1       The Listing      

The real estate business was booming, with listings never going stale in the upscale developments, particularly in Tamuning, where gated communities offered ocean views.
The call had come in on a morning when Amelia Tullis had other plans, but selling a million-dollar property was more important than her personal pursuits. The listing was within walking distance of her home, so fifteen minutes before she was to meet the client, she made the five-minute walk to the house. She opened the lanai doors to let fresh air in and made sure everything looked perfect.

The walk-through went well, and there was genuine interest in the property. She let the client know that if the one they toured wasn’t exactly right, she had other listings in Tamuning, Barrigada, Yigo, Dededo, and Agat that might be perfect. The client was impressed, believing they had finally found what they were looking for. Amelia gave them a card, and they arranged to meet again in a few days. The client drove away while she locked up the house and returned the key to the realtor’s lockbox.

The walk back to her own home was brief, and Amelia hummed a happy tune as she entered a code into her garage-door opener. As the door was rising, she glanced at her fitness watch and considered changing clothes and driving to the park to catch up with her husband. She stepped into the garage and opened the driver’s-side door of her BMW. She reached into the front seat to retrieve her climbing-gear bag, and as she stood, she saw movement in her peripheral vision. Turning, she recognized the client she had just met standing to her right. Recognition shifted from confusion to fear in seconds, but it was a second too late.

The blur of motion left her instantly panicked and grasping at her throat. Blood gushed across her hands, and she felt her eyes closing against her will. The pain in her throat was excruciating. Then her knees registered a crushing pain as they hit the concrete floor of her garage. Then darkness. The loud ringing in her ears and the realization that her life was ending prevented her from hearing her murderer casually walk away as her life’s blood poured out beneath the car.

                                   ∞∞

After the day’s third brief but heavy shower, the afternoon sun had returned. The air had cooled a little, but twenty minutes after the last drops had fallen, the ground and rock face were completely dry again. That was the way every day went during the current season. Guam bragged about having all four seasons like the rest of the world. Rather than spring, summer, fall, and winter, Guam boasted a rainy season, a dry season, a rainy part of the dry season, and a dry part of the rainy season. This day fell on a wet part of the dry season, early springtime.

The climber was scaling a rock face with a ninety-foot drop to a cove where several jagged coral formations protruded from the ocean below. This was not a place to make a mistake, as a plunge from any height would be a fatal error.
At forty-seven, Randy Tullis continued to take on such activities to challenge himself. He wanted desperately to hold on to the physicality that had taken him through his two decades in the Navy, serving as a member and leader of SEAL Team Seven.

On this day, he completed his climb, successfully scaling the rock face for the eighth time that year. Four of his climbs had been done with Amelia as his climbing partner, but that day she had a showing in Tamuning near their home in a gated community and couldn’t join him.
The showing put every aspect of their relationship back in his mind and heart as he pulled himself over the ridge. His thoughts of Amelia and their seven-year marriage were what propelled him through every challenge of his life, making him stronger, happier, more resilient, focused, and driven. Simply, more.

Randy managed to come up very close to where he had planned, and his BMW coupe was parked eighty yards away. He pulled his ropes up and put them—with his harness, hammer, gloves, shoes, pins, and carabiners—into a canvas bag in the trunk.

Randy wiped the sweat from his face and arms, noticing the typical coral scrapes on his arms that were inevitable with climbs. He loved the feel of the aching, overworked muscles in his legs, arms, and chest. Then, of course, he sat in the driver’s seat and didn’t love the sore muscles in his ass, but that came with the activity, too.

Randy drove the twenty minutes from Fort Nuestra Señora de la Soledad to the home he and Amelia shared in Tamuning in light traffic. He pulled into his gated community. When he turned the corner on Iwo Jima Terrace, he immediately saw the emergency vehicles parked in front of his home. Randy frantically stopped the car and ran toward the house, only to be blocked by two Guam uniformed police officers.

Randy was trying to explain that he lived there and asked what was going on when two additional officers ran over. The four of them attempted to take Randy to the ground and handcuff him. They didn’t have much luck. His MMA training kicked in, and he put one of them to sleep before he was kicked by one and tased by the other two, convulsing all the way to the ground. They continued sending fifty thousand volts through four darts that penetrated his back, shoulders, and hip.

Randy bit almost entirely through his tongue while riding the lightning. Then his hands were pulled behind him and cuffed. The cop Randy had put to sleep came to and was helped up. He stood over Randy and said, “This haole tried to kill me.”

Randy looked up and said, “If I had tried to kill you, your next of kin would be getting a notification. So what’s going on in my house? Where is Amelia? Where is my wife?” He was frantic and growing more agitated.

The cop standing over him, whose name tag read Gumataotao, swung for the bleachers, striking Randy on the side of the head with a nightstick. Randy’s lights went out without understanding why.

He awoke in the back of an ambulance, legs and wrists cuffed to a gurney, and found the cop who had hit him sitting across from him next to a med tech who was trying to stop the bleeding and keep blood from Randy’s eyes. Randy said groggily, “If you think you can answer a question without attacking an innocent man, what the hell happened at my house? Where is my wife?”

“That’s a good one, haole. You are on your way to jail for murdering your wife and for attempting to kill four police officers while resisting arrest.”

That’s how Randy found out the love of his life had been taken from him. Once released from the hospital the following day, Randy was confined to a jail cell in Hagåtña (pronounced Agaña) on the day of Amelia’s funeral. He was denied representation by an attorney from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he was no longer on active duty and had not been for eight years. He didn’t hold a reserve position, so as a retiree, he wasn’t entitled to military representation.

Randy’s father, Dr. Raymond Tullis, flew to Guam with Randy’s mother, and they hired a local law firm to represent him. After spending over one hundred thousand dollars on his defense, he was found guilty of murder and three counts of resisting arrest and battery of a police officer.

He intended to file an appeal, but it would be heard by a judge with a similarly dim view of haoles, so his hopes for the conviction being overturned were slim at best. Two months later, on the six-month anniversary of Amelia’s death and on what would have been their eighth wedding anniversary, Randy made a desperate appeal to his dad and mom. That resulted in a telephone call from Franklin, Kentucky, to Denton, Texas, on July 7.