Chapter 8 - The Threat
The threat came in October.
Rosa was at home on a Sunday afternoon, gardening — pulling up the last of the tomato plants and putting them in a wheelbarrow for the compost heap — when her phone rang.
It was an unknown number.
She answered.
"Sergeant Martinez," a man's voice said.
"Who is this?"
"You don't need to know my name. What you need to know is that there is a man in Leavenworth who is still very angry at you. And there are people outside Leavenworth who are still very angry at you. And one of those people has a daughter who goes to Kansas State."
Rosa's blood went cold.
"What did you say?"
"I said what I said. Back off. Stop talking to the IG. Stop talking to the FBI. Stop talking to the U.S. Attorney. Let the colonel's lawyers do what they are going to do. And your daughter will finish her senior year, and she will graduate, and she will get a job, and everyone will be fine."
"Who is this?"
The line went dead.
Rosa stood in her garden for a long time.
Then she called Ramsey.
Ramsey's response was immediate.
Within an hour, a deputy provost marshal was at Rosa's door, and a second one was at Elena's dorm at Kansas State, and a third was at the K-State campus police department, and the FBI was notified of a threat made across state lines, and a federal judge in Topeka signed an emergency protective order that named Colonel Derek Fallon and three of his known associates and that prohibited any contact between them and Rosa Martinez or her daughter.
The call had come from a burner phone.
The FBI traced it to a man named Andrew Pruitt — no relation to Helen Pruitt — who was a retired chief warrant officer who had served under Fallon in Germany in 2008. He had been paid five thousand dollars in cash to make the call. The cash had come from Fallon's brother.
Fallon's brother was arrested two weeks later.
Fallon's brother was charged with witness tampering and conspiracy. He was convicted. He is currently serving four years in federal prison.
Fallon was charged with an additional count of obstruction.
His court-martial date was moved up. It was held in September.
Rosa did not attend.
Elena did.
She sat in the gallery with Rosa's sister, and she listened to her mother's name being read aloud in a courtroom at Fort Leavenworth, and she listened to a defense attorney say that her mother was a "disgruntled noncommissioned officer who had a personal vendetta against a decorated officer."
And she listened to a woman named Mrs. Helen Pruitt stand up in the gallery and say, in a voice that carried across the entire courtroom, "That is a lie. Sergeant Martinez saved my life."
The judge — a military judge named Colonel Richard Bellamy — did not allow the outburst to be entered into the record.
But he did allow Mrs. Pruitt to testify.
She testified for forty-five minutes.
She testified about her son, Specialist Fourth Class Thomas Pruitt, who had been killed in Kandahar in 2011. She testified about the years since, and about the Memorial Day ceremonies, and about the letter she had received from the Army that said her son had died "in the service of his country."
She testified about the night of the banquet. She testified about how the sergeant had refused to serve her tray. She testified about how she had not understood, at first, why the dinner had been interrupted. She testified about how the general had called her, personally, the next morning, and told her what had happened.
She testified that she had asked him one question.
"What did you ask him, Mrs. Pruitt?" the prosecutor said.
"I asked him if the sergeant was going to be okay," Mrs. Pruitt said.
"And what did he say?"
"He said, 'Mrs. Pruitt, Sergeant Martinez is the reason you are still alive.'"
The courtroom was silent.
Mrs. Pruitt sat in the witness chair with her hands folded in her lap and her chin up.
"Sergeant Martinez did not know me," she said. "She had never spoken to me. She had seen me at Memorial Day ceremonies and she had shaken my hand. And when she found out that the food on my tray had been tampered with, she did not serve it. Not because she knew me. Because it was wrong." She paused. "I want that in the record. I want the record to show that she did not serve the tray because it was wrong."
May you like
The judge looked at her.
"Mrs. Pruitt," he said, "the record will show it."
