The Wrong Man

18

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.