

At 11:42 p.m., Officer Jennica Brune of the Los Angeles Police Department, on routine patrol in Hollywood with her partner, spotted an illegally parked pickup on Franklin Avenue. She pulled her black and white parallel to the truck. She heard loud music blaring from inside. The engine appeared to be idling.

Her partner, Officer Jeffrey Benkert, got out and directed his flashlight into the cab. A male Caucasian was sprawled on the seat. Benkert knocked on the window. No response.

The truck was unlocked. With Officer Brune taking the sidewalk position, Benkert opened the door.
“Whoa,” he shouted above the music. “We got ourselves a dewey.”
Officer Brune knew he meant DUI — driving under the influence .
Benkert shut off the stereo and tried to rouse the occupant. He was out.
“I’m guessing this guy’s gonna be over two-point-oh,” Benkert told Brune.
“What’s he been drinking?” Brune said.
“Beer. Talk about your open containers. There must be eight, nine bottles in here. Looks like Dos Equis is his preferred label.” Benkert sighed. “Let’s take him in.”

After a fitful sleep in a holding cell, Jared was informed he was at the Hollywood station on Wilcox, that his truck was impounded, and that he would get one free call. He used it to call Cara. He wasn’t ready to spring this on his mother.

When his sister came for him, he felt embarrassed and dirty, and it didn’t help that Cara was silent all the way to her car and all the way out to Hollywood Boulevard.

Finally Cara said, “So what are you going to tell Mom?” He shrugged.
“She’s been sick with worry. I won’t let you stab her in the

heart.”
“Thank you so much. You ever thought about going into
psych?”
“Shut it, Jared.”
“Much better.”
Cara shook her head. “You think you can dance away from
this?”
“Quit trying to play big sister, will you?”
“I’m just your sister then, and you know what that means? I love
you, dork.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Why don’t you listen to your family?”
“Like Dad? Great role model he is, huh?”
“That’s real forgiving of you, Jared.”
“Here it comes.”
Cara jammed the brakes. Tires shrieked as she turned the car to
the curb in front of a Chinese restaurant.
Jared lurched against the shoulder strap. “Are you nuts?” “You’re not the only one with problems, you know.” “What are you doing?”

“I want you to come back to church,” Cara said.
“What’s that going to do?”
“At least you won’t be drinking.”
“For two hours maybe.”
“It’s a start.”
“Just drive,” Jared said.
“Promise you’ll come to church. You still have friends there.” He sat still, eyes directed out the window. A man in a Dodgers hat stood outside the Chinese restaurant, yelling at someone through the door. Jared couldn’t tell if the guy was angry, high, or a combination of both.

“Cara, I’m messed up,” he said. “I know that. The VA says it’s PTSD, but I don’t know. It’s like my genes got messed up and I’m this totally new person, and nobody knows who I am.”

“Somebody knows,” Cara said.
He glared at her. “God? Is that what you’re saying?” “Yes.”
“Have him send me a memo,” Jared said.
“He will. In church. Say you’ll come with us.”
“I’m not going to — ”
“Promise or I’ll get out and take you down, right there on the

sidewalk.”
A laugh poked through Jared’s anger. He remembered when
Cara could actually do that to him, back when he was scrawny and
she was in a tennis champ. It got him mad back then and he swore
to himself he’d become a Marine someday. Just so he could wrestle
his big sister to the ground.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Now drive on.”

It was past nine in the morning and Dallas paced the family room like a big cat in a cage. She prayed but kept looking at the phone. If she didn’t hear anything in a few hours, she’d call the police.

That reminded her about the strange message she’d had on her cell phone last night. A male voice, a whisper.
Call me. Very important
. He gave a number with a 310 area code.

Terrific. No doubt some reporter seeking an exclusive got her number!
How?
Somebody gave it away
.
No, that couldn’t be. That would mean someone close to her was leaking information. Maybe someone from the church. She couldn’t allow herself to think that. She had enough to deal with without cooking up conspiracy theories.
Maybe it was Oliver Stone.
Stop it!
It was probably just some sleazy reporter who had a way of finding out these things.
But she wasn’t going to call, no way. She did jot the number down on a pad just in case she had to tell the cops about this.
She had to do something besides stew. She fired up the computer in the study and went to Google. She wanted to read more about posttraumatic stress disorder, especially as it related to the soldiers coming home from Iraq. In seconds she had a slew of links and started to check them out.
She came across the account of a Marine soldier whose profile sounded eerily like Jared’s. A kid raised in a Christian home in the South, who came back covered in tattoos.

Soldiers like this signal that a crisis is unfolding, mental-health experts say. One out of six soldiers returning from Iraq suffers from a severe type of posttraumatic stress. Experts say they have not seen its like.

The Pentagon, which did not anticipate the extent of the problem, is scrambling to find resources to address it.
A recent study found that 15.6 percent of Marines and 17.1 percent of soldiers surveyed after they returned from Iraq suffered major depression, generalized anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder — a debilitating, sometimes lifelong change in the brain’s chemistry that can include flashbacks, sleep disorders, panic attacks, violent outbursts, acute anxiety, and emotional numbness.
Army mental-health experts say there is reason to believe the war’s ultimate psychological fallout will worsen. The army survey of 6,200 soldiers and Marines included only troops willing to report their problems.
“The bad news is that the study underestimated the prevalence of what we are going to see down the road,” said Dr. Frederick J. Matthews, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “And there is some aggravating factor underneath the surface of all this that we need to more deeply explore.”

The words stuck in her mind. What could that be? She jotted the phrase on a pad and determined to follow it up.
She switched to the Google news site to see what was being written about Ron. More sensationalized stuff with the sex angle. There wasn’t going to be any getting away from that.
One squib with the term “Melinda Perry” in it caught her attention. She clicked on the link. Dallas couldn’t get past the gut feel of the woman scorned. Melinda Perry, though dead, was a rival. What had drawn Ron to her? What had she done to seduce him?
She read desperately for answers.

Melinda Perry, the deceased, was also known as Melinda Chance. She was, by the account of industry insiders, a rising star in adult films. Producer/Director Vic Lu, one of the industry’s top moneymakers and principal owner of LookyLu Productions, said Ms. Perry was on the verge of stardom.

She had it all.
Apparently Ron thought so too.
She skipped the rest of the sex-themed stories and found some covered locally. And then, at the
Daily News
site, she found a quote that was apparently being readied for the next day’s edition:

Councilman Bernie Halstrom, who was working with Hamilton on possible regulations of the adult-entertainment industry in Chatsworth, mentioned the case.
“I know Ron Hamilton to be a good, decent man. I cannot, of course, comment on a pending criminal matter.”

“Why not?” Dallas whispered out loud. “What’s stopping you?” And then it hit her. There was something bigger than Ron going on here. It wasn’t just about him and his ministry. The overarching issue was the one they both cared passionately about — the evil of pornography.

This case was going to be used to try to destroy that work. She was not about to let that happen. She’d promised Ron she would keep the pressure on Bernie Halstrom, and she would.