Part 16

Marcus and I went back a long way.

We’d served together early in my career before he climbed into the rarified air of three-star command and I settled into the work I do now at futures command.

He wasn’t just a colleague. He was one of the handful of people who’d watched me grow from a green second lieutenant into someone who could hold a room of colonels silent with a single sentence.

And over the years, he’d developed what I can only describe as a very specific dry sense of humor about anyone foolish enough to underestimate me.

He told me later that he read the first paragraph of Gregory’s letter, an aggrieved account of conduct unbecoming an officer involving an unprovoked physical assault at a private social gathering and had to set it down for a moment because he was laughing too hard to keep reading.

Denise Whitfield, he told me he’d said out loud to an empty office, got challenged to a fight, and this man is mad she won.

But amusement isn’t the same as dismissal. And Marcus, whatever else he is, has always been thorough. An inquiry was opened exactly as Gregory had hoped it would be.

Statements were requested. Video evidence of which there was an abundance given how many phones had been recording that Labor Day evening was reviewed in full.

Within days, it was clear beyond any reasonable dispute that I had done nothing except respond with considerable restraint to a challenge thrown at me in front of dozens of witnesses.

The inquiry into my conduct closed almost as quickly as it opened with a formal note in the record commending the composure I’d shown under public provocation. But inquiries once opened have a way of generating their own momentum.

Somewhere in the process of verifying the basic facts of the incident, someone on Marcus’ staff pulled Gregory Sinclair’s business background as a matter of due diligence.

Standard procedure when a formal complaint involves a private citizen making serious allegations against a serving officer.

What they found had nothing to do with me at all and everything to do with the very foundation Gregory Sinclair had built his comfortable life upon.