Chapter 5 - The First Page
My mother read it to me over the phone. Her voice shook the whole time, but she didn't stop.
"Sloane thinks she's better than all of us," my father had written, in his heavy, slanted handwriting. "Fine. Let's see how much better she is when this comes out. Every check goes in under her name. Every company thinks they're paying her. If it ever comes apart, it comes apart on her. Not me."
Underneath it, a few lines down, he had added one more sentence. In different ink. Like he'd come back to it later.
"Thirty years of salutes. Let's see them salute this."
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and didn't say anything for a long time.
It wasn't the money. It was never the money.
My father had planned it from the very first day. He had built the whole thing so that if anybody ever caught it, the blame would land on me. On my name. On my career. On thirty years of my life.
"Sloane?" my mother whispered. "Are you still there?"
"I'm here, Mom."
"I'm taking it to the FBI in the morning," she said. "Kurt's lawyer is driving me. I wanted you to hear it from me first."
"Mom," I said, "you don't have to do this."
"Yes, I do," she said quietly. "For fifty-two years, I stood in the kitchen and turned up the radio so I wouldn't hear what he was doing to you children. I owe you this. I owe you a lot more than this."
She walked into the FBI office in Norfolk at nine o'clock the next morning, at seventy-three years old, in her church dress, holding that little black notebook in both hands.
The rest of the notebook was even worse than the first page. Every company. Every check. Every date. And next to almost every entry, the same little note in my father's handwriting. "S. never knows."
The FBI compared the handwriting. It was his. There was no question.
Four days later, the Army's inspector general closed its investigation of me. Completely. In writing. The report said there was "no evidence whatsoever" that I had known about any of it, and "clear evidence" that I had been "deliberately targeted."
I got my command back the next Monday.
When I walked into headquarters that morning, the hallway was lined with soldiers. All the way from the front door to my office. Nobody said anything. They just stood there as I walked past. The young staff sergeant from the motor pool was at the very end, and she gave me a tiny nod.
That afternoon, I found out my nomination for a third star had been sent back to the Senate.
My father's expensive lawyer quit the case. A week later, my father's new court-appointed lawyer called the prosecutor and said his client wanted to plead guilty. To all twenty-three counts.
Kurt wasn't charged with anything. Because he walked in on his own, before anyone came looking, and gave them everything he had. The prosecutors called him a cooperating witness. He agreed to pay back the small amount he'd been given for setting up the account. Every penny. He cried in the parking lot afterward, from relief.
And then there was Tonya Ruelas.
I couldn't help her with her business. Not as a general. Not ever. That would break every rule I had spent thirty years following, and I wasn't going to start now, not even for her.
But the court could. My father's house, his car, his savings, his boat, all of it was seized. Every dollar was going back to the people he stole from.
Tonya called me the day she got her forty thousand dollars back.
"I'm not calling about a contract, General," she said, laughing and crying at the same time. "I know better. I'm just calling to say I'm going to make it. My girls are going to college. And I'm going to keep making armor that actually fits women."
My father's sentencing was set for a cold Tuesday morning in January, in the federal courthouse in Norfolk.
I wasn't going to go. Quinn talked me into it. "You don't have to say anything," she said. "But I think someday you'll be glad you were in the room."
So I went. I sat in the back row, in a plain black suit. My mother sat on one side of me. Kurt sat on the other.
Twenty minutes before the hearing started, a U.S. marshal walked down the aisle and stopped next to my seat.
"General Merrick?" he said quietly. "Your father is in a holding room downstairs. He's asking to see you. Before the judge comes in."
He paused.
May you like
"Ten minutes. He asked for you by name."
Should Sloane go see her father?
